Digital Commons Network^™

Women, Knowledge Institutions, And Constitutional Law, Vicki C. Jackson

UMKC Law Review

This Essay argues that knowledge institutions are crucial to the ability of historically disadvantaged groups—including women—to correct the injustices they have suffered. In Part II, the Essay begins by defining knowledge institutions and explaining why they need legal recognition and protection in a constitutional democracy. Part III then argues that knowledge institutions are a resource for challenging conventional understandings and assumptions that may produce injustices not readily remedied through political processes. Knowledge institutions have served this role in several important constitutional battles in the United States—over racial equality, gender equality, and discrimination against same-sex couples. The claim is not that …

The Other Side Of The Glass Cliff, Angela Onwuachi-Willig, Kellye Testy

UMKC Law Review

No abstract provided.

Winging It: Convergence, Convivencia, And Belonging Of Latina Lawyers, Verónica C. Gonzales

Fordham Law Review

No abstract provided.

“No Further Discussion Necessary”: Compliance As Professionalism In Legal Education, Sarah J. Schendel

Fordham Law Review

No abstract provided.

At The Crossroads: Sports Betting In Missouri And Proposals For Regulations, Jimin Shumate

The Business, Entrepreneurship & Tax Law Review

Sports betting is a rapidly growing industry nationwide, and Missouri became the 39th state to legalize the practice. Although states hope to reap the benefits of a regulated sports gambling market, the activity carries significant mental, physical, and socioeconomic risks due to its inherently addictive nature. The hyper-accessibility of modern platforms, particularly those enabling unlimited micro betting, magnifies longstanding concerns in a new digital context. Compounding these risks, the absence of federal standards for minimum wagering ages and the aggressive marketing strategies employed by sportsbooks draw in young adults. This article proposes a coordinated federal and state regulatory framework that …

Beyond The Prompt: The Social Costs Of Generative Artificial Intelligence, J. Scott Christianson, Josh Rickard

The Business, Entrepreneurship & Tax Law Review

The rapid commercialization of generative artificial intelligence has produced extraordinary value for technology companies while systematically externalizing costs onto society. This Article provides a review of these externalities across three domains: environmental, human health, and digital infrastructure. The environmental burden includes massive energy and water consumption alongside ecologically destructive mining for rare earth elements and accelerating electronic waste. The human toll encompasses a documented pattern of AI-induced mental health crises, including suicide and self-harm linked to anthropomorphic chatbot design, raising novel questions of product liability in cases like Garcia v. Character.AI. The digital commons face degradation through industrialized data scraping …

Some Things Are Actually Nails: The Value Of Randomized Experiments Across Legal Theories, Hajin Kim, Kevin Tobia, Kristen Underhill

University of Chicago Law Review

Experiments sometimes get a bad rap. Critics allege that they don’t illuminate how the real world works, are subject to p-hacking and manipulation, and often don’t study the most important populations of interest. We examine historical uses of experiments to generate knowledge for legal academia. Recently, experiments have become associated with law and economics as part of a broader coupling of quantitative empirical work with law and economics. But experimentation is a highly adaptable, if imperfect, research method that can support causal claims and test assumptions that are useful across many legal theories, including law and political economy. We discuss …

Weaponized Bureaucracy At The Criminal Immigration Divide, Dorien Ediger-Seto

Washington Law Review

Despite deportation being entrenched as a civil consequence rather than a punishment over 100 years ago, today’s immigration enforcement and deportation scheme relies heavily on state-level criminal arrests, convictions, and data sharing systems. And immigration-based crimes have accounted for between twenty-five and fifty percent of all federal criminal charges over the past decade. But the fact that the systems are bureaucratically and doctrinally separate from each other has practical impacts that go beyond these formalized intersections. Not only do federal law enforcement actors often have dual mandates to investigate and prosecute federal crimes alongside related civil removal cases, but criminal …

Facing State-Created Danger In Facial Recognition Technology, Esha Jain

Washington Law Review

When the police wrongfully arrest someone, that person faces distinct harms. Various scholarship, news articles, and studies document that AI-powered facial recognition technology (FRT) disproportionately misidentifies individuals from marginalized racial groups when used irresponsibly. Many of those sources indicate that police reliance on FRT without adequate vetting results in wrongful arrests. Yet law enforcement continues to misuse FRT.

This Comment contends that the 42 U.S.C. § 1983 state-created danger doctrine offers a potential remedy for plaintiffs harmed by police reliance on FRT. To prevail under this doctrine, plaintiffs must prove affirmative conduct, deliberate indifference, and proximate causation. If successful, these …

Reason Enough: The Wrongful Extension Of Asylum’S “One Central Reason” Nexus Standard To Withholding Of Removal, Elaine Hernandez Flores

Washington Law Review

Noncitizens often come to the United States seeking protection from violence, persecution, or life-threatening conditions in their home countries. However, upon arrival, many noncitizens are placed in removal proceedings and face deportation back to the very dangers they escaped. U.S. immigration law provides various forms of relief from deportation, most notably asylum and withholding of removal. Both forms require the applicant to show a connection—or “nexus”—between the persecutor’s motive for persecuting them and one of five protected grounds: race, religion, nationality, political opinion, or membership in a particular social group.

Although asylum and withholding of removal both require a noncitizen …

Bankrupt Crypto Organizations, Kara Bruce, Christopher K. Odinet, Andrea Tosato

North Carolina Law Review

No abstract provided.

The Indian Law Aunties, Torey Dolan

UMKC Law Review

No abstract provided.

The Lawyer’S Swan Lake: Generative Ai, Legal Epistemology, And The Nondelegable Duty To Think, Angie Zinzilieta

The Business, Entrepreneurship & Tax Law Review

Generative artificial intelligence (“GAI”) has entered law wearing the costume of competence: fluent, confident, and fast. But legal practice is not a memory sport despite the bar exam. Lawyers are paid to create, test, and refine ideas (arguments, narratives, and theories of liability) inside an adversarial system that punishes error, rewards precision, and demands accountability. This article argues that the central risk of GAI in legal work is not merely “hallucinations” or confidentiality breaches; it is epistemic atrophy, an outsourcing of the intellectual labor by which lawyers understand where law comes from, how it changes, and why it applies. Using …

Sanctioned Judge Speaks: A Conversation With Icc Judge Kimberly Prost, Kimberly Prost, David Collins

Judicature International

No abstract provided.

Fostering An Equitable Scrum: A Conceptual Framework For Using Antiracist Enrollment Management Practices To Counter Job Market Discrimination, Aaron N. Taylor

AccessLex Institute Research

For most law students, attending law school is an investment. At stake are immense amounts of time and money spent pursuing the degree. The most desired payoff is a lucrative and fulfilling career. This chapter argues that law schools must adopt enrollment management practices that attempt to account for the job market their entering students will face at graduation. In proffering this argument, the chapter presents a conceptual framework for aligning class size targets to the future job market and proposes an equity-based approach to tuition discounting that accounts for job market racism. Graduates of color, particularly Black graduates, experience …

Inequality As Market Failure, Erick J. Sam

William & Mary Bill of Rights Journal

This Article explores economic, philosophical, and legal relationships between economic inequality and market failure, and it draws on these linkages to develop an innovative normative justification and alternative constitutional basis for a levy on wealth.

The Article’s central analytic result is that several general mechanisms responsible for common market failures can also systematically produce economic inequalities whenever preferences against extreme inequality are fairly widespread. Because these mechanisms satisfy both the ‘process-based’ and ‘outcome-based’ criteria of market failure, redistributive transfers designed to reduce these inequalities would be normatively justified under the widely accepted market failure theory of government action. On this …

Beyond Equality To Belonging: The Missing Value In Equal Protection Law Involving Education, Danieli Evans

Washington Law Review

Belonging is a fundamental need without which people cannot function optimally. Accordingly, school belonging—students’ perceptions of mattering or feeling cared about, accepted, respected and valued by faculty, staff, and peers—impacts students’ well-being, academic motivation and outcomes.

Equal Protection jurisprudence governing education largely overlooks the value of school belonging. Instead, it centers on a formal conception of equality, or an “anti-classification” principle, which essentially prohibits purposeful discrimination based on a fixed set of suspect traits. This formalistic “anti-classification” approach permits many policies and practices that undermine students’ sense of school belonging and inhibits schools from taking certain measures to foster belonging. …

Engendering Human Rights Through Clinical Legal Education, Caroline S. Bettinger-Lopez

UMKC Law Review

No abstract provided.

Engendering Authority: Social Movements, Legitimacy, And Gender, Judith Resnik

UMKC Law Review

No abstract provided.

Contemporary Law And Economics, Adam Chilton, Joshua C. Macey, Mila Versteeg

University of Chicago Law Review

Law and economics (L&E) emerged as a field in the middle of the twentieth century, it focused on using economic theory to study the common law. During this period, L&E offered insights so novel that it not only profoundly influenced legal doctrine, but the movement’s key figures also became some of the most cited and acclaimed scholars in the American academy. The field of law and economics has since continued to grow and become more technically sophisticated, but it is also a less cohesive movement. Moreover, L&E has been misunderstood and misrepresented by the emerging law and political economy (LPE) …

Against Privacy Essentialism, Daniel J. Solove

North Carolina Law Review

No abstract provided.

Bankrupt Crypto Organizations, Kara Bruce, Christopher K. Odinet, Andrea Tosato

Faculty Scholarship

This Article provides the first comprehensive analysis of the intersection between decentralized autonomous organizations (DAOs) and American bankruptcy law. DAOs are blockchain-based entities that enable individuals to pursue common goals using decentralized decision-making and automated governance. Since their recent emergence, DAOs have proliferated dramatically—with over 20,000 organizations managing over $20 billion in assets and engaging in activities ranging from investment management to real estate and even attempting to purchase historic copies of the U.S. Constitution. Yet like any other organization, DAOs can fail, creating an urgent need to understand what happens when unstoppable code meets immovable bankruptcy law.

Our investigation …

Contagious Discrimination: Why Race-Blind Justice In Courtrooms Is Not Enough, Yijia Lu, Murat C. Mungan

Faculty Scholarship

Existing theories of discrimination focus on discrimination at the individual, societal, or organizational level. We highlight the importance of the dynamic relationship between different institutional actors who jointly give rise to discriminatory outcomes. This reveals that discrimination can be contagious: discrimination that would otherwise not occur at one institutional level can arise due to discrimination at another institutional level. Therefore, discrimination by some actors can trickle down and create disparate impacts in processes that would otherwise be free of discrimination. This phenomenon, which we term “contagious discrimination,” can manifest itself in various settings such as employment and commercial trade negotiations. …

Chicana Professionalism: Embracing Greñas, Glitter & Boots, Luz E. Herrera

Faculty Scholarship

The current political moment, where immigrant identity is scapegoated and academic freedom is threatened, requires an affirmation of personal identity, a recognition of personal struggle, and a celebration of resilience. This Essay embraces the ideas that professional identity development is temporal and that the current conceptualization of professionalism requires embarking on a reflection journey that addresses the dissonance between personal conscience and professional duty.   Part I briefly revisits the work of Professor Margaret E. Montoya, one of the first Chicana law professors that describes the formation of her professional identity as a law student. It explores the status of Latinas …

Evidence And Assessing Verbatim Transcription Quality Of Black English And Standard American English, L. Alexander Walker Iii

Faculty Scholarship

This chapter explores the accuracy of private transcription services when transcribing Black English and Standard American English. Courts and lawyers in the US regularly rely on transcripts from such services, but third-party verification of their accuracy, especially with respect to their quality when faced with nonstandard language varieties, is lacking. This study draws on experimental methods to contrast the quality of transcription services offered by transcribers and AI route. The quantitative results show that transcription by humans and AI resulted in more mistakes when transcribing Black English than when transcribing Standard American English. Furthermore, a qualitative analysis reveals that these …

Post-Chevron Deference In Asylum Proceedings, Shawn E. Fields

Cardozo Law Review

The Supreme Court held for four decades that Chevron deference should apply in all immigration proceedings. How, then, will asylum proceedings change in a post-Chevron world? When, and under what circumstances, will courts continue to defer to the findings of immigration judges and the Board of Immigration Appeals (BIA)? And why does it matter? This Article answers those questions.

These issues require urgent examination for three reasons. First, they directly confront an issue pending before the U.S. Supreme Court in Urias-Orellana v. Bondi: Without the protection of Chevron insulating BIA decisions from meaningful judicial review, can certain legal questions like …

From Doctrine To Practice: Shūrā-Centred Islamic Ethics For Sustainable Ecological Solutions, Fatima Dhanani, Cecilee Glaus Jones

Abdou Filali-Ansary Occasional Paper Series

This paper examines how Islamic ethics, when translated into lived practice, generate both moral frameworks and scalable solutions to pressing ecological challenges. Focusing on shūrā, tawḥīd, khilāfa, and taʿaddudiyya, and drawing on case studies of Stewardship Canada and the Aga Khan University’s Carbon Management Tool, the authors show how Islamic values move beyond doctrinal abstraction to guide institutional decision-making, programme design, and community engagement. More than treating ethics as fixed theological propositions, they frame them as negotiated, context-sensitive processes that align with ecological resilience, distributive justice, and economic viability.

Grounded in shūrā …

Beyond Precedent: Leveraging Non-Precedential Writings In Pursuit Of Social Justice Advocacy, Marissa C. Meredith

Marquette Benefits and Social Welfare Law Review

The role of law in society is complex and often intersects with evolving societal norms, politics, technology, etc. Despite this complexity, students, especially our current Gen-Z students, enroll in law school, hoping to enact positive change within their communities through the legal system. As noted by recent studies, law students' reasons for attending law school have shifted from a “desire to have a challenging and rewarding career” to a focus on “helping others or uplifting their communit[ies]” and addressing “social justice” issues. With this change in purpose, students' expectations about the education they will receive in law school have shifted, …

Adoption And Parentage Inequality For Same-Sex Couples In Wisconsin In The Age Of Assistive Reproductive Technology, Isabella Barnard

Marquette Benefits and Social Welfare Law Review

In the age of assistive reproductive technology, same-sex couples have more avenues than ever before to become parents, but the law has failed to match pace. With the ever-growing number of same-sex couples conceiving children through artificial insemination, Wisconsin must take action to remedy the inequality of same-sex couples adopting their biological or intended children. As of the publication of this comment, it is recommended that same-sex couples follow the adoption process for their child, as a formal adoption constitutes a court order granting full parentage security because other more efficient options, such as a gender-neutral voluntary parentage acknowledgement, are …

The Urban Talented Tenth: Race, Higher Education, And The Law Of Opportunity, Walter A. Jean-Jacques

Marquette Benefits and Social Welfare Law Review

This Article reexamines W.E.B. Du Bois’s theory of the “Talented Tenth” through the lens of contemporary African American males in urban educational contexts. Drawing on historical origins, critical race theory, and modern jurisprudence surrounding higher education, it argues that law and policy have systematically overlooked those who form what this Article terms the “Urban Talented Tenth.” These students, often lacking traditional markers of privilege, navigate structural inequities while achieving academic excellence. By situating their experiences against the backdrop of landmark Supreme Court cases such as Brown v. Board of Education, Regents of the University of California v. Bakke, Grutter v. …