Digital Commons Network^™

Leadership In The Law: Perspectives From The Nyc Law Department's Family Court Division, Jennifer Gilroy Ruiz

NYLS Law Review

No abstract provided.

Law And Leadership In Times Of Crisis: The New York City Experience, James E. Johnson

NYLS Law Review

No abstract provided.

Managing Through Crisis At The Nyc Law Department: Lessons Learned From The Covid-19 Pandemic, Hon. Asim Rehman

NYLS Law Review

No abstract provided.

A Personal Memory Of The New York City Law Department's Response To 9/11, Marjorie Landa

NYLS Law Review

No abstract provided.

Court-Appointed Neutrals: A Judicial Perspective

NYLS Law Review

No abstract provided.

Protecting The Debtor Across The Atlantic: A Comparative Analysis Of The United States And European Union Regulatory Frameworks Against Debt Collection Abuse And Harassment, Terin Michelle Tyson

South Carolina Journal of International Law and Business

Consumer debt is a long-standing global phenomenon, yet the regulation of debt collection practices remains fragmented across international borders. This lack of uniform standards leaves consumers vulnerable to debt collectors who exploit weak legal frameworks, resorting to abusive, harassing, and deceptive tactics to pressure repayment. Such practices not only undermine consumer trust in the financial services industry but also prove self-defeating; aggressive collection methods can destabilize a consumer’s financial footing and daily livelihood, ultimately impairing their capacity to repay.

This article provides a comparative evaluation of consumer protections against abusive and harassing debt collection practices in the United States and …

Parenting Without Pay Or Equal Partnership: Improving The Fmla Through Comparative Analysis, Courtney Jean Clavel

South Carolina Journal of International Law and Business

This article seeks to analyze ways to improve the Family and Medical Leave Act by comparing government-protected parental leave in the United States, Australia, Japan, and Norway. Section II will introduce the current fears around America’s birth rate, why women are important to the American workforce, why families often need two parents working, and, finally, how the Family Medical Leave Act has fallen short and a common suggestion for improvement.

Section II will analyze various countries’ national laws that govern parental leave. Each subsection will describe the country’s nationally protected parental leave policy. It will proceed as follows: the United …

Tradition Without Text?, Daniel B. Rice

Faculty Publications

This Essay critiques the Supreme Court’s emerging “history and tradition” methodology, as articulated in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, arguing that its reliance on affirmative textual recognition in historical positive law fundamentally misrepresents the nature of American liberty traditions. By insisting that unenumerated rights are constitutionally cognizable only when earlier legal sources explicitly identified them as rights, the Court adopts a truncated evidentiary framework that privileges written enactments while disregarding lived experience, social practice, and the normative assumptions that shaped earlier understandings of permissible state power. The result, the Essay contends, is a mechanized and impoverished account of …

A First Amendment Right To Know, David S. Ardia

Faculty Publications

This Article tackles an increasingly important question: Can police round up people on American streets and keep secret the names of those they detain without violating the First Amendment? Alarmingly, the government made this very argument in the summer of 2020 when it sought to break up Black Lives Matter protests occurring in cities across the country. Based in part on a Supreme Court decision from the 1970s involving access to prisons, the government argued that the First Amendment imposes no constraints on government secrecy. If it is true that the government can shield its exercise of police power from …

Cobalt's Climate Paradox: Global Ambitions For A Greener Future Rely On Blood-Stained Hands, Ashleigh Wootton

Natural Resources Journal

The global effort to mitigate climate change increasingly relies on widespread electrification, with lithium-ion batteries at its core and the key minerals required for their production concentrated in countries uniquely vulnerable to exploitation. Lithium-ion battery production relies heavily on cobalt, a critical mineral primarily sourced from the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC), which supplies approximately 70 percent of the world’s cobalt. As demand for cobalt is projected to rise sharply, the DRC has become indispensable to the global clean energy transition. Cobalt extraction in the DRC is closely linked to severe human rights abuses, including forced labor, child labor, …

Racial Disparities In Maternal Mortality: The Role Of Explicit And Implicit Bias In U.S. Healthcare, Lailah Allen

Capstone Showcase

Maternal mortality in the United States remains a critical public health crisis, with disproportionately high rates among Black and other minority women. Despite advances in obstetric medicine, racial disparities in pregnancy-related deaths persist due to structural inequities, implicit bias in healthcare delivery, unequal access to prenatal and postpartum care, and broader social determinants of health. Nationally, Black women are significantly more likely to experience severe maternal morbidity and mortality compared to White women, reflecting longstanding inequities embedded within the healthcare system. This paper examines the relationship between race, healthcare access, and maternal outcomes through a focused case study of and …

Legal Stories Without Villains, Alison Peck

Law Faculty Scholarship

Lawyers have always been storytellers, and cognitive science is increasingly demonstrating that human beings are wired to learn through story. But legal stories may have a dark side if, as theorists have recently suggested, stories motivate pro-social action by reinforcing in-group identification and out-group hatred. In an increasingly divided polity, are we doomed to stories that drive us toward social disintegration? A solution to the legal storyteller’s dilemma may be found in an ancient source: Aristotle’s Poetics. By crafting legal stories that track the elements of the Tragedy as described by Aristotle and adapted by modern storytellers from Broadway …

Table Of Contents, Loyola University Chicago International Law Review

Loyola University Chicago International Law Review

No abstract provided.

Food Stamp Participation And Health Outcomes In Ca Immigrants, Esther Kang

Scripps Senior Theses

The U.S. social welfare system includes programs aiming to increase access to nutritious food to reduce nutrition insecurity. However, studies suggest that immigrants continue to face disproportionate risks of nutrition insecurity and may face barriers to enrollment due to legal status. This study, using secondary data from the 2023 California Health Interview Survey, examines the associations between food stamp participation, food insecurity, and clinical diagnosis of diabetes among adult U.S.-born, naturalized, and non-citizen adults in California. The findings suggest that those enrolled in food stamps are more likely to report food insecurity than those who are not enrolled, and that …

The Intertemporal Law Doctrine’S Application To The Acquisition Of Colonies In The Americas, Kent Mcneil

All Papers

The intertemporal doctrine provides that international disputes have to be resolved in accordance with the international law that existed at the time the events giving rise to the dispute took place, not at the time the matter is adjudicated.1 It is thought to be impermissible to apply current standards to events that occurred in the past when different legal principles and rules were the norm. This doctrine applies as much to acquisition of colonies as to other international issues.2 So in order to determine whether a European nation acquired sovereignty over an overseas territory, it is necessary to determine and …

The Right To Seek Joy, Tyler Rose Clemons

Faculty Publications

Within the past three years, roughly half of American states have restricted access to gender-affirming medical treatment for children. In this article, I argue that these bans violate transgender children’s right to liberty guaranteed by the Fourteenth Amendment’s Due Process Clause. I do so by excavating the Framers’ understanding of liberty as the right to seek joy. Rooted in the philosophies of John Locke and Epicurus, the Framers understood liberty as the right to make important life decisions according to one’s subjective preferences without undue interference from the government. Based on this understanding, I develop a new framework for substantive …

Treatment Sentences, Evelyn Malavé

Faculty Publications

One of the most common mandates of a non-incarceratory sentence is to submit to treatment. Across the criminal legal system, from problem-solving courts to probation, millions of defendants sentenced to non-incarceratory sentences—including people not diagnosed with a substance abuse disorder—are required to attend drug treatment programs. After decades of policies that criminalized drug use, non-incarceratory sentences that match people with treatment may appear to be a step forward—or at least not the most pressing problem.

But criminal law scholarship has not fully reckoned with the harms of treatment sentences, including the harms of mandated treatment itself. Analysis of treatment sentences …

At The Intersection Of Property And Disaster Recovery, Jeanne Ortiz-Ortiz

Faculty Publications

(Excerpt)

When disaster strikes, communities rally to meet urgent, short-term needs—food, shelter, and medical care that keep people alive and safe in the immediate aftermath. For days, we see images of flooded streets, emergency shelters, and calls to support fundraising campaigns in the media cycle. Long-term recovery after a disaster often depends on something less visible: the ability of people, especially those experiencing economic insecurity, to rebuild or return to stable, functional homes.

The outcome of this largely depends on whether families can navigate and access assistance programs like those offered by the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA). Can you …

Values Primacy & Total Governance Through Activism, Carliss N. Chatman, Sergio Alberto Gramitto Ricci

Faculty Journal Articles and Book Chapters

In the aftermath of George Floyd’s murder, public companies swift-ly pledged sweeping equity commitments—only to abandon them under political and market pressure. These reversals were not aberrations. They were opportunistic, performative, and reactionary marketing responses. They expose a governance regime in which stakeholder interests are structurally reversible because they remain doctrinally optional, lacking the institutional interlock needed to create binding accountability across stakeholder roles.

This Article explores how stakeholder power is already embedded in corporate governance through interlocking initiatives grounded in shared values. Stakeholder activism—boycotts, proxy votes, viral campaigns—is not merely expressive; it is an overlooked form of governance. Drawing …

Can Federalism Protect Subnational Liberal Democracy From Central Authoritarianism?, James A. Gardner

Journal Articles

Liberal democracy is eroding rapidly around the globe, including in the United States, raising alarming questions about whether American democratic institutions will endure. Nevertheless, some have speculated that federalism may protect liberal democracy at the subnational level when the central government turns authoritarian. This article argues that such optimism is premature: there is no a priori basis on which to predict the effect of central democratic backsliding on the quality of subnational democracy. Federal theory does suggest that internal heterogeneity in basic political commitments is likely to produce an escalating pattern of severe and possibly intractable intergovernmental conflict. Empirical evidence …

Super-Efficient Breach In Bankruptcy: Recalibrating Remedies For Contract Rejection Damages, Ishaq Kundawala

Emory Bankruptcy Developments Journal

Contract law rests on a simple but powerful premise: when a party breaches, the law protects the injured party’s expectation interest, placing them, as nearly as possible, in the position they would have occupied had the contract been performed. This principle underlies the theory of efficient breach, which tolerates economically rational breaches so long as the non-breaching party is fully compensated. But in bankruptcy, this foundation often collapses. Under section 365 of the Bankruptcy Code, a debtor may reject an executory contract, with the law treating that rejection as a prepetition breach and relegating the counterparty’s claim to general unsecured …

Insurance And Chapter 11 Bankruptcy: Is The Insurance Neutrality Doctrine Dead?, Mikaela Deleon

Emory Bankruptcy Developments Journal

Insurers have traditionally been denied “party in interest” status under the Bankruptcy Code due to the longstanding insurance neutrality doctrine. The insurance neutrality doctrine prevents insurers from challenging a chapter 11 bankruptcy plan as a section 1109(b) “party in interest” if the plan does not increase the insurance company’s liability from pre-bankruptcy levels. If none of their rights or obligations were impacted by the plan, insurance companies were previously left without a means to challenge a proposed reorganization plan. As a result, insurance companies providing liability insurance to corporations stricken with mass tort lawsuits ran the risk of becoming the …

Asbestos 2.0: A Looming Disaster At The Intersection Of Pfas Litigation And The Texas Two-Step––Even After Purdue Pharma, Tyler Sheridan

Emory Bankruptcy Developments Journal

Companies that have manufactured, processed, or sold per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances (“PFAS”), also known as “forever chemicals,” face mounting financial pressure as the number of claims against them skyrocket. With billions of dollars already allocated to settlements and new lawsuits continuously filed, liable corporations may utilize the Texas Two-Step to minimize financial risk. The maneuver would enable solvent companies to isolate PFAS liability and discard it into bankruptcy, potentially delaying and capping payouts for claimants in the process. Third-party releases have survived Purdue, leaving the forum’s ability to permanently resolve mass tort liability intact. Moreover, escalating litigation may prompt …

Why Are Executions Becoming Crueler?, Deborah W. Denno

Faculty Scholarship

Since the modern death penalty era, this country’s six execution methods have become crueler over time. This article details the execution procedures adopted across death penalty states up to the end of 2025, analyzing their societal and cultural underpinnings and explaining how they were implemented, including their shared flaws, unscientific origins and protocols, and reliance on untrained, unqualified, or unknown executioners. While legislatures and courts claim that states move from one technique to the next to enhance greater humaneness, history shows that such switches are primarily propelled by constitutional challenges to a state’s particular technique. In theory, rendering a state’s …

Should Statutory Interpretation And Contract Interpretation Be Harmonized?, Ethan J. Leib

Faculty Scholarship

This paper develops four case studies about how states have harmonized or separated their statutory interpretation regimes and their contract interpretation regimes.  After exploring the choices of Texas, Alaska, New York, and Alabama—all of which take different approaches to their lumping or splitting—the paper seeks to make state courts more aware of what their options are; to help states think about whether their commitments to formalism or contextualism make sense to apply in both domains; and to help them evaluate their meta-choices about whether to bring their interpretive regimes closer together or further apart.

Expanding State Tax Authority: Public And Private Sector Impacts Of Wayfair, Maxwell Pastoria

Williams Honors College, Honors Research Projects

The 2018 Supreme Court decision in South Dakota v. Wayfair, Inc. (Wayfair) overturned the longstanding physical presence rule for state sales tax collection, enabling states to enforce tax obligations on remote sellers through marketplace facilitator and economic nexus laws (Oyez, 2018). This study investigates the effects of these two post-Wayfair tax laws on state sales tax revenues, entrepreneurship, and public expenditures across all 50 states. Using a two-way fixed effects difference-in-differences (TWFE DID) framework, this research analyzes how policy adoption influenced per-capita outcomes in tax revenue, firm formation, and government spending in social services, education, infrastructure, and …

Health Care Governance And Structural Exclusion In Florida: A Human Rights Analysis Of Access For Latinx Communities, Natalie Medrano

Honors Undergraduate Theses

Access to health care in the United States is a complex system shaped by statutory programs and the discretionary powers of state governance. This thesis examines how Florida’s healthcare system structures access through administrative design, with particular attention to its impact on Latinx communities. Although formally race-neutral, Florida’s reliance on Medicaid non-expansion, managed care delivery, and complex eligibility processes produces systemic barriers that limit access for low-income populations. Drawing on the international right-to-health framework articulated in General Comment No. 14 of the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights, alongside Latinx Critical Race Theory (LatCrit), this study analyzes how …

Activist Judicial Restraints, Michael Gentithes

Akron Law Faculty Publications

For decades, jurists and scholars have touted the virtues of judicial restraint—a characteristic of judges who only adjudicate issues they are competent to resolve, thereby avoiding political thickets and preserving their authority. Judicial restraint is ingrained in justiciability doctrines that emanate from Article III of the Constitution. When applied evenhandedly, standing requirements, the political question doctrine, and prudential manageability prerequisites to litigation help the Court maintain an appropriately restrained docket.

The Roberts Court falls well short of this restrained ideal in potentially dangerous and destructive ways. The Court has changed justiciability doctrines into “activist judicial restraints” that, rather than avoiding …

Confessions In Cases Of Child Physical Abuse - A Capnet Study, Margaret R. Russell, Antoinette L. Laskey, Henry T. Puls, Suzanne P. Starling, Joanne N. Wood, Daniel M. Lindberg, Nancy S. Harper, Caitlin R. Mcnamara, Angela N. Bachim, Farah W. Brink, Lori D. Frasier, James D. Anderst, Porcia Vaughn, Kristine A. Campbell

Department of Pediatrics Faculty Publications

Objective

Prior research on confessions of physical abuse (PA) has explored mechanisms of injury. Little is known about conditions supporting a confession of abuse or how confessions may influence case outcomes.

Methods

This cross-sectional study of suspected PA in children age < 10 years at 10 centers participating in CAPNET, a multicenter child PA research network, included children with in-person Child Abuse Pediatrics (CAP) consultations between Feb 2021-Dec 2022 and excluded children without injury. Our focus was a confession of inflicted injury known to the CAP during clinical involvement. We compared child and clinical characteristics, out-of-home (OOH) placements, and arrests between cases with and without confessions. Multivariable models using generalized estimating equations (GEE) produced adjusted predicted probabilities (APP) clustering by CAPNET site.

Results

Confessions were known to CAPs in 115/4297 (2.7%) cases, with significant site variability. In a multivariable GEE model, confessions were more likely in cases with injuries with high-specificity for abuse (APP 6.0% vs 1.5%, p< 0.001), near-fatality (APP 5.5% vs 2.3%, p< 0.001), and older children (APP 4.8% vs 2.5%, p = 0.025). OOH placements and arrests were more common in cases with confessions. CAP awareness of confessions, OOH placements, and arrests did not follow racial or ethnic patterns seen in the US child welfare system. Lower socioeconomic status was associated with OOH placements and arrests but not CAP awareness of confessions.

Conclusions

Our findings highlight differences in case characteristics and outcomes where a confession is known to the CAP and raise questions about agency …

Patent Law's Trade Remedy, Michael Doane

Akron Law Faculty Publications

Although a trade remedy, not an intellectual property rights statute, Section 337 of the Tariff Act of 1930 plays an important and controversial role in the enforcement of intellectual property rights in the United States. As a trade remedy, Section 337 is designed and intended to promote innovation and investment in the United States through support of statutorily defined domestic industries against unfair competition from infringing imported products. This Article analyzes Section 337 as a trade remedy from the perspective of intellectual property rights owners and innovators such as start-up companies, universities, individual inventors, and other research and development-focused entities. …