Digital Commons Network^™

Compelling Code, Nicole Ligon

SMU Law Review

Does the First Amendment protect computer code from being compelled by the government? As society becomes more reliant on coded devices— like pacemakers, insulin pumps, and even some baby bassinets—courts will need to grapple with this question. In considering compulsions related to code, this Article concludes that intermediate scrutiny is almost always the appropriate standard of review. Rather than expressing a particular viewpoint, code generally constitutes a functional and neutral script. Given that a machine’s interpretation of code generally results in an objective action, not a subjective belief, the government need only show in most instances that the compulsion furthers …

Manipulation And The First Amendment, Helen Norton

Publications

No abstract provided.

Trademark Law And Consumer Constraints, Laura A. Heymann

Faculty Publications

Trademark law’s focus is on the consumer. Both the trademark literature and the marketing literature, however, tend to assume a consumer with few constraints on economic or cognitive processing resources. For example, scholars have argued that some confusion in the marketplace is not only inevitable but is also an overall positive in that encountering confusion trains consumers to be more resourceful and to learn how to interpret marketing communications more carefully. But not all consumers have the same level of cognitive and economic resources. Disadvantaged consumers—such as those not literate in the English language, those with lower socioeconomic status, and …

The Path To Employee Status For College Athletes Post-Alston, Tyler J. Murry

Vanderbilt Journal of Entertainment & Technology Law

College athletics are in a state of flux following the Supreme Court’s decision in NCAA v. Alston. While student athletes can now earn money from their name image and likeness (NIL) through endorsement deals, the NCAA and its member schools can still exploit college athletes to earn billions of dollars. To remedy this injustice, courts should classify student athletes as employees under the Federal Labor Standards Act (FLSA) to compensate these students for their work. Whether student athletes should be eligible for minimum wage and employment benefits has been a hot-button topic in the legal community for many years. Fortunately, …

Unsexing Breastfeeding, Naomi Schoenbaum

GW Law Faculty Publications & Other Works

For half a century, constitutional sex equality doctrine has been combating harmful sex stereotypes by invalidating laws that treat women as caregivers and men as breadwinners. Yet decades after the constitutional sex equality revolution unsexed parenting roles, one area of parenting has escaped this doctrine’s exacting gaze: breastfeeding. Beginning in the 1990s in the wake of public health efforts to promote breastfeeding, a raft of laws were enacted, from insurance coverage mandates under the Affordable Care Act to workplace accommodations under the Fair Labor Standards Act, that provide substantial breastfeeding protections and benefits, but only to women. Although the sexed …

Still Awaiting Justice: An Analysis On The Impact Of Anti-Immigrant Sentiment On The Reproductive Autonomy Of Migrant Women, Annays Esperanza Yacaman

Senior Independent Study Theses

My research aims to explain the impact of anti-immigrant sentiment on the reproductive autonomy of migrant women. Legislators typically act as their constituents feel on a certain issue, so I aimed to explore how legislators responded with legislation when their constituents held higher levels of anti-immigrant sentiment, hypothesizing that this would lead to more legislation limiting the reproductive autonomy of migrant women. I explore topics of eugenics and how anti-immigrant sentiment has led to modern day eugenics.

My hypothesis did not manifest itself in the expected way, but the results do provide evidence for a causal link between legislation meant …

Automated Legal Guidance At Federal Agencies, Joshua D. Blank, Leigh Z. Osofsky

Faculty Publications

When individuals have questions about Federal benefits, services, and legal rules, they are increasingly seeking help from government chatbots, virtual assistants, and other automated tools. Current forms of automated legal guidance platforms include the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services’s “Emma,” the U.S. Department of Education’s “Aidan,” and the Internal Revenue Service’s “Interactive Tax Assistant.” Most scholars who have studied artificial intelligence and Federal government agencies have not focused on the government’s use of technology to offer guidance to the public. The absence of scholarly attention to automation as a means of communicating government guidance is an important gap in the …

Conflicting Fundamental Rights Under The Indian Constitution: Analyzing The Supreme Court’S Doctrinal Gap, Nikhil Pratap

LL.M. Essays & Theses

The Constitution of India recognizes a wide variety of fundamental rights: civil and political, socio-economic, and group rights. A conflict between these rights is a common occurrence. The Supreme Court of India’s method of resolving conflicts has been ad-hoc, nebulous, and vague. The Court rarely locates the conflict at a granular level and, on the rare occasion that it does, the decision lacks comprehensive reasoning. This paper attempts to demonstrate the doctrinal, structural, and reasoning gap in the Court’s jurisprudence. The paper does so by analyzing a subset of cases where the Court has adjudicated on conflicts between the right …

Choosing Death, Shaping Death: Assumptions About Disabilities, Race, And Death, Janet L. Dolgin

Hofstra Law Faculty Scholarship

This article considers two legal cases and the stories that developed around them. Both the cases and their stories involved issues of significance to the larger society - death and bias. Each concern has occasioned confusion and debate in its own right. When these issues are combined, confusion and debate are intensified. This Article examines the complicated interplay between bias and decisions about death and dying in the U.S. health care system. Further, it reviews intersecting claims about the importance, respectively, of autonomy and community in resolving disputes about the topics of death and dying.

Report Of The International Commission Of Human Rights Experts On Ethiopia, Kaari Betty Murungi, Steven Ratner, Radhika Comaraswamy

Other Publications

In the present report, submitted pursuant to Human Rights Council resolution S-33/1, the international Commission of Human Rights Experts on Ethiopia presents its initial findings. The Commission concludes that there are reasonable grounds to believe that violations such as extrajudicial killings, rape, sexual violence and starvation of the civilian population as a method of warfare have been committed in Ethiopia since 3 November 2020. The Commission finds reasonable grounds to believe that, in several instances, these violations amounted to war crimes and crimes against humanity. The Commission provides an assessment of transitional justice developments and makes urgent recommendations.

White Paper: Effective Communication With Deaf, Hard Of Hearing, Blind, And Low Vision Incarcerated People, Tessa Bialek, Margo Schlanger

Other Publications

Tens of thousands of people incarcerated in jails and prisons throughout the United States have one or more communication disabilities, a term that describes persons who are deaf, hard of hearing, blind, low vision, deaf-blind, speech disabled, or otherwise disabled in ways that affect communication. Incarceration is not easy for anyone, but the isolation and inflexibility of incarceration can be especially challenging, dangerous, and further disabling, for persons with disabilities. Correctional entities must confront these challenges; persons with communication disabilities are overrepresented in jails and prisons and the population continues to grow. Federal antidiscrimination law obligates jails and prisons to …

Fda-Approved: How Pfas-Laden Food Contact Materials Are Poisoning Consumers And What To Do About It, Katya S. Cronin

GW Law Faculty Publications & Other Works

Nearly every person in the United States currently has in their body dangerous amounts of chemicals proven to cause cancer, endocrine disruptions, liver and kidney failures, infertility, developmental difficulties, learning disorders, and immunodeficiencies. These chemicals are known collectively as “PFAS”—per- and poly-fluoroalkyl substances—and they were designed for heavily industrial applications. However, over the last two decades, they have surreptitiously and successfully migrated from heavy machinery and building sites onto the many items that consumers use to cook, serve, or store their food. With the FDA’s blessing, PFAS are now ubiquitous in food contact materials, from where they leach directly into …

Private Student Loans May Be Dischargeable In Bankruptcy Without Meeting The Undue Hardship Requirement And If Not, There Are Two Ways To Prove Undue Hardship, Kimberly Lee

Bankruptcy Research Library

(Excerpt)

Section 523 of title 11 of the United States Code (the “Bankruptcy Code”) prevents former students from discharging certain educational debts in bankruptcy, unless the failure to discharge “would impose an undue hardship on the debtor and the debtor’s dependents.” Typically, it is a debtor’s burden to show that their loans may be discharged on the grounds of “undue hardship.” However, Congress has not defined “undue hardship” leaving jurisdictions divided regarding the appropriate test. Most courts have followed the Brunner three-prong test, while only the First and Eighth Circuits use the totality of the circumstances test.

Additionally, section 523(a)(8) …

การกำหนดความผิดทางอาญากรณีบังคับให้เด็กสมรส, อนัญญา จ่าวัง

Chulalongkorn University Theses and Dissertations (Chula ETD)

เอกัตศึกษาฉบับนี้มีวัตถุประสงค์เพื่อศึกษาแนวคิดในการกำหนดความผิดที่เกี่ยวข้องกับกรณีการบังคับให้เด็กสมรสและความจำเป็นที่ประเทศไทยควรจะกำหนดให้การบังคับให้เด็กสมรสเป็นความผิดทางอาญา และวิเคราะห์ปัญหาในการบังคับใช้กฎหมายของประเทศไทยต่อกรณีการบังคับให้เด็กสมรส รวมถึงสำรวจมาตรการทางกฎหมายของต่างประเทศในการกำหนดความรับผิดทางอาญากรณีการบังคับให้เด็กสมรส และมาตรการทางกฎหมายที่เกี่ยวข้องในการคุ้มครองเด็กจากการถูกบังคับให้สมรสของประเทศออสเตรเลีย อังกฤษ และฟิลิปปินส์ เพื่อให้ได้มาซึ่งแนวทางที่เหมาะสมต่อการกำหนดความผิดทางอาญากรณีการบังคับให้เด็กสมรสในประเทศไทย การบังคับให้เด็กสมรสเป็นการกระทำที่ละเมิดต่อสิทธิและเสรีภาพของเด็กอย่างร้ายแรงซึ่งผู้กระทำมักเป็นบุคคลในครอบครัว ไม่ว่าจะเป็นบิดามารดา ผู้ปกครอง หรือบุคคลอื่น ๆ ที่มีหน้าที่ในการดูแลเด็ก เด็กถือเป็นกลุ่มเปราะบางที่อาจยังไม่มีความสามารถเพียงพอในการปกป้องสิทธิของตนเอง จึงทำให้ตกเป็นผู้เสียหายจากการกระทำดังกล่าวได้โดยง่าย ซึ่งส่งผลให้เกิดผลกระทบทางด้านลบทั้งต่อตัวเด็กเองและต่อสังคม จากการศึกษาพบว่าประเทศไทยยังไม่มีมาตรการทางกฎหมายใด ๆ ที่จะนำมาใช้บังคับกับกรณีการบังคับให้เด็กสมรสได้อย่างชัดเจน ทำให้เกิดปัญหาในการคุ้มครองเด็กจากการกระทำดังกล่าว และเมื่อสำรวจกฎหมายต่างประเทศพบว่าประเทศออสเตรเลีย อังกฤษ และฟิลิปปินส์ ได้มีการกำหนดความผิดทางอาญากรณีบังคับให้เด็กสมรส รวมถึงมีมาตรการทางกฎหมายอื่นเพื่อคุ้มครองเด็กจากการกระทำนั้น ทั้งนี้ เมื่อวิเคราะห์การกระทำกรณีบังคับให้เด็กสมรสประกอบกับหลักเกณฑ์การกำหนดความผิดทางอาญาแล้ว พบว่าการบังคับให้เด็กสมรสเป็นการกระทำที่มีลักษณะร้ายแรงและสมควรที่จะกำหนดให้เป็นความผิดทางอาญา ดังนั้น เอกัตศึกษาฉบับนี้จึงเสนอให้มีการกำหนดความผิดทางอาญากรณีบังคับให้สมรสโดยการแก้ไขเพิ่มเติมบทบัญญัติในมาตรา 26 แห่งพระราชบัญญัติคุ้มครองเด็ก พ.ศ. 2546 ให้เป็นหนึ่งในการกระทำที่ต้องห้ามมิให้กระทำต่อเด็กซึ่งหากผู้ใดฝ่าฝืนจะมีบทลงโทษทางอาญาเพื่อเป็นประโยชน์ต่อการบังคับใช้ในการคุ้มครองเด็กจากการถูกบังคับให้สมรสตามสิทธิและเสรีภาพของเด็กอันพึงจะได้รับต่อไป

Equal Education Means Equal Education: Confronting Education Access Disparities For New York Students Amid The Covid-19 Pandemic During The 2020-2021 School Year, Sara Gruber

Cardozo Journal of Equal Rights & Social Justice

The COVID-19 pandemic exacerbated existing educational disparities, particularly affecting low-income and minority students in New York due to the shift to online learning. The state's current legislation, such as the Dignity for All Students Act, fails to address these off-campus digital divide issues, necessitating legal reform to ensure equal educational opportunities.

The Surprising Virtues Of Data Loyalty, Woodrow Hartzog, Neil M. Richards

Faculty Scholarship

Lawmakers in the United States and Europe are seriously considering imposing duties of data loyalty that implement ideas from privacy law scholarship, but critics claim such duties are unnecessary, unworkable, overly individualistic, and indeterminately vague. This paper takes those criticisms seriously, and its analysis of them reveals that duties of data loyalty have surprising virtues. Loyalty, it turns out, can support collective well-being by embracing privacy’s relational turn; it can be a powerful state of mind for reenergizing privacy reform; it prioritizes human values rather than potentially empty formalism; and it offers solutions that are flexible and clear rather than …

Race-Ing Antitrust, Bennett Capers, Greg Day

Scholarly Works

Antitrust law has a race problem. To spot an antitrust violation, courts inquire into whether an act has degraded consumer welfare. Since anticompetitive practices are often assumed to enhance consumer welfare, antitrust offenses are rarely found. Key to this framework is that antitrust treats all consumers monolithically; that consumers are differently situated, especially along lines of race, simply is ignored.

We argue that antitrust law must disaggregate the term “consumer” to include those who disproportionately suffer from anticompetitive practices via a community welfare standard. As a starting point, we demonstrate that anticompetitive conduct has specifically been used as a tool …

"Blood, Sweat, Tears:" A Muslim Woman Law Professor's View On Degenerative Racism, Misogyny, And (Internal) Islamophobia From Preeclampsia And Presumed Incompetent To Pandemic Tenure, Nadia B. Ahmad

FIU Law Review

From classical literature, popular press, law, everyday conversations, and social media rampages, society scrutinizes visible Muslim women even though they are a part of a vast global population. From E.M. Forrester’s A Passage to India—the Orientalist summer reading I endured in high school—to the incessant online attacks on U.S. Congresswoman Ilhan Omar, the hatred has no end and no bounds. Visible Muslim women are accustomed to erasure and censure for simply existing. In France, legislators sought to expel visible Muslim women under the age of eighteen from the public space. Women’s rights have been used as a pretext to invade …

Generals Of The Resistance: Multistate Actions And Nationwide Injunctions, Elysa M. Dishman

Faculty Scholarship

State attorneys general (AGs) have become leaders of the political resistance against recent presidential administrations. They are suing the federal government with increasing frequency, seeking nationwide injunctions that thwart presidential priorities and shape national policies.

Nationwide injunctions have sparked considerable debate among jurists, scholars, and policymakers. However, the largely court-centric debate has overwhelmingly overlooked the role that state litigants and litigators play in shaping criticisms of the nationwide injunction. States and AGs have unique
attributes, advantages, and incentives that allow them to frequently seek and successfully secure nationwide injunctions. And these advantages are enhanced when states litigate together. Because states …

Actively Achieving Greater Racial Equity In The Law School Classroom, Catherine Bramble

Faculty Scholarship

2020 and 2021 continue to illustrate the pervasiveness of implicit and explicit racism in our society. Less well-acknowledged and recognized is the extent to which Socratic pedagogy also reflects those pervasive racist realities while simultaneously resulting in inferior learning based on a teaching method invented 150+ years ago. Despite this racist and outdated reality, the legal academy has been reluctant to alter the traditional method of teaching. Tangible, empirical evidence obtained from data-driven cognitive learning science research demonstrates that active learning not only improves learning outcomes for all students, but also mitigates the structural effects of racism in the classroom …

Misinformation About Marijuana: Commercialization, Consolidation, And The New First Amendment, David Angelatos

American University Law Review

From “Reefer Madness” to “This Is Your Brain on Drugs,” Americans have lived through decades of anti-cannabis propaganda. Legalization is poised to turn this information environment on its head, unleashing a torrent of corporate-funded, pro-cannabis misinformation that regulators cannot prevent or dispel. This appears to be a problem caused by the Supreme Court’s creation and expansion over the past fifty years of First Amendment protections for corporate and commercial speech. Although these doctrines contribute substantially to the problem, this Article shows how it originates in lax antitrust policy rather than expansive First Amendment jurisprudence.

If Congress follows current legalization trends …

Choosing Death, Shaping Death: Assumptions About Disabilities, Race, And Death, Janet L. Dolgin

Hofstra Law Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Essential, Not Expendable: Protecting The Economic Citizenship Of Agricultural Workers, Hunter Knapp

University of Colorado Law Review

No abstract provided.

Creating Oases Throughout America’S Food Deserts, Hannah M. Dahle

BYU Law Review

No abstract provided.

Trouble With Names: Commercial Speech And A New Approach To Food Product Label Regulation, William Cusack

Duke Journal of Constitutional Law & Public Policy Sidebar

The Supreme Court has recognized First Amendment protection for “commercial speech” since 1975. Commercial speech doctrine seeks to balance advertiser interest in speech, consumer interest in information, and society’s interest that “economic decisions in the aggregate be intelligent and well-informed.” Regulations and compulsory disclosures of commercial speech play a part in ensuring consumers are well-informed. Yet, there continues to be consumer confusion surrounding the commercial speech doctrine’s application to food labeling. Lawmakers continue to pass regulations that are unnecessary or nonsensical. Regulators continue to enforce these regulations, even if the state interest in doing so is minimal or non-existent. There …

Trick Or Treat? How A U.S. Patent Over A Method For Processing Sugarcane Wrongly Alarmed The Colombian Panela Industry, Carter Ostrowski

University of Cincinnati Law Review

No abstract provided.

Student Pharmacists’ Emotional Responses And Coping During The Covid-19 Pandemic, Hannah E. Johnson, Deaundre Bumpass, Aric Schadler, Jeffrey Cain

Journal of Wellness

Introduction: Health professions students, including student pharmacists, have been impacted by the coronavirus disease 19 (COVID-19 pandemic) as schools have transitioned to remote learning and cancelled milestone events. During times of crises, media consumption and hobby participation also impact well-being. The adverse emotional responses and coping strategies of student pharmacists amidst the COVID-19 pandemic have not been evaluated, nor have factors that may contribute to emotional responses. The purpose of this study is to determine Doctor of Pharmacy students’ emotional responses and coping precipitated by the COVID-19 pandemic, and the influence of media use, working status, and participation in hobbies. …

Birth Rights And Birth Wrongs Through A Common Law Lens: Why The No Liability Regime Is Likely To Endure, Richard A. Epstein

The Journal of Contemporary Legal Issues

Dov Fox’s recent book, the aptly named Birth Rights and Wrongs, is, as its title suggests, a study of the stark conflicts that arise in the highly contested area of reproductive rights. Fox makes the powerful case that the legal protection of reproductive rights, in all their protean forms, is systematically under-protected relative to two key benchmarks: the standards of ordinary decency, and social expectations. In my view, he has an acute awareness of these failures. But his greatest strength is also his greatest weakness, as he systematically ignores the great successes wrought through the current system, as disjointed …

The Ncaa’S Historical Challenges With Antitrust Issues And Its Current Battle For Continued Relevance, Andrew Bondarowicz

Seton Hall Journal of Legislation and Public Policy

No abstract provided.

The Flag Can Travel But The Constitution Must Ask Permission: How The First Circuit And The District For Puerto Rico Commit To Equal Protection Without Abandoning The Insular Cases Doctrine, Alejandro J. Anselmi González

University of Miami Inter-American Law Review

For American citizens, one of the most important safeguards guaranteed by the Constitution of the United States is the equal protection of the law. The United States prides itself on the doctrine and jurisprudence of equal protection because of the social progression achieved since the end of the Civil War. The Reconstruction Amendments to the Constitution eliminated the institution of slavery and were supposed to guarantee equal civil and legal status to all citizens. The Constitution, however, has not been consistently interpreted in this way since the end of the Spanish-American War in 1898. The nation emerged from this conflict …