Digital Commons Network^™

Project Rural Practice: Its People & Its Purpose: The Next Chapter, Patrick G. Goetzinger, Robert L. Morris

South Dakota Law Review

No abstract provided.

The Future Of Indigent Defense In South Dakota, Brooklyn Bollweg, Neil Fulton

South Dakota Law Review

No abstract provided.

Reconceiving Tort Law And The Role Of Insurance: Achieving Mutual Accountability, Grace Hong

CMC Senior Theses

Despite insurance being a deciding factor in whether liability is found in tort cases, it is not always reflected in tort theories and court opinions. In this paper, I offer a framework for reconceiving the role of insurance in tort law. To achieve this, I outline where insurance falls into instrumental and non-instrumental theories and why non-instrumental theories are more persuasive. After establishing this, I move to Goldberg and Zipursky’s civil recourse theory and delineate how similarities between the right to vote and right of action indicate parallel problems with failures to comprehend lack of access to the political process …

Using Social Media As A Tool To Inform Person-Centred Justice, Matthew Dylag

Articles, Book Chapters, & Popular Press

Many leading access to justice organizations recognize the importance of including the public’s perspective within programming and policy development. One key question underlying this approach is, how can organizations learn about the public’s experience with legal problems and the law? Noting that conversations about legal problems provide evidence of such experiences, this paper presents a study that examines conversations posted to the social media platform Reddit. It argues that social media can be leveraged to better understand the public’s experience with legal problems and the law and, in doing so, help to inform a person-centred perspective of justice.

Preparing Future Lawyers To Draft Contracts And Communicate With Clients In The Era Of Generative Ai, Kristen Wolff

Articles

Thank you all for coming today. This is, I think, a really important topic. Important enough that the conference has decided to have two talks on the same topic, and Mark will be presenting on this in the next session, too. I plan on attending because I don’t think you can get enough perspectives on it right now. And hearing this information, I had to attend several talks myself before I really digested it and understood what this was all about. So, I hope that I can give you a little bit of that today. My name is Kristen Wolff. …

Fairness And Fair Use In Generative Ai, Matthew Sag

Faculty Articles

Although we are still a long way from the science fiction version of “artificial general intelligence” that thinks, feels, and refuses to “open the pod bay doors,” recent advances in machine learning and artificial intelligence (AI) have captured the public’s imagination and lawmakers’ interest. We now have large language models (LLMs) that can pass the bar exam, carry on (what passes for) a conversation about almost any topic, create new music, and create new visual art. These artifacts are often indistinguishable from their human-authored counterparts and yet can be produced at a speed and scale surpassing human ability.

“Generative AI” …

Exoneration Finance, Kay L. Levine, Russell M. Gold

Faculty Articles

The path to financial compensation for the wrongfully convicted can be complex and time-consuming. Exonerees often struggle to make ends meet and function in free society, let alone navigate serpentine processes while waiting years for the recovery they deserve. Securing the assistance of an attorney is often a critical step, but too few lawyers are willing to risk accepting these complicated cases on a contingency-fee basis—the only way that exoneree-clients can likely pay their lawyers without outside help.

Litigation finance—an important tool for increasing access to justice in tort cases—could help close this access to justice gap for exonerees. In …

Innovator Ecosystem Diversity As A Global Competitiveness Imperative, Margo A. Bagley

Faculty Articles

There are myriad ways that discrimination and bias can combine to profoundly limit inventor participation in the patent process. The utilitarian purpose of patents is to incentivize inventors to invent and disclose, so it makes sense to incentivize as large and as diverse a group as possible in order to maximize the likely output of innovative activity. This incentive is important in terms of our geopolitical aspirations as a country, but hopefully also because of our democratic commitment to provide opportunities for flourishing and reaching one's potential that are available to all.

Analysis On Investor Protection In Myanmar Under The Myanmar Investment Law 2016, Ei Ei Htwe

Chulalongkorn University Theses and Dissertations (Chula ETD)

This paper explores the legal protections offered to foreign investors under the Myanmar Investment Law 2016 (MIL 2016), focusing on how these protections are structured, how they are applied in practice, and how they compare with international and regional standards. The law contains key provisions aimed at creating a stable and transparent investment environment. In particular, Section 47 ensures national treatment for foreign investors, meaning they should be treated no less favorably than local investors in similar situations. Section 48 commits to fair and equitable treatment (FET) and transparency, which are essential for ensuring that government decisions affecting investors are …

Legal Loopholes And Uncertainties Of Nominee Structures Under Foreign Business Law Of Thailand: Comparative Analysis With Austrian Investment Law, Harald Hinterer

Chulalongkorn University Theses and Dissertations (Chula ETD)

Laws and regulations concerning foreign direct investments in Thailand are at an all-time high. One of the most relevant legal bases for foreign direct investment is the Foreign Business Act B.E. 2542 (1999) (the “FBA”), which imposes restrictions on certain business activities. This research paper critically examines the effectiveness of the FBA in regulating foreign direct investment, with particular attention to nominee structures that may be used to circumvent statutory ownership restrictions. While the FBA aims to strike a balance between attracting foreign investment and protecting national interests, by focusing solely on capital shareholding, it contains loopholes which permit a …

Can Medical-Legal Partnerships Do More To Advance Reproductive Justice After Dobbs?, Medha D. Makhlouf, Natasha Rappazzo

Faculty Scholarly Works

The medical-legal partnership (MLP) and reproductive justice (RJ) movements both seek to solve complex problems, serve diverse populations with intersectional challenges, and resolve community conditions that impact people’s ability to reach their highest health potential. Yet MLPs have been overlooked as a strategy to advance reproductive health and justice. MLP has distinct advantages for advancing RJ, and many MLPs might already be doing RJ work without referring to it by name. By intentionally adopting an RJ strategy and explicitly addressing the unmet social and legal needs that limit people’s ability to plan their reproductive futures, MLPs can better serve their …

Forbidden Purposes: A New Path For Limiting Criminalization, Raff Donelson

Journal of Criminal Law and Criminology

Activists and scholars have often complained that the American criminal justice system makes choices about criminalization and sentences based on nefarious reasons. For instance, critics have claimed that criminalization and sentencing decisions are made to provide cheap prison labor to the government or private industry, to boost the private prison industry, to offer employment in rural communities in the form of jobs managing correctional facilities, or to empower police to harass undesirables and remove them from public spaces. These accusations are very alarming, and the evidence may not confirm activists’ worst suspicions. But, supposing the extraordinary evidence could be adduced, …

Regulating Producers By Randomizing Consumers, Michael B. Abramowicz

GW Law Faculty Publications & Other Works

Consumer law aims to empower consumers with accurate information and to protect them from misinformation. For complex goods and services, however, mandated disclosure laws and other consumer law tools have had only limited success in helping consumers project their satisfaction and costs. Market responses, such as ratings, have limitations that have prevented them from compensating adequately for consumer law’s shortcomings. This Article describes how regulators could improve measurements of quality and cost by borrowing a tool from drug law: randomization. In designated markets, consumers who accept an incentive to volunteer would be randomized among two or more choices, and the …

The Missing Millions: Cy Pres In Federal Securities Class Actions, Scott Dodson, Joseph A. Grundfest

Emory Law Journal

Under prevailing cy pres doctrine, class-action-settlement residuals that cannot efficiently or fairly be distributed to the class may be distributed to a third party that represents the “next best” recipient consistent with class interests. Judges embrace cy pres despite theoretical concerns over inattention, conflicts, and abuse. We shed empirical light on the cy pres debate by examining an original, hand-collected dataset of 373 class-action settlements entered between 2010 and 2018. We document that the theoretical concerns have empirical merit. More than 57% of the settlements lack any evidence in the public record of the identity or court approval of cy …

Second Look Myopia: State Sentencing Reform And The Local Prosecutorial Response, Alexandra Harrington

Journal of Criminal Law and Criminology

This Article advises caution against over-reliance on local prosecutors’ offices to effect second-look reforms and to filter cases worthy of review. Using the lens of New York’s recent second-look law, the Domestic Violence Survivors Justice Act (DVSJA), I analyze the ways in which the local prosecutor can serve as a functional barrier to statewide implementation of sentencing reform. The New York State Legislature enacted the DVSJA—after advocacy from hundreds of directly impacted individuals, stakeholders, and organizations and after significant opposition from only the District Attorneys’ Association—to change the way the State sentences survivors of domestic violence. The DVSJA also allows …

Raising The Bar In Child Welfare Law, Diane M. Sumoski

SMU Law Review

This article explores the unique opportunities arising from child welfare law practice in clinical legal education. While training law students for lawyering in all practice areas, the clinic can also inspire experienced child welfare practitioners to raise the level of their practice. The article provides an overview of the child welfare practice in Texas, the various roles of lawyers in the system, the special training required for these lawyers, and how the lawyers are employed and paid. The article proposes that the clear impact of child welfare legal practice on clients, combined with its interdisciplinary complexity, creates an ideal combination …

Maine Law Magazine - Issue No. 98, University Of Maine School Of Law

Maine Law Magazine

• Maine Law’s Privacy Program Continues to Grow
• How The Maine Center is Strengthening the Environmental Law Program
• COP28 — A Formative Experience
• Profile: Seth Goodall, CEO & Executive Director — Maine Center
• Complex Problem-Solving Across Disciplines
• Expanding Rural Access to Justice
• Activating Change: The Center for Youth Policy & Law
• Students Working Across Borders on Behalf of Asylum Seekers
• Friends and Defenders of the Casco Bay

Upstream Lawyering: A Framework For Poverty Law, Kate Mitchell

Faculty Publications & Other Works

This Article introduces an upstream lawyering framework within the context of the history of poverty law and impact lawyering. While there have been several theories promoting systems change work, the upstream framework, stemming from public health theories and championed by medical-legal partnerships, offers a model for promoting and informing systemic policy. Using the public health concept of upstreaming, this Article explores lawyering practices that can be utilized to address the root causes of social and legal drivers of health inequity, poverty, and oppression. Part I of this Article provides a refreshed overview of the history of poverty law and civil …

Finding Our Way: Teaching Legislative Advocacy Clinics, Anita Weinberg, Elizabeth B. Cooper

Faculty Publications & Other Works

Legislative advocacy clinics are excellent vehicles for teaching lawyering skills, for achieving broad-based social change, and for imparting to law students the important roles they can play in preserving and strengthening our democracy. Notwithstanding their growth over the last 15 years, there has been little scholarly reflection about the pedagogy of teaching such clinics. This Article helps to fill this gap. We provide a roadmap through the challenges that come with teaching legislative advocacy clinics-some inherent to working within legislative bodies and some that accompany working with organizational clients and advocacy partners-identifying ways that clinicians can ensure an excellent learning …

Dedication To Professor Emerita Marie Failinger, Edwin Butterfoss

Mitchell Hamline Law Review

No abstract provided.

Please, Help Yourself: A Best Practice Model Analysis On The Self-Represented Litigants In America's Legal System, Linnea G. Coltvet

Mitchell Hamline Law Review

No abstract provided.

Covid-19 Sports Competition Lockdowns, Return-To-Play Decisions, And Participation Requirements: A Retrospective Review And Future Medicolegal Framework, Matthew J. Mitten, Laurel C. Montag, Abigail C. Barnett

Marquette Sports Law Review

No abstract provided.

Police Accountability In Expungement Processing In New Jersey: The Past, Present, And Future, Jahmir Sterling

Student Works

No abstract provided.

Asking Gpt For The Ordinary Meaning Of Statutory Terms, Christoph Engel, Richard H. Mcadams

Public Law and Legal Theory Working Papers

We report on our test of the Large Language Model (LLM) ChatGPT (GPT) as a tool for generating evidence of the ordinary meaning of statutory terms. We explain why the most useful evidence for interpretation involves a distribution of replies rather than only what GPT regards as the single “best” reply. That motivates our decision to use Chat 3.5 Turbo instead of Chat 4 and to run each prompt we use 100 times. Asking GPT whether the statutory term “vehicle” includes a list of candidate objects (e.g., bus, bicycle, skateboard) allows us to test it against a benchmark, the results …

Book Review—Shaping The Bar: The Future Of Attorney Licensing, Kevin P. Lee

Dickinson Law Review (2017-Present)

No abstract provided.

The Sword And The Scale: Model Rule 8.4(G) As A Tool Of Racial Justice In The Legal Profession, Tiffany Williams Brewer

Dickinson Law Review (2017-Present)

Lady Justice. Have you seen her? Standing regal and tall with blindfolded eyes. A sword in one hand and a scale in the other. Her image represents a symbol of hope and idealism in protecting and delivering her virtues. Lawyers enter this noble profession to do right by her and carry on her legacy. We serve our clients with the aim that she will ultimately be both our arbiter of facts and our judge. While the symbolism of her blindfold is often the subject of commentary on justice, consider the symbolism of the powerful tools she has chosen in her …

From Briefs To Bytes: How Generative Ai Is Transforming Legal Writing And Practice, Joseph Regalia

Scholarly Works

ChatGPT is having a moment in the legal field. And for good reason: Generative artificial intelligence (“AI”) was already disrupting the practice of law before OpenAI’s new chatbot came on the scene. But ChatGPT marks a new era. The brain behind OpenAI’s latest AI contains up to a trillion artificial neurons and was trained on hundreds of billions of pieces of text gathered on the web. All that data makes for the smartest AI ever.

But what’s more important is that all that computational muscle is aimed at things lawyers do every day: (1) Understanding complex concepts, (2) analyzing convoluted …

Am I My Colleague's Keeper When It Comes To Disclosing Connections?, Nancy B. Rapoport

Scholarly Works

No abstract provided.

Outsourcing Self-Regulation, Marsha Griggs

Washington and Lee Law Review

Answerable only to the courts that have the sole authority to grant or withhold the right to practice law, lawyers operate under a system of self-regulation. The self-regulated legal profession staunchly resists external interference from the legislative and administrative branches of government. Yet, with the same fervor that the legal profession defies non-judicial oversight, it has subordinated itself to the controlling influence of a private interest. By outsourcing the mechanisms that dictate admission to the bar, the legal profession has all but surrendered control of the most crucial component of its gatekeeping function to an unregulated industry that profits at …

Contingent Fee Conflicts: Attorneys Opt For Quick-Kill Settlements When Their Clients Would Be Better Off Going To Trial, Chryssa Deliganis, Steve Calandrillo, Neela Brocato

Faculty Articles

Despite the checkered history of contingency fees in the practice of law,

attorneys often claim that such fee arrangements perfectly align the interests of

lawyer and client. After all, contingency fee lawyers proclaim in TV ad after TV

ad, “we don’t get paid unless you win.” That superficial logic does not withstand

economic scrutiny. Utilizing a behavioral economics lens, this Article

demonstrates that contingency fee arrangements give attorneys excessive

incentives to settle cases that their clients would be better off taking all the way

through trial. In addition to highlighting this undertheorized problem in law, we

offer normative recommendations to …