Digital Commons Network^™

Teaching Cross-Cultural Communication In Law School: Lessons From Medicine, Social Work, And Business, Mireille Butler, Jaclyn Celebrezze

Articles

Legal clients in the United States are increasingly multilingual and multicultural. More than 71 million people living in the United States communicate in a language other than English. Consequently, the lawyer’s duty of shared understanding is taking on new meaning. With the advent of ABA Ethics Opinion 500, cross-cultural communication skills are a lawyer’s ethical duty and a law school’s mandate. Additionally, ABA Standard 303(c) and the potential of increased experiential learning credit requirements make clear that immediate curricular changes are needed. To prepare for the modern practice of law, tomorrow’s lawyers need to develop cross-cultural skills while in law …

Forget Me Not? Machine Unlearning’S Implications For Privacy Law, Jevan Hutson, Cedric Whitney, Jay T. Conrad

Articles

Generative AI systems are increasingly relied on and are already actively reshaping how we think about privacy and data protection law. Models ingest and process vast amounts of personal and sensitive data, challenging assurances of compliance with legal frameworks like the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) and the California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA) with increasing intensity. Machine unlearning is an emerging tool in practitioners’ attempts to address these challenges: the act of selectively removing or suppressing specific data, such as personal data that a data subject requests be deleted, from AI models as means of complying with legal obligations or …

A Theory Of Major Questions, Nicholas Almendares

Cardozo Law Review

The major questions doctrine has been fiercely criticized as an example of the Supreme Court’s “imperial” turn where it concentrates ever more power in its own hands. The doctrine is sweeping, vague, and lacks a clear justification. Not only does the Court get to decide when the doctrine applies and when the heightened standard is satisfied, but it has also not offered good reasons behind this rule. A well-defined theory would give the doctrine structure, clarity, and consistency. While majority opinions have been conspicuously quiet on the theory behind the major questions doctrine, concurrences, namely by Justice Gorsuch, have argued …

In Its Right Mind - Governance Of Social Superintelligence, David Filippi, Bill Tomlinson, Andrew W. Torrance

FIU Law Review

This Comment argues that a broad presumption of public access to court  documents is essential to preserving the legitimacy and constitutional values  of the American legal system. Although the principle of public access is  rooted in common law and constitutional tradition, individual states differ in  how they approach transparency in the context of court documents. These  jurisdictional inconsistencies continue to gain significance, as the digital age  has completely transformed the way people consume information. The  increasing digitization of court records has heightened the need for consistent  and constitutionally grounded standards that preserve transparency while  adequately protecting legitimate privacy interests. Florida’s …

Interpreting Anti-Boycott Laws In The Shadow Of The First Amendment, Joseph A. Tomain

Articles by Maurer Faculty

Thirty-eight states have enacted “anti-BDS” laws. These laws require people or entities doing business with the state to certify that they do not participate in the Boycott Divestment Sanction movement against Israel. Typically, these laws define boycott as a “refusal to deal, terminating business, or other actions” that limit commercial relations with Israel or Israeli entities. It is highly contested in the courts and commentary whether these anti-boycott laws violate the First Amendment. Assuming arguendo that the “refusal to deal” and “terminating business” clauses do not implicate the First Amendment, that leaves the residual clause. At least one court and …

A Two-Pronged Approach To Addressing Unmet Legal Needs On The Pine Ridge Indian Reservation, Elaine Yellow Horse, Jillian Yellow Horse

South Dakota Law Review

This Article, which marries theory and praxis, provides a focused literature review and concrete solutions for immediate implementation. It begins by exploring the existing scholarship pertaining to unmet legal needs and (in)access to justice in Indian country. It considers the overlapping yet distinct roles of licensed attorneys and lay advocates, prosecutors, and judges and how tribes have endeavored to draw the lines around these roles. After reviewing this background, the Article pivots and contributes a more nuanced perspective that concentrates on the legal system on the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation in particular. Rather than endorsing a single apparent answer to …

Innovative Sovereignty: California Tribes' Use Of The Nonprofit Corporation, Stephen F. Diamond, Jennifer W. Kuan

South Dakota Law Review

Native American tribes have long sought, but not always received, federal recognition as sovereign Indian Nations. Recognition confers substantial financial and legal benefits including access to federally funded health services, education and housing. Sovereign status allows tribes to pursue business activity. Tribal sovereignty, however, has significant limitations. The recognition process is costly, time-consuming, highly politicized, and often uncertain. Federal law enforcement and health services that should follow recognition are chronically underfunded. We examine the efforts of Indian tribes in California’s Monterey County to use the nonprofit corporation form to establish clear property rights to land. We interview key participants and …

The Ambitions Of History And Tradition In And Beyond The Second Amendment, Joseph Blocher, Reva B. Siegel

Faculty Scholarship

This Article examines the ambitions of history-and-tradition review in and beyond the Second Amendment. In Bruen and Rahimi, the Roberts Court rejected means-end review in favor of a historical-analogical approach, claiming to constrain the exercise of judicial discretion and thus to promote the democratic decisions of the founders. But our examination of these cases shows that the Court has created new opportunities for judges to advance their values in considerably less transparent ways. We identify contexts in which Second Amendment doctrine enables judicial discretion, key among them that it allows judges to reason about gun rights and regulation at disparate …

Standard Textualism, James A. Macleod

Articles

For as long as legal scholars have been writing about the rules-versus-standards distinction, textualism has been understood to produce characteristically rule-like law. This Article argues for the opposite view. Far from generating the “law of rules” that Scalia famously envisioned, the rule of modern textualism produces a law of standards—much more so than anybody, proponent of textualism or critic, appears to have recognized.

Two aspects of today’s textualism produce this result. The first is its emphasis on ordinary language and communication. Modern textualism typically produces standards because ordinary language and communication are typically standard-like. The second is modern textualism’s drive …

The Painted Ones’ Fine Line: Batok As A Protectable Form Of Traditional Knowledge Under Trade Secret Jurisprudence, Kathleen M. Dinoso

American University Law Review

For centuries, the ancestral tattooing practice of batok has served not as mere ornamentation but as a visual archive of Indigenous Filipinos’ history and identity. In 2021, a digital creator invited the public to learn batok online for merely fifteen dollars. Soon after, many discovered that the renown instructor, Apo Whang-Od, may not have agreed to take part. The resulting discourse exposed a broader issue: Indigenous customs and creations become increasingly vulnerable to misappropriation and improper commodification as they enter global markets and multimedia platforms. Though this event occurred abroad, it highlights how U.S. law is poorly designed to protect …

Silenced By Fear: Undocumented Immigrant Victims Of Sexual Assault, Adriana Isabel Herrera

FIU Law Review

Imagine being sexually assaulted and then having to choose between justice or deportation. In today’s climate of heightened immigration enforcement, many undocumented immigrant victims of sexual assault understandably remain silent. After all, who would risk everything just to report a crime that might get them deported? The fear of being separated from their families, ripped from the lives they have built, and sent back to dangerous conditions in their home countries prevents these victims from coming forward and seeking justice. Additionally, the current protections available to them are flawed and insufficient—primarily due to the U visa cap and prolonged processing …

Race, Reparative Justice, And Climate Change-Related Migration, Monica Visalam Iyer

FIU Law Review

The question of how to appropriately respond to migration linked to climate change is increasingly being debated in academia, in government and policy circles, and, crucially, in international legal and climate policy forums. These debates often center on data and on understanding the true numbers of people who might migrate in the context of climate change, and how much of this migration can accurately be linked to climate change, or on the security and logistical concerns associated with responding to this “challenge,” or on the appropriate legal box into which people migrating in this context can be shoved. Too often, …

The Protection Of Geographical Indications Under Comparative Lens: Whether Law Artificially Creates Scarcity Of Goods, Domenico Di Micco

FIU Law Review

The economic principles of supply and demand dictate that market prices are contingent on the conditions under which supply and demand converge. Within this theoretical framework, the concepts of scarcity and abundance assume paramount significance. When goods are scarce, prices tend to escalate, while in cases of abundant supply, prices tend to decline. But what factors determine scarcity and abundance? In many cases, scarcity is inherent to the nature of the commodity (for example, diamonds are rarer than common stones). In other cases, such as geographical indications, scarcity is constructed through the legal denomination associated with the commodity, thereby creating …

The Italian Rice Production: Between Tradition And Globalization, Bianca Gardella Tedeschi

FIU Law Review

The Article examines the Italian rice sector as a case study in how law mediates the tensions between territorial agricultural traditions and the pressures of globalization. Focusing on the rice-producing districts of Piedmont and Lombardy, the Article argues that the resilience of Italian rice production cannot be explained solely by agronomic or economic factors. Rather, it depends on a dense legal and institutional framework that structures water governance, quality control, market organization, and contractual relations across the supply chain.

The Article develops three principal claims. First, it shows that the competitiveness of Italian rice production rests on an integrated model …

International Law, The Courts, And The Political Branches Of Singapore: Painting A Complete Picture, Benjamin Joshua Ong

Research Collection Yong Pung How School Of Law

In line with Singapore's vision of the separation of powers, the courts' duty is primarily to give effect to domestic law; the political branches take the lead in engaging with international law. A study of Singapore's interface with international law would therefore be incomplete were it to consider only the courts' role and not the political branches' model of international law as primarily a guarantor of Singapore's sovereignty and standing as a participant on the international stage. The political branches have been circumspect in engaging with international law in other areas, such as human rights, preferring a specifically Singaporean vision …

Race And Racism In Canada’S Immigration Detention System, Efrat Arbel, Prasanna Balasundaram, Hanna Gros, Nana Yanful

All Faculty Publications

Race and Racism in Canada's Immigration Detention System is the first comprehensive, independent study to examine race and racism in Canada's immigration detention system. Grounded in rigorous legal analysis and qualitative research, the study draws on interviews with 50 participants, including people with lived experience of immigration detention, as well as lawyers, paralegals, and service providers who work in immigration detention. The research was guided by an advisory board of people with lived-experience in immigration detention and co-led by a collaborative research team.

Model Law? Template Legal Culture And The Global Production Of Environmental Law, Natasha Affolder

All Faculty Publications

Lawyers build from templates. Accounts of how law is made rarely mention them. New legislation tends to present itself as original. It is almost never made from scratch. This article makes the hidden process visible. It does so through a study of the near-global spread of environmental impact assessment (EIA) legislation since 1969, using computer-assisted textual similarity analysis to trace what I expected to be identifiable model laws and clear lines of legal inheritance. The search yielded instead a transnational repertoire of legal fragments, repeatedly recombined into new legislative forms across different legal traditions, languages and decades. EIA's legislative spread …

Gendered Words And Patent Grant Rates: A Textual Analysis, Deborah R. Gerhardt, Miriam Marcowitz-Bitton, W. Michael Schuster, Avshalom Elmalech, Omri Suissa, Moshe Mash

Faculty Publications

Text is a vehicle to convey information that reflects the writer’s linguistic style and communication patterns. By studying these attributes, we can discover latent insights about the author and their underlying message. This article uses such an approach to better understand patent applications and their inventors.

While prior research focuses on patent metadata (i.e., filing year or gendered inventor names), we employ machine learning and natural language processing to extract hidden information from the words in patent applications. Through these methods, we find that inventor gender can often be identified from textual attributes—even without knowing the inventor’s name. This ability …

The Present Interregnum: The Ultra-Right Revolution, María Pía Lara

Emancipations: A Journal of Critical Social Analysis

This paper deals with recent political consequences of presentism as conceptualized by the historian Francois Hartog. It clarifies how our experiences of time and history have enlarged the present and the past and have almost disappeared the future (except for catastrophic views). The consequences of these changes in the experiences reflect profound changes in expectations about the future, and how this regime of historicity allows people to become disoriented. They were moved into the margins of precarity. As a result, many of their views on politics find resonance redesigned by the distorted narratives of ultra-right leaders who blame those who …

Translating The “Preposition + Which” Construction In English Legal Texts Into Indonesian, Doni Jaya

Paradigma: Jurnal Kajian Budaya

Legal text translation is challenging because of its emphasis on semantic and syntactic faithfulness, while ST structures do not always have correspondent TL equivalents. One of such structures is the English “preposition + which” (PW) construction. This construction can be difficult to translate into Indonesian because the language does not always have ready-to-use connectors to produce a structurally faithful translation, often forcing translators to take the easy way of using ungrammatical and unnatural connectors which becomes the hallmark of the Indonesian legalese style. This research seeks to examine various ways to translate PW constructions in a more grammatical and …

Gamesmanship In Civil Litigation, Edith Beerdsen

Georgia Law Review

In civil litigation, strategy is everywhere. Some of it is explicitly envisioned by rules of procedure, but other forms of strategy rely more on clever exploitation of gaps in the rules, sometimes through trickery, surprise, or psychological mind games. The role strategy plays in civil litigation is underexamined, which raises two concerns: first, this lack of attention entrenches strategy by default as a procedural value in competition with accuracy, efficiency, and other procedural values. Second, it amplifies the disadvantages experienced by unrepresented litigants. This Article builds on earlier work to examine how courts shape the space that litigants have for …

Lahirnya Tensi Metafisik Di Urat-Leher Projek-Projek Interpretasi Konstruktif, Herman Bakir, Mukhtasar Syamsuddin

Jurnal Hukum & Pembangunan

This project is a legal hermeneutics. The aim is to elaborate the paradigm of the law as integrity theory, Ronald Dworkin’s work, which has received recognition as one of the most influential philosophical systems in the world of law throughout the last century. The issues discussed are divided into three subjects: (1) the interpretation role in legitimizing “law” as a corpus that has a “soul”; (2) a concept of interpretation from the womb of the law as integrity theory; (3) the dual capacity of “constructive interpretation” in [a] “returning” law to its roots; and [b] housing “morals” within the body …

Journal Of Roleplaying Studies And Steam (Jrpssteam) Vol. 4 [2025], Número 2 (Issue 2), Cristo Leon, Romano Ponce-Díaz Phd, Ivan Avila Gonzalez Phd, James Lipuma Dr., Bruce G. Bukiet, Ricardo Victoria-Uribe, Nazario Robles-Bastida, Chris Birmingham, Ximena Diaz Santillan, Edgar Francisco Vázquez Martínez He, Jorge Prieto Terrones, Juan Carlos C. González Vidal S, Edgar Meritano, Laura Magela Garcés Ramírez

Journal of Roleplaying Studies and STEAM

En una sesión de juego por medio del registro lingüístico se organiza la escena, se orienta la manera de nombrar las tareas, se distribuyen los roles actanciales, se establecen la expectativas; por lo tanto, se establece una puesta en escena. De tal forma, las prácticas lúdicas y ficcionales se configuran a partir de nuestra mirada del mundo e irremediablemente también reconfiguran esa misma mirada. El ser y el estar en un espacio es la especificidad mediática fundamental de los juegos de rol; dicho de otra manera, en los sistemas de juego de rol dentro de sus universos narrativos, en su …

“Fleeing The Climate: The Need For Protection Of Climate Refugees In The Light Of International Law”, Carina Dietmayer

Pace International Law Review

Climate change, which is already making itself felt, poses challenges for international law and the international community. Climate change and its consequences will lead to (involuntary) human mobility and affect many people. This forced migration is not yet specifically addressed by international law. This article addresses climate-induced migration and the protection of climate refugees through international refugee and migration law, international human rights law, international environmental law, climate change law and international disaster law. It analyzes how and, above all, why climate refugees are protected. The core thesis of the article is the justification of a need for protection of …

The Dynamics Of The Louisiana Civil Codes, Olivier Moréteau

Journal of Civil Law Studies

This article presents a historical survey of the codification of Louisiana civil law from a dynamic perspective, aiming to identify why a digest was preferred over a code, only to be replaced by a code intended to be a better digest. Although attempts to codify Louisiana civil law reconnected it with French sources and methodology after the Spanish period and the United States' purchase, the local legal community resisted the force of codification. The abrogation of the ancient laws, a multilingual ius commune with which judges and lawyers were familiar, generated anxiety in a conservative and educated community. Additionally, a …

The Myths And Legal Implications Of Cancel Culture, Yekun Zhou

Loyola of Los Angeles Entertainment Law Review

No abstract provided.

Religious Employment And The Tensions Between Liberty And Equality, R. Shawn Gunnarson, James C. Phillips, Christopher A. Bates

BYU Law Review

Located in Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 is an exemption for religious employers that is often misunderstood. Often courts and commentators mischaracterize it as a narrow privilege for religious employers to hire people of the same religion. But the statute’s text says otherwise. This article resolves interpretive debates about the meaning and application of the religious employer exemption through a close textualist reading that discovers a new understanding of the structure of Title VII. Our approach applies the tools of textualism, the prevailing theory of statutory interpretation. Paying attention to the text and structure of Title …

Ghosts At The Gate: A Call For Vigilance Against Ai-Generated Case Hallucinations, Christina Frohock

Articles

No abstract provided.

Standing Before The Icj: A Novel Framework For Erga Omnes Partes, Elson Law

Loyola of Los Angeles International and Comparative Law Review

This paper explores the concept of legal standing before the International Court of Justice (“ICJ” or “the Court”) in contentious cases and the legal theories that states may invoke to establish their entitlement to submit claims relating to specific subject matters. The concept of standing in international law requires a party to demonstrate a sufficient legal interest in the subject matter of their case. Three primary theories potentially provide such an interest for states parties to multilateral treaties: legal injury from the respondent state’s violation of an obligation owed to the applicant state, obligations erga omnes partes created by the …

Indigenous Law Is Real Law: Ending Erasure Through Legal Reform And Recognition, Callie Mobley

University of Cincinnati Law Review

No abstract provided.