Digital Commons Network^™

Poison! An Africana Legal Studies Investigation Into Enslaved Africans And Their Deadly Roots, Angi Porter

Minnesota Journal of Law & Inequality

No abstract provided.

The Caseload Chronicles: Investigating The Case Manager Role Through The Perspectives Of Current Special Education Teachers, Khalil Milad Abouhamad

University of the Pacific Theses and Dissertations

Teacher attrition and resulting shortages have become severely problematic across the United States. This is especially true within special education. This study employs role theory (Kahn et al., 1964) to isolate the case manager role carried by special education teachers, investigate it through the stories of current practitioners, and establish it within academia. Burnout theory (Maslach, 1993) provides a lens through which to evaluate the strain of working conditions surrounding the case manager role. Elements of narrative inquiry (Clandinin, 2006; Creswell & Guetterman, 2019) in the form of 1-1 interviews with current IEP case managers from across California provided the …

The Comstock Act’S Equal Protection Problem, Danny Y. Li

Michigan Law Review Online

Following its victory in Dobbs, the antiabortion movement has set its sights on a national abortion ban. Affiliates of the second Trump Admin- istration—including the vice president-elect—have endorsed the re- newed enforcement of the 1873 Comstock Act as one avenue for implementing such a ban. This Essay argues that contemporary enforce- ment of the Comstock Act as a national abortion ban would be unconsti- tutional. The Act violates the Fifth Amendment’s equal protection guarantee because it was enacted with the discriminatory purpose of in- hibiting illicit sex to promote women’s sexual purity. Only contemporary reenactment of the law without constitutionally …

The Federal General Counsel, Law, And Our Democracy At A Crossroads, Seth Frotman

Michigan Law Review Online

This speech, given by the general counsel of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) on January 7, 2025, examines how federal government lawyers can help ensure that laws are faithfully administered to address the contemporary challenges facing American citizens. Despite the CFPB’s successes in protecting consumers from predatory financial practices—particularly amid the rapid digital transformation of the economy—undemocratic forces have increasingly rigged the legal system to serve as both sword and shield for the powerful. The speech describes how judge-made doctrines like “major questions” have been weaponized to disempower Congress from writing statutes with enduring relevance. These challenges represent an …

Adaptive College Athletics: The Champion Medals Await Those Collegiate Universities Who Compete, Peter Galati

Student Works

No abstract provided.

Ncaa: Not Comprised Of Amateurs Anymore, Michael Reilly

Student Works

No abstract provided.

2025-2026, Benjamin N. Cardozo School Of Law

Student Handbooks

No abstract provided.

The National Firearms Act Is An Unconstitutional Tax, Charles K. Eldred

Wyoming Law Review

The National Firearms Act (NFA) regulates certain firearms (most importantly, short-barreled rifles and suppressors) under the taxing power. The Supreme Court upheld it as such in the 1930s. But those precedents are subject to attack under Heller and Bruen, since the NFA taxes the exercise of constitutional rights the earlier precedents did not recognize—and does so without any historical precedent. Moreover, consideration of rarely considered limitations on the taxing power that the Supreme Court reaffirmed in Sebelius leads to the conclusion that several provisions of the NFA violate the taxing power, independent of any Second Amendment concerns. In sum, the …

Risks, Benefits, Opportunities, And Electronic Formalities In The Law Of Wills: A Comparative Approach, Bridget J. Crawford, Margaret Isabel Hall, Tina Cockburn, Rosie Harding, Kelly Purser

Elisabeth Haub School of Law Faculty Publications

Traditional "formalities" in the law of wills-including formal requirements for revocation by destruction-contemplate paper documents, wet signatures, and testators and witnesses in the physical presence of one another. Unless these traditional requirements have been modified by legislation, wills made using one or more electronic formalities will not meet the formal requirements for a valid will. Traditional wills formalities have become something of an outlier as the use of electronic text, records, signatures, and witnessing has become routine in many spheres, including for the creation and storage of valid legal agreements. The special nature of wills, and their consequent vulnerability to …

Adaptation For Whom? Understanding The Impacts Of Dyke Policies On Small-Scale Farmers In Ca Mau Province Of Vietnam, Nguyen Minh Quang, Nguyen Van Minh, Nguyen Vo Chau Ngan, Martha B. Lerski

Publications and Research

Low-lying deltas worldwide are extremely vulnerable to sea-level rise. As the risks of climate-induced flooding become increasingly clear, the thirst for infrastructure-driven adaptation increases. This highlights a patent need to understand the impacts of engineering adaptation solutions, especially those targeting built structures such as dykes and sluices, on farmers from a bottom-up, farmer-centred perspective. The study addresses this call by examining cases where dyke policies, while successful in some dimensions, have undermined small-scale farmer livelihoods in Ca Mau ― Vietnam’s southernmost rural province. It identifies areas in need of attention and adds empirical data related to this group of farmers. …

Identifying Intangible And Biocultural Heritage Elements Toward Environmental Understanding: Engaging Stakeholders Through Art, Martha B. Lerski

Publications and Research

Grounded in a case study in Barbuda in the Caribbean, this research examines sustainability from the perspective of what arts and heritage can contribute to community engagement and local and broader understandings about the environment. This article documents a growing body of literature recognizing the role of arts and culture, including local knowledge and traditional ecological knowledge (TEK), in climate change endeavors. Art and TEK present expansive world views. Contextual information situates research done on the island of Barbuda pre- and post-Hurricane Irma. Visual arts workshops engaged community members in mixed methods research. Results documented cultural elements, particularly intangible and …

A Workable Common Law Baseline For Regulatory Takings, Adam J. Macleod

Faculty Articles

Rights to use property are property rights. The Takings Clause of the Fifth Amendment requires governments to provide just compensation when they take property. In our constitutional republic, legislatures are competent to change the law, and legal changes sometimes alter private rights, including use rights. The Takings Clause does not forbid such legal changes. It only requires compensation for property rights taken as a result.

To give use rights the constitutional protection that the Takings Clause requires, courts need a baseline of rightful property use to show when a change in the law that adversely affects use rights amounts to …

From Cigarettes To Cereal: Analyzing The Rise, Peak, And Fall Of Ultra-Processed Foods And The Legal Battle Against Industry Food Deception, Charlotte F. Baird

SMU Science and Technology Law Review

This Comment explores the legal, regulatory, and public health dimensions of ultra-processed foods (UPFs) in the United States and abroad, revealing the urgent need for comprehensive reform. It traces the historical evolution of UPFs, exposing how Big Tobacco strategically pivoted into the food industry after facing public backlash and regulatory crackdowns with cigarettes and tobacco products. Using the same research tactics, behavioral manipulation, and aggressive marketing practices once employed to sell cigarettes, Big Tobacco companies repurposed their corporate expertise to engineer food designed for potential addiction, overconsumption, and profit, while often targeting children and marginalized communities. This Comment critically examines …

Incremental Innovation, George Horvath

SMU Science and Technology Law Review

Transformative innovations—the ones that use new technologies to disrupt the world—command our attention. But most new products are the result of a more mundane process of incremental iterative innovation, evolving through a long series of small modifications of existing technologies. Although both kinds of innovation can result in improved safety and utility, both can also create new dangers. We tend to be more aware of this in trans- formative innovations (as current worries over artificial intelligence show); by contrast, dangers created by incremental iterative innovation often go unrecognized, because the process itself is easy to overlook. Policymakers and regulators need …

Disenchanting Consent, Ruifeng Song

SMU Science and Technology Law Review

Despite being criticized as a flawed mechanism for data protection, con- sent has witnessed a revival in the recent wave of state privacy statutes. One factor that contributed to the revival may be the widely held belief that con- sent constitutes the “cornerstone” of data privacy laws. This Article conducts a comparative historical survey to examine the validity of this belief. The findings are twofold. First, contrary to what many believe, consent has been playing a limited role in global data privacy laws. Second, consent is an inherently defective mechanism for data protection. Some of its problems have existed since …

Regulation To Reinforce The Evidentiary-Science Base Of U.S. Medicine In The Age Of "Omics", Michael J. Malinowski

SMU Science and Technology Law Review

United States’ technology transfer law and policy (TTLP) integrates government, academia, and industry—a “triple-threat” research and development (R&D) methodology—and harnesses commercial incentives to stimulate market application of federal government-funded invention. TTLP, which has proven a potent catalyst for remarkably prolific biomedical R&D since Congress enacted its cornerstone legislation in 1980, is transforming U.S. medicine to molecular medicine—to personal genome medicine (PGM)—in real time. A genomics (gene function in the context of an organism’s entire genome, meaning its full set of genetic instructions) complement to the Human Genome Project (HGP) emerged in the 1990s. Genomics has given rise to a portfolio …

Keynote Address: The Future Of Constitutional Interpretation, Madiba K. Dennie

Saint Louis University Law Journal

The American constitutional order is in a state of flux, caused in part by the Supreme Court and its embrace of originalism. The originalist ideology contends that the Constitution has one true historically discoverable meaning, and interpreters must understand the document today the same way the public purportedly understood it when it was enacted. While its advocates insist that originalism promotes objectivity and democratic legitimacy, closer examination reveals that it is little more than a political tool designed to entrench 18th-century power hierarchies by transforming some of the nation’s lowest historical shortcomings into its highest legal standards. The author argues …

Originalism, The Second Amendment, And The Vibe Of The Constitution, Allen Rostron

Saint Louis University Law Journal

Constitutional law often comes down to how judges feel about the vibes of the Constitution’s text, structure, and history. This has always been true, but in the past, courts had more leeway to be honest about this. With a majority of the Supreme Court embracing an originalist approach to constitutional interpretation, the opportunity for candor has been lost. Judges now pretend that history and tradition supply the answers to difficult constitutional questions, even when they must rely on tenuous inferences from the historical record. This Essay examines major cases from the past where the Supreme Court acknowledged that it was …

Judicial Jujitsu In The New Originalism, Marcia L. Mccormick

Saint Louis University Law Journal

The Supreme Court’s adoption of the “history and tradition” test has prompted a substantial body of critique. Most of that critique has focused on problems connected with historical analysis, but additional aspects of the test’s application warrant scrutiny. This essay focuses on one of those: how the Supreme Court redefined what counts as evidence of a right in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization. The Court applied the same test in Dobbs that it had in New York State Rifle and Pistol Ass’n v. Bruen in an opposite manner to reach the opposite result. In Bruen, the Court …

The Court’S Haphazard Reasoning On The Separation Of Powers, Steven D. Schwinn

Saint Louis University Law Journal

The Supreme Court in recent years has taken a sharp and decisive turn toward originalism in cases touching on individual rights. Say what you will about the Court’s originalism in individual-rights cases (and there’s much to say), at least it’s an approach. We can’t even say that much about the Court’s treatment of cases touching on the separation of powers.

In short, the Court’s separation-of-powers opinions are a mess. They lack any consistent methodology or any coherent theory across cases. If five or six justices agree on the result in any given case, it seems, the explanation and reasoning are …

Unwarranted Warrants? An Empirical Analysis Of Judicial Review In Search And Seizure, Miguel De Figueiredo, Brett Hashimoto, Dane Thorley

Faculty Articles and Papers

Every year, police perform searches governed by the Fourth Amendment on hundreds of thousands of individuals and their property throughout the United States. Many of the academy’s most decorated scholars have focused on the genesis and jurisprudential nature of the Fourth Amendment’s warrant requirement. Surprisingly, we know almost nothing about how the Fourth Amendment regulates searchers and how searches actually work in practice.

In this Article, we pull back the curtain on the search and seizure process by presenting the largest quantitative study of warrants of any kind. We analyze over 33,000 warrant applications filed through Utah’s “e-warrants” system over …

Foreword, Marcia L. Mccormick

Saint Louis University Law Journal

This volume of the Saint Louis University Law Journal contains a number of terrific articles by participants in the 2024 symposium cosponsored by the Journal and the William C. Wefel Center for Employment Law at Saint Louis University. The topic, Revisiting Religion in the Struggle for Workplace Justice, grew, in part, out of twin, somewhat dialectic motivations of mine: frustration and hope. My own research over the last several years has been focused on ways that people are marginalized because of their sex, gender, and sexuality, particularly through growing claims that religion requires the ability to exclude, to contribute …

Whose Labor Law Do We Follow? St. Louis’S Jesuits And Labor Justice, Ken Homan

Saint Louis University Law Journal

In this essay, Br. Ken Homan, SJ explores how Jesuits in St. Louis varyingly referred to Natural Law and statutory law when addressing questions of labor rights and justice. Homan provides three categories of engagement before turning to the present-day relationships between mission-oriented institutions, workers, and the state. Homan argues that all three parties are at their best and can avoid state-religion entanglement when they actively seek to promote worker justice.

Felons In Possession: Rejecting The Third Circuit And Its Application Of Bruen, Morgan Schmidt

Saint Louis University Law Journal

The Supreme Court’s 2022 decision striking down a New York public carry law has triggered widespread legal challenges to gun regulations across the United States. Among the most contested statutes is 18 U.S.C. § 922(g)(1), the federal felon-in-possession law, a crucial tool for the Department of Justice in restricting firearm access. Recent rulings from the Third and Eighth Circuits have resulted in a legal split regarding the constitutionality of this provision, raising uncertainty about its future enforceability. This note examines the historical and legal foundations of § 922(g)(1), the implications of New York State Rifle & Pistol Association v. Bruen …

Kill ‘Em With Lies: The False Narrative Of The American Execution Laboratory, Danica Howell

Saint Louis University Law Journal

The Supreme Court’s narrative regarding capital punishment, in keeping with the laboratories of democracy theory, boasts the consistent development of more humane methods of execution. Contrary to the Court’s narrative, however, states are not driven by the desire to create humane execution; they are merely striving to keep state-sanctioned killing alive. Examination reveals that execution methods are adopted on best guess and are retained without post-adoption verification of their effectiveness, humanity or painlessness. As abolitionist ideals close in on capital punishment, legislative shortcuts, willful ignorance, and secrecy allow new methods to propagate. As those tactics begin to fail, states resort …

The Value Of A Statistical Life: From Skin In The Game To Vision Zero, Michael C. Duff

Saint Louis University Law Journal

This essay discusses justice issues surrounding occupational safety and health and assesses the ethical legitimacy of regulatory cost benefit analysis when the costs in question involve the risks and realization of workplace injury and fatalities. The current “value of a statistical life” for legal-regulatory purposes is 13.1 million dollars. Economists claim that this figure does not “really” represent an attempt to value any particular life. But the obvious purpose of even calculating the number is to provide a statistical justification for saying “no” to rules requiring safer work.

The moral-ethical dilemma of work related injury and death remains a central …

Inaugural Adr And Social Entrepreneurship Course, Helen M.E. Winter, Harshit Rathore

Saint Louis University Law Journal

This article examines the innovative integration of Alternative Dispute Resolution (ADR) principles with social entrepreneurship, focusing on how this combination can be used to address significant societal challenges. The article highlights a course designed specifically for law students, which provides a comprehensive understanding of ADR mechanisms such as mediation, negotiation, and system design, while also encouraging students to develop entrepreneurial solutions to real-world conflicts. Inspired by the nonprofit organization R3solute, which trains refugees and locals as peer mediators, the article explores how students are equipped to create ADR-centered ventures that offer sustainable resolutions to social problems.

The article discusses the …

Opening Space For Negotiation Reflection In Law Practice, Katrina Lee

Saint Louis University Law Journal

Critical to negotiations learning and skills-building, reflection is an enduring feature of law school negotiations courses. At the same time, anti-reflection forces in law practice persist. Lawyers face demanding work environments that compel them to make seemingly impossible choices among advancing their careers, maintaining mental and emotional health, and continuing to learn and grow. The time for slowing down and reflecting can be excruciatingly hard to come by. Technology in negotiations may also obscure the need or opportunities for reflection. This Article highlights the importance of negotiation reflection and the longstanding and emerging challenges to creating and maintaining a lawyer’s …

Pracademically Speaking: Incorporating Real-World Legal Practice Into The Dispute Resolution Curriculum, Debra Berman, Denise Peterson

Saint Louis University Law Journal

Bridging the gap between traditional dispute resolution pedagogy and the realities of practice has been a major point of discussion within the legal academy for some time. Professors want to equip students with the dispute resolution knowledge and skills that will allow them to thrive as attorneys. At the same time, the dynamics and time constraints within traditional dispute resolution courses can create many obstacles to doing so. In this article, Professors Berman and Peterson provide tangible recommendations for designing dispute resolution courses that maximize practice-readiness. They address options for course structure, class format, skills building, and various methodologies professors …

Humanizing The Law: Building Better Lawyers Through Mediation Coursework, Simone A. Haberstock

Saint Louis University Law Journal

Many students enter law school with the goal of helping others. Traditional law school classes do not help students develop empathy and an understanding of client needs and interests. This paper argues that mediation training in law school helps students improve their understanding of the human experience of litigants involved in legal disputes and builds important empathic, relational, conflict resolution, and problem-solving skills. These skills not only help students connect with and understand their clients better but can promote the self-awareness and self-care necessary for students to become healthier and happier practicing attorneys. This results in students who are more …