Digital Commons Network^™

Designed Lands©Apes—Ar©Hitecture, Sculpture, Visual Art, Shape, Pi©Torial Work, Or . . . Nothing At All?, Richard H. Chused

Articles & Chapters

This article arises from the saga of the construction and eventual destruction of a landmark landscape architectural work by the well-known artist Mary Miss that was constructed adjacent to the Des Moines Art Center called Greenwood Pond: Double Site. The project’s demise is emblematic of the remarkably ambiguous copyright problems that surround such artistic creations. They do not neatly fit into any category of copyrightable works. Though they may contain sculptural works, their overall designs are rarely totally sculptural. While architects typically draw plans and “sculpt” a landscaped space, the results usually are not “buildings,’ as required by the definition …

Cecil Maxwell Deason Collection, University Of Alabama School Of Law

Manuscript Collections

This collection contains personal papers and photographs from Alabama state trial court judge and assistant solicitor Cecil Maxwell Deason from his times serving in the Pacific theatre of WWII, on the bench in Jefferson county, and in the solicitor's office.

Howell Thomas Heflin Collection, University Of Alabama School Of Law

Manuscript Collections

The Howell Thomas Heflin Collection documents Heflin's years as legal reformer and Alabama State Supreme Court Chief Justice, as well as his tenure as United States Senator through press clippings, scrapbooks, speech files, audiotapes, videotapes, press releases and statements, newsletters and various printed materials, photographs, negatives, campaign materials, and memorabilia.

Thomas W. Christopher Collection, University Of Alabama School Of Law

Manuscript Collections

This collection includes administrative items regarding UA's School of Law and various personal items and notes from Dean Thomas W. Christopher.

Mirza Anwer Beg Collection, University Of Alabama School Of Law

Manuscript Collections

This collection consists of a large number of books, files, photographs, and notebooks on topics ranging from Islam and Islamic/Arabic themes to poetry and art as well as topics on law, diplomacy, history, and philosophy.

Risky Business, Atinuke O. Adediran

Faculty Scholarship

Corporate law scholarship and doctrine have largely operated on the assumption that corporate shareholders are interested in financial goals, while corporate stakeholders—such as employees, consumers, and local communities—are interested in social and environmental goals, like diversity and inclusion and climate change. Because of this assumption, the law largely requires a corporation to disclose information it considers to be “financially material” to shareholders—that is significant enough to impact the company’s financial position—including factors it considers to be financially risky.

Financial materiality is so embedded in corporate law doctrine that even if an issue is about social and environmental concerns, financial materiality …

Pragmatic Conceptualism, Public Nuisance, And The American Opioid Litigation, Benjamin C. Zipursky

Faculty Scholarship

Public nuisance as a part of American tort law has been as high profile in the first decades of this century as products liability law was in the last several decades of the 20th century.  The American opioid litigation over the past decades is a spectacular example, filling headlines and generating billions of dollars of settlements.  There is a plausible argument, however, that the doctrinal core of the opioid litigation is meritless because there simply is no “interference with public right” as required by public nuisance law.  The first aim of the article is to articulate and assess that argument. …

Court Review: Journal Of The American Judges Association, Vol. 62, No. 1, Eve M. Brank, David J. Dreyer, Reba Ann Page, Ana Cienfuegos-Silvera

Court Review: Journal of the American Judges Association

Contents

Creating “Buy-in” for Juvenile Restorative Justice Programs: Lessons from Nebraska’s Community Mediation Centers, Kristen M. Blankley, Lisa M. PytlikZillig, and Ashley M. Votruba

Consensus and Conflict Over Context: Select Criminal Law and Procedure Cases from the Supreme Court’s 2024-25 Term, Eve Brensike Primus and Elena Schultz

In the Shadow of Trauma: Opportunities and Obstacles of Restorative Justice with Young People Who Offend, William R. Wood

Restorative Transitional Justice: The Judicial Role in Colombia’s Peace Tribunal, Gabriel Rojas-Andrade

Editor’s Note: Restorative Justoce: Repairing Harm, Rebuilding Community, Eve Brank

Thoughts from Canada: Restorative Justice Through Prohibition on Arrest, Wayne K. Gorman …

Chat M.D., Nathan Cortez

Faculty Journal Articles and Book Chapters

Large language models (LLMs) such as Claude and ChatGPT are the most powerful artificial intelligence (AI) systems ever created, and they are being used to diagnose and treat patients. But LLMs have been shown to be unreliable, unpredictable, and unsafe on occasion. New AI guidelines recommend hundreds of standards, such as ‘transparency’, ‘trustworthiness’, and ‘safety’. But there is deep uncertainty whether these are sufficient. The literature focuses mostly on which standards best suit AI models, not on how to transmute standards into law. This article does that by considering AI guidelines as a starting point, then evaluating whether existing frameworks …

Meat Is Dead, Melissa D. Mortazavi

Faculty Articles

The legal and cultural landscape surrounding meat in the United States is evolving as plant-based alternatives, GMO farm animals, and cell-cultivated meat move from test tube to table. While global demand for meat rises amid environmental, ethical, and resource challenges, cell-cultivated meat emerges as a scientifically viable alternative, offering identical nutritional value without the drawbacks of conventional livestock production. Despite federal regulatory approval from USDA and FDA, multiple states have enacted unusually restrictive laws—including bans— targeting cell-cultivated meat. These are motivated largely by economic protectionism, but also deeper cultural anxieties tied to tradition and identity. This Article argues that food …

Excluded At The Root: Health Insurance Discrimination Against Hair Loss Conditions, Stacey A. Tovino, Tracy Hresko Pearl

Faculty Articles

No abstract provided.

The Unconstitutional Attempt To Criminalize Naming Ice Agents, Noah C. Chauvin

Faculty Articles

Some members of Congress propose to make it a crime to publish the name of a federal official with the intent of obstructing that official’s law or immigration enforcement duties. This Essay considers whether the lawmakers’ bill, the Protecting Law Enforcement from Doxxing Act, is consistent with the First Amendment. It is not.

Generative Ai And The Purpose Of Legal Scholarship, Michael L. Smith

Faculty Articles

What does generative artificial intelligence mean for the future of legal scholarship? The topic has been the talk of the town around academic watercoolers. Some legal scholars have tried their hand at producing legal scholarship using generative Al. The accompanying commentary is varied, but advocates for the technology suggest that generative Al may become a common tool for legal scholars, leaving those who refuse to adapt at a severe disadvantage.

In this article, I contemplate a world in which legal scholars routinely use generative Al to produce academic writing. I argue that an instrumental view of legal scholarship's value-a view …

Cultivating Free Speech Culture, Joseph A. Tomain

Articles by Maurer Faculty

Defending dissent to safeguard speech and political opposition is a challenging and necessary task for a self-governing democracy. Moreover, it is a collective task. Succeeding in this endeavor sometimes requires defending speech with which one disagrees, especially in a nation as pluralistic as the United States. Although imperfect and inconsistent, there are numerous examples where strange bedfellows join together to achieve this goal. While First Amendment law helps us reach the goal, law alone is not enough. We also need a cultural commitment to defending dissent. This Essay argues that cultivating a culture that values robust free speech protection is …

Health Truth To Power: Professional Collaboration To Bolster Trust Against Misinformation, William M. Sage, Keegan D. Warren

Faculty Scholarship

This Article is about health, leaving aside more general challenges to shared civic information today. The Article begins by surveying the principal challenges for health information in post-pandemic, arguably post-truth America, and then describes briefly the sources and limits of medical professional authority. Noting the double-edged sword of free speech guarantees under the U.S. Constitution, the Article continues by commenting on speaking truth to government, to industry, and to the crowd. Next, the Article considers the physicians’ role in speaking truth to power from the perspective of standard medical professional ethics and identity, comparing it to that of lawyers. Finally, …

Multidimensional Analysis Of Social Discourse On Twitter (X) Around Venezuelan Migration In Columbia, Joseph Martínez, Melissa Miller-Felton, Jose J. Padilla, Erika Frydenlund, Katherine Palacio

VMASC Publications

Colombia has become the principal host of Venezuelan migrants in Latin America, prompting a complex mix of solidarity, anxiety, and discrimination. This study offers a multidimensional analysis of Twitter (now X) discourse on Venezuelan migration in Colombia between 2014 and 2022, using natural language processing, geolocation inference, sentiment analysis, and manual annotation of derogatory terms. Drawing from 7.4 million posts, we examine how online discourse evolves across time, space, and language. While negative sentiment is pronounced in original tweets during periods of political and social unrest, our findings highlight that users tend to amplify neutral and positive messages—over 67% of …

Cybersecurity Mission Creep, Mailyn Fidler

Law Faculty Scholarship

Cybersecurity is experiencing mission creep. Policymakers are casting more and more problems as issues of cybersecurity. So refrained, wildly different policy issues, from misinformation, to child social media safety laws, to antitrust regulations, to alleged journalist misconduct, to anti-sex trafficking statutes become what this Article calls "cybersecuritized." Before this refraining, these issues present as important but not existential. But once cybersecuritization positions the issues as threats intensified by their technological nature, they gain access to the politics and law of urgency and exceptionalism and invite troubling governance responses. Positioned as security threats, cybersecuritized issues become endowed with the apparent normative …

Uncovering The Keystone: Case Study Of The Ubs Art Collection Gift, Loan And Contemporary Voices Exhibition At Moma In 2005 - Twenty Years Later, Maria Glikman Yamarakov

MA Theses

This research aims to reconstruct foundational history of the Case, based on the publicly available sources. Using the established factual background to test the significance of each of the three major assumptions, referred traditionally as motivation behind the studied Case undertaking. Through critical analysis this Thesis targets to uncover the keystone of this Case and use it as the background to introduce the governance Duty of Stewardship concept in the corporate collection context. Assuming the introduced concept sustains initial analysis, assess its potential value for further strategic development of the corporate collections of the contemporary art.

Brokering Safety, Chinmayi Sharma, Thomas E. Kadri, Sam Adler

Faculty Scholarship

For victims of abuse, safety means hiding. Not just hiding themselves, but also their contact details, their address, their workplace, their roommates, and any other information that could enable their abuser to target them. Yet today, no number of name changes and relocations can prevent data brokers from sharing a victim’s personal information online. Thanks to brokers, abusers can find what they need with a single search, a few clicks, and a few dollars. For many victims, then, the best hope for safety lies in obscurity—that is, making themselves and their information harder to find.

This Article exposes privacy law’s …

Transparency As A Regulatory Duty, Olivier Sylvain

Faculty Scholarship

This symposium piece offers a simple survey of transparency measures addressed to deepfakes and other related consumer harms, as well as the constitutional problems they present.

Can We Talk—Really Talk—About Critical Race Theory? What A Game For All Ages Can Teach Us, Dan Subotnik

Touro Law Review

This essay may shock many readers. What it tries to do is look more closely than usual at the underpinnings of American racial discourse in the hope of leaving its readers, by its end, more willing than before to speak openly and listen carefully to people who disagree with them on the fraught subject of race. Wouldn’t many of us academics like to engage in a more open-minded sort of interracial conversation with a greater variety of our peers than we usually do? And yet it never seems to happen. Do any of us, black or white, feel we can …

Required Learning, Voluntary Service: A Critical Look At Mandatory Cle And Pro Bono Options, Rima Sirota

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

This chapter critically examines the intersection of mandatory continuing legal education (MCLE) and pro bono service in the United States, focusing on the growing practice of awarding MCLE credits for pro bono work. It argues that MCLE, widely justified as promoting lawyer competence, rests on a striking lack of empirical support and is structured in ways that undermine effective professional learning. A pro bono option for earning MCLE credit, introduced as an incentive to expand access to justice, has similarly failed to demonstrate measurable impacts on pro bono participation. Nonetheless, the pro bono option holds untapped potential because, if properly …

Sprawozdanie Z Międzynarodowej Konferencji Naukowej Pt. „13th International Phd Students’ Conference On Competition Law: Antitrust Institutional Design”, Białystok, 10 Października 2025 Roku, Paulina Korycińska-Rządca, Anna Piszcz

internetowy Kwartalnik Antymonopolowy i Regulacyjny (internet Quarterly on Antitrust and Regulation)

Międzynarodowa Konferencja  pt. 13th International PhD Students’ Conference on Competition Law: Antitrust Institutional Design, Białystok, 10 października 2025 r.

The Law And Economics Of Resilience, Doni Bloomfield, Jeff Gordon

Faculty Scholarship

The field of law and economics has long studied externalities, the costs and benefits actors create and yet fail to internalize. But scholars have largely overlooked a set of externalities that lead firms across the economy to systematically underinvest in resilience, with macroeconomically harmful consequences. In this Article, we address this gap with a theory of the law and economics of resilience, by which we mean the ability of markets to reliably and optimally meet demand for goods and services without extreme price fluctuations. 

We argue that corporate resilience is determined by a conflict between two basic forces: the resilience …

Dan Subotnik Kept It Real, John Mcwhorter

Touro Law Review

No abstract provided.

If I Only Had The Words (To Tell You): Billy Joel Lyrics In Legal And Medical Scholarship, Seuli Bose Brill, Christian H. Brill

Touro Law Review

Law and medicine are often considered to be among the least accessible professions, partly because of the heavy use of non colloquial jargon. This article examines more than 150 instances in which Billy Joel’s lyrics have been used to improve the accessibility of legal and medical scholarship. Legal and medical professionals have used the words of the “Piano Man” to discuss a variety of topics—everything from civil procedure to property rights and the COVID-19 pandemic to colorectal surgery. Nontraditional communications techniques of this type do not just contribute to the body of legal and medical scholarship; they also help professionals …

Durbin’S Ripple: How Fee Caps Reshaped Banking And Boosted Fintechs: Exploring The Unintended Consumer Impacts And Regulatory Gaps In The Wake Of The Durbin Amendment, Rebecca M. Reeve

Touro Law Review

This Article explores the implications of the Durbin Amendment on consumer protection, financial innovation, and market competition. Initially intended to cap interchange fees and foster cost savings for merchants and consumers, the Amendment’s effects have diverged from its legislative intent. Financial institutions offset lost revenue by increasing other consumer fees, unintentionally spurring a financial technology (fintech) boom as consumers sought low-cost alternatives. This Article examines the administrative rulemaking challenges the Federal Reserve faced in implementing the Amendment, the rise of fintech solutions as a response to shifting bank priorities, and the potential regulatory gaps affecting consumer protection in a rapidly …

The American Dream And The Politics Of Promise: Presidential Rhetoric Against Reality On Inequality, Education, And Assistance Since 2000, Abigail Demonte

Touro Law Review

No abstract provided.

High Stakes And Random Rewards: A Critical Look At Loot Boxes And Illegal Gambling, Brian T. Wersan

Touro Law Review

Since their inception in the mid-2000s, loot boxes have been legal and virtually unregulated in the United States. Ever-growing mountains of evidence demonstrate the harms of loot boxes, but their structure has not yet been found to be in violation of any current U.S. gambling law, leading to a complete lack of recovery for victims. Certainly, if people experience harm, a legal avenue providing justice must exist. While other avenues are referenced, this Note ultimately argues that loot boxes can be interpreted by courts to satisfy the elements of, and thus, violate multiple state gambling laws, revealing a path to …

The Proportionality Trap: Why Death Tolls In War Need Not Add Up Equally, Thane Rosenbaum

Touro Law Review

Imagine a war without battlefields. There are no uniforms. Civilians and combatants are indistinguishable. Homes, schools, hospitals, and religious buildings are used as command and communication centers, and for the warehousing of weapons. Apartment rooftops are launching pads; the civilians who live inside . . . human shields. There are over 300 miles of reinforced tunnels, all outfitted with weapons and passageways for terrorists to take hostages and travel freely. Beyond Proportionality examines Israel’s battles against Hamas and Hezbollah under the laws of war and concludes that its war time conduct was based on military necessity and fought justly. The …