Digital Commons Network^™

Testing Our Faith: Why It Is Important To Study The Complexity Of Client Experiences In Family Dispute Resolution, Heather Heavin, Brea Lowenberger, Michaela Keet

Canadian Journal of Family Law

Increasingly across Canada, court-based processes are being recast as forums of ‘last resort’ for family conflict. Studies inviting lawyers to reflect on the success of their collaborative negotiations, mediations, and settlement conferences show optimism—faith that the quality of their clients’ experiences has been more positive, or, at least, less damaging. As researchers, however, we know less about how the parties in the midst of separation and divorce actually experience those processes. The Saskatchewan study described in this article suggests that ‘the inside’ of dispute resolution (DR) processes in family conflict might be as qualitatively painful, negative, and difficult as the …

Family Violence And Child Support: Abuse, Shared Parenting, And Special Expenses, Joanna Radbord

Canadian Journal of Family Law

This article addresses specific sections of the Federal Child Support Guidelines which are particularly problematic for survivors of family violence: (a) section 9 in relation to child support in circumstances of shared parenting time, and (b) section 7 dealing with special or extraordinary expenses. Child support in Canada currently functions as an application-based system within an adversarial context, which creates significant barriers to child support for victims of abuse. In relation to shared parenting, a presumptive reduction in the quantum of child support is likely to exacerbate systemic inequalities and further disadvantage survivors of family violence—disproportionately women and children. This …

Factors Affecting The Joy Of Life In Old Age: A Scale Development Study, Yalçın Karagöz, Yusuf Karaşi̇n, Mustafa Filiz, Mehmet Ateş

Adultspan Journal

This study aims to introduce a measurement tool into the literature that can reveal the factors affecting the joy of life in older adulthood. Participants included 266 individuals aged 55 and over living in Izmir, Turkey. The process of developing the scale includes the following stages: problem identification, item pool creation, expert opinion, form shaping, pilot application, and finalizing the scale. The exploratory factor analysis revealed that the scale consists of 6 different dimensions, and the variance explained by these dimensions was found to be 65.184%. The acceptable values for the scale's fit indicators are as follows: χ²/df0.90, IFI > 0.90, …

§1983 And The Federal Nursing Home Reform Act: A Perfect Fit, Sandra H. Johnson

Saint Louis University Journal of Health Law & Policy

The Supreme Court rarely takes a case involving federal quality standards for nursing home care, and that alone would make Health and Hospital Corporation of Marion County v. Talevski (Talevski) a significant case for those interested in long-term care. The Court’s decision in Talevski, however, reaches far beyond long-term care with implications for every federally funded program that relies on the states for administration, delivery of benefits, or enforcement of standards.

Much about the Talevski case signaled that a significant change in law may be coming. The plaintiff’s cause of action relied on a statutory instrument (§1983) frequently used by …

The Layered Harms Of Nursing Home Segregation, Mary Crossley

Saint Louis University Journal of Health Law & Policy

This Essay explores several dimensions of how segregation, separation, and shielding from view permit and contribute to the ethically problematic state of nursing home care in the United States. A quarter of a century ago, the Supreme Court recognized in the Olmstead decision that institutional care can function to segregate disabled people (whether young or old) from the richness of community life. Research over the past few decades confirms that racial segregation exists within the nursing home industry, and during the COVID-19 pandemic, the correlations between nursing homes’ racial makeup and their level of COVID fatalities were shocking. On another …

Judicial Economy In The Age Of Ai, Yonathan A. Arbel

Articles

Individuals do not vindicate the majority of their legal claims because of access to justice barriers. This entrenched state of affairs is now facing a disruption. Lawyers and non-lawyers alike are adopting artificial intelligence (AI) tools to perform legal tasks tools that sharply reduce the costs of generating legal materials. There is finally hope that AI might allow many more to access justice.

Paradoxically, what we gain in access to justice we might lose in the delivery of justice. The problem is not that AI tools are ineffective. Indeed, they are even more effective than most realize affecting every stage …

In Search Of A State, Maeve Glass

Faculty Scholarship

This article offers a legal history of one of America’s earliest campaigns of state legislative resistance: the effort in Massachusetts to protest the national government’s perceived dismantling of an old Atlantic commercial order from 1803 to 1815. To date, scholars have either condemned this protest as a dangerous harbinger of the Civil War or vindicated it as an inevitable and salutary extension of the Founding. This article steers a different course. By focusing on the evolving language of protest and the complex hybrid of ideas and material realities from which this language emerged, this article illuminates how Federalist leaders who …

The Resurgence Of Massive Resistance, Danielle Wingfield

Law Faculty Publications

“Massive Resistance” to equal access to good quality public education is resurging across the nation. First employed by segregationists in Virginia, Massive Resistance spread across the South to oppose school desegregation. This extreme push to suppress equitable education occurred most notably post-Brown. Although 2024 marked Brown’s seventieth anniversary, Massive Resistance is again surging. In fact, the last few years have witnessed increasing resistance to publicly funded education. Some areas where anti-public education resistance strategies have manifested include political rhetoric around Critical Race Theory, library censorship, and renewed parental rights debates.

To devise the most effective response to …

Operationalizing A Pedagogy Of Antiracism In Legal Education, Doron Samuel-Siegel

Law Faculty Publications

To reckon with structural racism in legal education, legal educators collectively must do much more than we have done thus far. A true reckoning will occur only once we provide an education that ensures racially minoritized students can learn free of the harms of traditional legal education, and that all students are equipped to contribute to the dismantlement of structural racism in the law and legal profession. A pedagogy that centers these two goals counteracts the effects of structural racism while also creating conditions for its dismantlement, making it a pedagogy of antiracism.

This article is about moving toward the …

History's Identity Crisis, Allison Orr Larsen

Faculty Publications

Lower court judges across the country are struggling to manage the Supreme Court’s new “history and tradition” test that applies to Second Amendment challenges. This Article articulates one fundamental reason for the struggle: nobody is quite sure what a judge is actually doing when she evaluates claims about what happened in the past. Is it traditional legal reasoning— weighing evidence and looking for patterns? Is it fact-finding of the sort we think expert historians should testify about—conveying to a trial judge the best evidence we have about the purpose of colonial gun laws? Or is it a different sort of …

Rebuilding The Foundation: Addressing A Crisis In Juror Participation, Paula Hannaford-Agor

Faculty Publications

Courts are experiencing dramatic decreases in juror response and appearance rates, threatening the future of jury trials and the legitimacy of the American justice system. Effective strategies exist to reverse this trend, if justice system stakeholders are willing to employ them.

Fairness Writ Large Or Small In International Criminal Justice, Nancy Amoury Combs

Faculty Publications

For this symposium, I was not assigned to talk about Megan [Fairlie]’s work per se, and so I initially planned to discuss something completely different. In the end, however, I came back to Megan’s work because I believe her scholarship provides a new way of thinking about the entrenched challenges currently facing our collective field of study: international criminal law and procedure.

As we all know, Megan was an accomplished comparativist, and her area of expertise was criminal procedure. Even more particularly, Megan specialized in the criminal procedure of the still relatively new international criminal courts and tribunals. She focused …

The State Of The Russian Media Through The Lens Of Democratization: 1991 As The Peak Of Openness In Russia’S Media Laws, Antonina Semivolos

Notre Dame Journal of Law, Ethics & Public Policy

No abstract provided.

Housing Justice Pipeline: Harnessing Housing Clinics To Transform The Right To Counsel Movement, Erica Braudy, Thomas Honan, Tuhfa Begum

Seattle Journal for Social Justice

No abstract provided.

The First Prison, William Gillis

Seattle Journal for Social Justice

No abstract provided.

“Pick-Up Orders” And Foster Youth In Washington, Lauren Higgins

Seattle Journal for Social Justice

No abstract provided.

Visual Legal Rhetoric In The Age Of Generative Ai And Deepfakes: Renaissance Or Dark Ages?, Michael D. Murray

Law Faculty Scholarly Articles

The paradoxical development of visual generative AI tools, such as OpenAI’s DALL-E 3, Midjourney, and Stable Diffusion, simultaneously signals a renaissance and a potential dark age in visual rhetoric and communication. On the one hand, these tools democratize the creation of visual content, empowering attorneys and others to become artists and illustrators of their legal communications without needing to learn how to draw. These AI systems can simplify complex legal concepts, bridge language barriers, and enhance advocacy. But on the other hand, the proliferation of deepfakes presents significant challenges for visual rhetoric. Deepfakes can quickly and easily create realistic but …

Please Provide Feedback? How To Effectively Receive And Learn From Feedback About Your Writing, Melissa N. Henke

Law Faculty Popular Media

We have all been there. We submit a draft document to a supervising attorney or valued colleague. And then we wait. Will we receive criticism? Will we receive praise? At some point we just hope to hear something in response. Or do we?

Once we get a response, the criticism is hard to receive. We may get angry or upset, we may feel defensive or defeated, or we may just shut down and try to avoid the feedback altogether. Sometimes even feedback framed as praise can leave us feeling uncomfortable or overwhelmed.

An aversion to feedback, especially to criticism, is …

Cultivating Thoughtful Dialogue, Shared Humanity, And Emotional Intelligence In Client Counseling Courses, Jacki J. Langum

Saint Louis University Law Journal

Historically, client counseling courses in law schools across the country omitted concepts fundamental to a successful attorney-client relationship–thoughtful dialogue, shared humanity, and emotional intelligence. Psychology and the practice of law, including the omitted concepts, are now being integrated into more courses each semester. The essay demonstrates how I integrate them into my own course and work alongside students to help them practice those concepts and the most important skill of active listening. The students’ practice requires thoughtful work around self-awareness, bias, power, and money–topics often neglected because of the discomfort involved in their contemplation and reflection. The earlier students are …

Bail-Ing Out Of Cash Bail: Navigating The Pretrial Fairness Act And Illinois’ Cashless Frontier, Sara Worrell

Saint Louis University Law Journal

Cash bail, once a tool intended to ensure appearances in court, has evolved into a system that disproportionately incarcerates marginalized and economically disadvantaged communities. This national reckoning with the failures of the cash bail system necessiates a critical reevaluation of pretrial justice in the United States. Calls for bail reform have been ringing across the nation and Illinois has answered.

This note critically examines the Pretrial Fairness Act (PFA), a landmark reform in the Illinois SAFE-T Act which abolishes cash bail and restores the presumption of innocence to pretrial detention decisions in Illinois. In response to the systemic inequities of …

“They Told Us We Were Safe”: An Analysis Of The Constitutionality Of Missouri’S Ban On Gender-Affirming Healthcare For Medicaid Recipients, Tory Davidson

Saint Louis University Law Journal

The current state of gender-affirming care in the United States hangs in a precarious balance. Though the medical community seems to agree that such care is critical in at least some cases, citizens’ perceptions of that necessity are far from unified. As of this publication, at least one case involving a state-sponsored ban on gender-affirming care for minors, United States v. Skrmetti, is pending before the United States Supreme Court. The arguments in that case have centered on whether denying hormonal treatments inconsistent with a child’s assigned sex, when the same treatments may be prescribed when consistent with a …

The Techcons, Chris Jay Hoofnagle

Loyola Consumer Law Review

Selling sometimes involves trickery. How should we decide what trickery is "swindling" versus ordinary "selling"? One method is elucidated in Yale Law Professor Arthur Leff's curious, lost-to-history book. In "Swindling and Selling: The Story of Legal and Illegal Congames", Leff showed how market structure is a powerful factor for distinguishing illegal confidence games ("congames") what he called "swindling" from legal "selling." Leff demonstrated how con artists weave narratives to convince marks they have a monopoly over some desirable asset. Con artists then manipulate marks to mistakenly believe they possess a monopsony over its capture.

This essay revisits Leff's mostly forgotten …

Doge's Matrix Structure And Presidential Power, Jason Marisam

Faculty Scholarship

At the start of his second term, President Trump created the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), a novel White House entity tasked with reshaping the federal bureaucracy. Far more than a traditional advisory commission, DOGE employed a matrix structure that embedded staff across executive agencies, establishing dual reporting lines to both agency heads and the White House. This essay argues that DOGE’s organizational design represents a structural innovation in presidential control and an evolution of the longstanding “czar” model. Drawing on organizational and principal-agent theories, the essay explores how the matrix structure enhanced the President’s capacity to monitor agency behavior, …

Ditching Deference: Redefining Particular Social Groups In The Wake Of Loper Bright, Claire E. Pellegrin

Emory Law Journal

Thousands of individuals flee gang-related violence and seek asylum in the United States every year. Many of these asylum seekers claim they suffer persecution because of their membership in a “particular social group” targeted by the gang’s brutality. Left undefined in the 1951 Refugee Convention, “social group” is interpreted by U.S. immigration agencies in an increasingly restrictive manner. Over the years, the Board of Immigration Appeals has adopted a three-part test for social group membership, and using these criteria, immigration courts often deny social groups based on opposition to gang recruitment. Thus, the United States is at odds with prevailing …

How Theories Of Art Can Inform Debates About Ai, Jessica Silbey

Emory Law Journal

Debates about artificial intelligence (AI) tend to swing between the optimistic and the apocalyptic. I propose a less binary approach that frames conversations about AI from the perspectives of theories of art and creativity. Whether we agree that AI is artificial or intelligent, whether it should be constrained or liberated, we cannot deny its influence on literary, artistic, and innovative production. AI may be described as simply a new tool to produce art and science, like the camera or the microscope, or it may transform and reshape art and science, the way the internet transformed global communication. Either way, these …

Deepfakes, Deep Skepticism, And The Privacy Dividends Of A Default Of Distrust, Marc Jonathan Blitz

Case Western Reserve Law Review

No abstract provided.

Under The Influence: Duties, Deception, Disclosures, And Due Diligence Of Social Media Influencers, Arianna Kiaei

Washington and Lee Law Review

The encroachment of social media into the daily lives of society reflects a major shift in consumer behavior. As social media moves from providing platforms of narrow connectivity among friends and family to social connection beyond one’s personal network, novel channels are being formed for consumers to absorb and share information. It opens opportunity for corporations to market their products beyond traditional methods and establishes the “influencer” sharing personal thoughts and recommendations on such products.

Social media’s immense purchasing power has a direct effect on the decision-making processes of individuals and the profit margins of corporations, and thus, the capacity …

Does The 25th Amendment Merit Reform?: The Challenge Of Determining Presidential Disability, Karena R. Andreassen

Honors Theses

This research project examines the persistent lack of use of the 25th Amendment to the United States Constitution in its original form, despite many calls for the reform of the language or expansion of its application as situations unfold. Adopted in 1967, the amendment was created to address the challenges of presidential succession and incapacity. However, historical events over the last few decades, such as the assassination attempt on Ronald Reagan, Reagan’s colon cancer, and the general increase in the age at which presidents assume office, have contributed to scrutiny over the amendments’ provisions. This study will explore why specifically …

Space Agriculture, Biotechnology, And Terraforming: Rethinking The Paradigm Of Harmful Contamination, Francesca Giannoni-Crystal

Journal of Air Law and Commerce

As humanity transitions from sporadic exploratory space missions to permanent settlements on celestial bodies (like the Moon or Mars), agriculture biotechnology, and, potentially, terraforming projects will be essential for establishing self-sustaining settlements.

These activities raise critical issues concerning the interpretation of the principle of harmful contamination under Article IX of the Outer Space Treaty (OST) and its implementation through the Committee on Space Research’s Policy on Planetary Protection (COSPAR Policy) referred together in this article as the “Planetary Protection Framework,” which is primarily oriented toward exploration with scientific integrity rather than permanent habitation.

The challenge lies in the fact that …

Institutionalized Ostracism, Danieli Evans

Michigan Journal of Race and Law

Belonging is a fundamental need, like food or water. Hundreds of social psychology studies find that people who are ostracized (excluded, rejected, or ignored) experience severe pain and suffering. Ostracism threatens basic needs, triggers the same neurocognitive processing system as physical pain, and impairs functioning. Furthermore, ostracized people may cope in ways that beget “deviant” labeling and further ostracism.

Belonging and ostracism are prevalent themes in social psychology research, but these constructs have received relatively little attention in law. This Article begins to explore the implications of this research for law. I make three contributions: First, I name and describe …