Digital Commons Network^™

Presumptively Awful: How The Federal Government Is Failing To Protect The Constitutional Rights Of Those Adjudicated As Mentally Ill, As Illustrated By The 18 U.S.C. § 922(G)(4) Circuit Split, Kaitlyn M. Rubcich

Pepperdine Law Review

The Third, Sixth, and Ninth Circuits are split as to whether the 18 U.S.C. § 922(g)(4) federal firearms ban violates the Second Amendment rights of those who were once adjudicated as mentally ill but have since returned to good mental health. In Beers v. Attorney General, the Third Circuit applied its own unique framework and held that § 922(g)(4) is constitutional. Meanwhile, the Sixth Circuit applied intermediate scrutiny in Tyler v. Hillsdale County Sheriff’s Department and deemed the statute unconstitutional, while in Mai v. United States, the Ninth Circuit also applied intermediate scrutiny but held that § 922(g)(4) is constitutional. …

Generic Ab Initio, James A. Heilpern, Earl Kjar Brown, William G. Eggington, Zachary D. Smith

Buffalo Law Review

From comic conventions to disbanded dioceses, courts continue to struggle with a unique but puzzling question of trademark law. Federal law protects certain terms that refer to a product or service from a specific producer instead of to a product generally. Terms that refer to products are considered generic and cannot receive protection. Courts have also held that a term that was generic at the time the party adopted the mark cannot receive protection, even if the public later views it as being specific to a particular producer. But, many marks were adopted decades or centuries ago. As a result, …

The Committee Of Style And The Federalist Constitution, David S. Schwartz

Buffalo Law Review

The conventional interpretation of the Constitution assumes that the Committee of Style, which created the final draft of the Constitution, lacked authority to engage with substance; therefore, any arguably substantive changes it purportedly made should be disregarded in favor of earlier draft language found in the records of the Constitutional Convention. This “Style doctrine” has been embraced by the Supreme Court and several leading constitutional scholars. This Article argues that the Style doctrine is historically unfounded and obscures the Constitution’s original meaning. The Committee of Style was not prohibited from proposing substantive changes. In any case, most of the revisions …

Checking Our Attachment To The Charter And Respecting Indigenous Legal Orders: A Framework For Charter Application To Indigenous Governments, Naiomi Metallic

Articles, Book Chapters, & Popular Press

The Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedom looms large in our national identity. As a constitutional law professor at a Canadian law school, my experience is that most students and lawyers see the Charter as intrinsically tied to fundamental notions of justice and fairness in our country. Because of this, Canadian lawyers and judges, who believe the Charter to be inherently good, may find it hard to understand why Indigenous peoples resist application of the Charter to their own institutions. But Canadian jurists’ attachment to the Charter, if not kept in check, can easily lead to dismissing important objections …

Disadvantaged Communities, Water Justice & The Promise Of The Infrastructure Investment And Jobs Act, Misbah Husain, Melissa K. Scanlan

Seton Hall Law Review

No abstract provided.

Disentangling Textualism And Originalism, Katie Eyer

ConLawNOW

Textualism and originalism are not the same interpretive theory. Textualism commands adherence to the text. Originalism, in contrast, commands adherence to history. It should be self-evident that these are not—put simply—the same thing. While textualism and originalism may in some circumstances be harnessed to work in tandem—or may in some circumstances lead to the same result—they are different inquiries, and command fidelity to different ultimate guiding principles.

In this Essay, I argue that disentangling textualism and originalism is critical to the future vibrancy and legitimacy of textualism as an interpretive methodology. When conflated with originalism, textualism holds almost endless opportunities …

The Pandemic And Privacy: The Global Culture Of Intrusion, Jon L. Mills, Lucca Viana, Danielle Black

Legislation and Policy Brief

No abstract provided.

Well-Known Signs: Models Of Disability In Early Modern Islamic Law And Current American, European, And Pakistani Jurisprudence, Elicia Shotland

Washington International Law Journal

Current American, European, and Pakistani legal structures are often insufficient to ensure rights of disabled people, particularly rights of equal access to courts and to act as a witness in court. As the disability rights movement gains ground, judges and legislation drafters are struggling to shift modes of jurisprudence from a medical model that conceptualized disability as a permanent physical affliction to the social model, which locates disability in an individual’s relation to their built and social environments. A review of historical records concerning deaf and hard of hearing participants in legal processes from the Ottoman Empire shows that the …

The Right To Remain, Timothy E. Lynch

Washington International Law Journal

Article 12.4 of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (ICCPR) states, “No one shall be arbitrarily deprived of the right to enter his own country.” Citizens clearly enjoy Article 12.4 rights, but this article demonstrates that this right reaches beyond the citizenry. Using customary methods of treaty interpretation, including reference to the ICCPR’s preparatory works and the jurisprudence of the Human Rights Committee, this article demonstrates that Article 12.4 also forbids States from deporting long-term resident noncitizens—both documented and undocumented—except under the rarest circumstances. As a result, the ICCPR right to remain in one’s own country is a …

Vesting, Jed Handelsman Shugerman

Faculty Scholarship

"The executive Power shall be vested in a President of the United States of America." The Executive Vesting Clause is one of three originalist pillars for the unitary executive theory, the idea that the President possesses executive powers like removal without congressional limitations (that is, the powers are indefeasible). An underlying assumption is that "vest" connotes a formalist approach to separation of powers rather than a more functional system of Madisonian checks and balances. Assumptions about "vesting" for official powers are likely the result of semantic drift from property rights and ahistoric projections back from the later Marshall Court doctrine …

Getting Into Equity, Samuel L. Bray, Paul B. Miller

Notre Dame Law Review

For two centuries, common lawyers have talked about a “cause of action.” But “cause of action” is not an organizing principle for equity. This Article shows how a plaintiff gets into equity, and it explains that equity is shaped by the interplay of its remedial, procedural, and substantive law. Equity is adjectival, that is, it modifies law rather than the other way around. Its power comes from remedies, not rights. And for getting into equity, what is central is a grievance. To insist on an equitable cause of action is to work a fundamental change in how a plaintiff gets …

Impeachment And Trial After Officials Leave Office, Michael W. Mcconnell

Missouri Law Review

The second impeachment of President Donald J. Trump raised an important and unresolved question: May Presidents and other federal officers be impeached or tried on impeachments after they have left office? Most Democrats argued that former officers can be both impeached and tried; most Republicans argued that former officers can neither be impeached nor tried. Trump himself was impeached while still in office and tried – and acquitted – after he left office. This is the sort of question that could easily arise again, in connection with presidents and other officers of either party, and it needs an answer that …

Textualism As Fair Notice?, Benjamin Minhao Chen

Washington Law Review

The opportunity to know the law is one of the bedrocks of legality. It is also a powerful and attractive reason for giving statutory language the meaning it has in everyday discourse. To do otherwise would be to hide the law from those it governs.

Or so the argument goes. Despite its intuitive force, the fair notice argument for textualism is vulnerable to two challenges. The first challenge is to the notion that fair notice requires congruence between ordinary and legal meaning. There is no normative gauge for determining the time and expense people ought to spend learning their legal …

Racial Justice And Peace, Yuvraj Joshi

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Corpus Linguistics Criticisms Of Heller Misuse Corpus Linguistics, Michael Showalter

SMU Law Review Forum

A number of linguistics experts have asserted that new corpus-linguistics evidence undermines the U.S. Supreme Court’s conclusion in District of Columbia v. Heller that the Second Amendment phrase keep and bear arms means to possess and carry weapons. At the time of ratification, the term bear arms carried both an idiomatic sense meaning “to serve as a soldier” and a literal sense meaning “to carry weapons.” The Heller majority concluded that the Second Amendment uses the literal sense, partly because the idiomatic reading has the absurd implication of causing the Amendment to protect a right to serve as a soldier. …

Who Benefits?: How The Aia Hurt Deceptively Non-Joined Inventors, Jordana R. Goodman

Hofstra Law Review

Congress enacted the America Invents Act ("AIA") to bolster economic development, sustain American innovation, and protect American jobs. This pro-business legislation, however, overlooked one actor critical to any successful innovation endeavor: the inventor. The AIA created access barriers, preventing inventors from efficiently and effectively seeking the entire remedy spectrum to which they are entitled. Paul Morinville and others have opined that the new first-to-file system put small inventors out of business, naming the AIA the single worst disaster in the history of the U.S. patent system. Beyond the filing and subject matter changes, the AIA created fundamental access to justice …

Assessing The Accessibility Of The Judicial System's Arrest-To-Parole Timeline For People Who Are D/Deaf And Hard-Of-Hearing, Evelyn G. Birnbaum

University Honors Theses

The judicial system is inaccessible to many groups of people for a variety of reasons, one of those populations being the d/Deaf and Hard of Hearing community (DHH). This community faces prejudice and discrimination in many institutions because of their identity, but within the justice system, this prejudice is compounded and controlled by poor legislation and either the lack of, or barriers to, effective communication. At every point in the chronological timeline from getting arrested to achieving parole, individuals who are d/Deaf or Hard of Hearing face discrimination and obstacles that their hearing counterparts do not. The discrimination they face …

Strangers In Their Own Land: A Survey Of The Status Of The Alaska Native People From The Russian Occupation Through The Turn Of The Twentieth Century, Jon W. Katchen, Nicholas Ostrovsky

Alaska Law Review

The federal government's scattershot treatment of Alaska Natives has long created confusion over the legal status and rights of Alaska Natives and Alaska Native entities. This confusion was center stage in the recent Supreme Court case, Yellen v. Confederated Tribes of the Chehalis Reservation, involving "Indian Tribe" entitlement to CARES Act relief funds. To better understand the reason uncertainty remains after more than 150 years since the purchase of Alaska from Russia, and more than sixty years after Alaska's statehood, we must look to the unique history of Alaska Natives. Starting in the mid-1700s, this Article surveys the laws …

Patent Law’S Externality Asymmetry, Peter Lee

Cardozo Law Review

Technologies such as social media, autonomous vehicles, and “big data” analytics generate enormous benefits for society, but they also create substantial harms. Many of these effects take the form of externalities—external benefits and harms that a decisionmaker (such as an inventor) imposes on third parties without charge or compensation. Considering negative externalities, for example, social media networks spread misinformation throughout the electorate, autonomous vehicles threaten the jobs of millions of professional drivers, and predictive policing based on big data can lead to unreasonable searches and seizures. Externalities can cause inefficient resource allocation, and the classic remedy is to “internalize” externalities …

Democratization’S Discontents: Rediscovering The Virtues Of The Non-Intervention Norm, Brad R. Roth

Chicago Journal of International Law

Post-Cold War triumphalism prompted efforts to transform international law into a tool of democratization, forsaking the international legal order’s former neutrality with respect to the foundations of political legitimacy within states. Yet after three decades, the sources of political legitimacy remain “incorrigibly plural,” and efforts to ascertain “the will of the people” remain beset by indeterminacy. It is time to rediscover international law’s role as a framework of accommodation among bearers of conflicting interests and values, with consequent limits on pro-democratic intervention in the internal affairs of states.

“You Keep Using That Word”: Why Privacy Doesn’T Mean What Lawyers Think, Joshua A.T. Fairfeld

Osgoode Hall Law Journal

This article explores how the need to define privacy has impeded our ability to protect it in law. The meaning of “privacy” is notoriously hard to pin down. This article contends that the problem is not with the word “privacy,” but with the act of trying to pin it down. The problem lies with the act of definition itself and is particularly acute when the words in question have deep-seated and longstanding common-language meanings, such as liberty, freedom, dignity, and certainly privacy. If one wishes to determine what words like these actually mean to people, definition is the wrong tool …

The Dialogical Language Of Law, Julen Etxabe

Osgoode Hall Law Journal

We live in a dialogical world. The normative environment around us is many-voiced. Legal activities like drafting, negotiating, interpreting, judging, invoking, and protesting the law take place in dialogical encounters, all of which presuppose entrenched forms of social dialogue. And yet, the dominant modes of thinking about the law remain monological. How can we bring our legal conceptions into alignment with the dialogical world in which we live?

The present article follows in the footsteps of a Bakhtinian dialogical theory of language that challenges the roots of contemporary positivist conceptions of law and language underpinning large swathes of legal academia …

World War I And The Armenian Genocide: Laying The Groundwork For Crimes Against Humanity, Julia Koch

Pace International Law Review

For all of its advancements in international law, including delivering justice to the war criminals of the Second World War, the International Military Tribunal in Nuremberg has long been tainted with accusations of victors’ justice and criticized for violating the principle of nullem crimen sine lege. Such is the case for crimes against humanity, a crime that did not exist in positive international law until the 1945-46 legal proceedings in Nuremberg. But the historiography of the First World War—an era where punishment for war crimes is generally viewed as a wholesale failure—provides an additional, indeed novel, basis for understanding …

Metasoftware: Building Blocks For Legal Technology, Houman Shadab

Seattle Journal of Technology, Environmental, & Innovation Law

This Article develops a novel concept in information technology called “metasoftware.” It then applies the concept of metasoftware to developing legal technology.

Metasoftware enables users to create the software of their choosing and stands in sharp contrast to traditional, functional. Functional software is the default type of software that is currently produced and includes word processing, email, social networking, enterprise resource management, online marketplaces, and video game software. Metasoftware, by contrast, is not functional. Metasoftware presents the user with a blank slate upon which to build functional software.

I argue that software is metasoftware to that extent that (1) it …

The Operation Successful, But The Patient Died. The Gradual Elimination Of The Central European Peasantry In The Light Of Globalization And Interwar Processes, Janos Fritz

Journal of Global Awareness

In terms of “depeasantisation," it was with the EU accession in 2004 when Central Europe – including Hungary – reached the stage where England had already arrived in the 18th and Germany in the 19th century. The gradual disappearance of the peasantry in the continent is doubtless in connection with the tendencies of globalization, a phenomenon that could not be stopped even by the authoritarian regimes of the interwar period – the time period examined by the dissertation. However, in a latent way, the question had already arisen at the time: is peasantry necessary at all? Nevertheless, as a consequence …

Star–Crossed Copyrights: The Story Of How Mexico Defied Civil Law Traditions By Infusing Common Law Ideologies Into Its Audiovisual And Motion Picture Copyright Regulations, Camila Chediak

University of Miami Inter-American Law Review

This Note was inspired by the out–of–the–ordinary, yet practical approach that Mexico chose to implement when it waived certain longstanding copyright moral rights principles in favor of the U.S. common law work–made–for–hire approach for its audiovisual and motion picture regulations. Since the inception of its copyright law, Mexico has strictly adhered to the civil law ideologies that are generally standard to civil law countries, particularly in its loyalty to the original creators of creative works through the moral rights doctrine. The United States, on the other hand, favors utilitarian ideologies that emphasize the societal importance of fostering innovation through the …

International Human Rights, Sara Blackwell, Heather Cohen, Mark Du, Uche U. Ewelukwa, Claudia Feldkamp, Samantha Rowe, Mali Torres

The Year in Review

No abstract provided.

The Iachr’S Comprehensive Response To The Covid-19 Pandemic And Its Intersectional Impacts On Human Rights, Antonia Urrejola Noguera, Soledad Garcia Muñoz

University of Miami International and Comparative Law Review

The region of the Americas is facing unprecedented humanitarian and social challenges as a consequence of the Covid-19 pandemic. As such, the regional institutions need to deliver rapid and effective responses to the region’s inhabitants. In this way, the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights (hereinafter IACHR or the Commission) has aimed to deliver a timely answer so that States, the Civil Society, and stakeholders can assure individuals that the treatment of the pandemic incorporates a human rights approach from the Inter-American System’s framework. The purpose of this work will be to give a brief takeaway on how the IACHR has …

Patent Performativity, Dan L. Burk

Journal of Intellectual Property Law

Gender bias is rife in the patent system; a large and growing body of empirical literature demonstrates the exclusion of women from the patent system at every level. Such pervasive marginalization cannot be explained by the paucity of women in STEM fields. Rather, more fundamental discriminatory mechanisms must be at work. In this paper I examine one aspect of such biases, arguing that patents operate as performatives, that is, as social assemblages that enact what they disclose, and that create their own social facts. To demonstrate patent performativity, I briefly trace the development of performative concepts, from Austinian declarations, through …

177th University Of Notre Dame Commencement Program, University Of Notre Dame

Commencement Programs

The Commencement Program includes

• Schedule of Events
• Graduate School Commencement Ceremony
• Mendoza College of Business
• School of Architecture
• Law School Diploma Ceremony [see pages 43–47]
• University Commencement Exercises
• College of Arts and Letters Diploma Ceremony
• College of Science
• College of Engineering
• Mendoza College of Business
• School of Architecture
• Valedictorian Candidates
• 2022 Emeriti Faculty
• Honor Societies
• Awards and Prizes [Law School pages 89–90]