Digital Commons Network^™

Black Maternal Mortality Rate: Improving Outcomes For Black Mothers Using Legislation That Reverses The Effects Of Structural Racism In Medicine, Ashley Pattain

Mitchell Hamline Law Journal of Public Policy and Practice

No abstract provided.

Can Policing Be Purged Of White Supremacy? A First Amendment Inquiry, Jessica Tilton

Mitchell Hamline Law Journal of Public Policy and Practice

No abstract provided.

Loose Lips And Internet Censorship: Freedom Of Expression In India And Malaysia, Matin Pedram, Jean-Christophe Roberge, Eugina Georgiades

University of San Francisco Law Review

No abstract provided.

Superpowers With Villainous Objectives: How The Executive Branch’S Immigration Enforcement “Powers” Utilize Technology To Violate Noncitizens’ Privacy, Nina-Simone Edwards

Library Scholarship

The United States border, for noncitizens, has a unique quality to it. Each time a noncitizen crosses that border, they are no longer private individuals. They can no longer choose to give up their information–instead, there is a forced exchange: data for entry. Who they are, what they are, and everything that connects them to the world is given up in exchange for a new life in a new land. Once the border is crossed, noncitizens no longer have the privacy that they may have known before. This Note first builds on scholarship theorizing that noncitizens do have a right …

Rural Health Care In The Age Of Hospital Bankruptcies, Sonal Rastogi

Emory Bankruptcy Developments Journal

In recent years, the United States has witnessed a surge in bankruptcy filings within the healthcare sector. Inflation, rising expenses, shifts in payment models, labor shortages, legislative uncertainty, and mounting pharmaceutical costs have impacted all healthcare organizations, casting a shadow over communities. This is particularly evident in rural America where hospital closures have shrunk access to healthcare services. This Comment delves into the challenges and interests at play when healthcare entities and nonprofit organizations navigate bankruptcy proceedings, paying particular attention to the challenges faced by health care business bankruptcy proceedings.

This Comment argues that the current bankruptcy framework requires adjustments …

The Importance Of Gender Diversity On Police Culture, Haley Vasko

Williams Honors College, Honors Research Projects

This paper outlines the problem of historical underrepresentation of women in the police force and its potential impact on police culture, effectiveness, and community relations. This paper aims to investigate the importance of gender diversity within law enforcement.

The research framed the context of organizational behavior and diversity management, exploring how gender diversity affects group dynamics, organizational culture, and policing. The literature review covered historical trends in gender diversity in policing, challenges faced by women in the profession, and the influence of gender diversity on police culture.

The methodology involved an extensive literature review, case studies from different regions, and …

The Promise Of Progressive Prosecution, G Ben Cohen

Akron Law Faculty Publications

This Article focuses on the promise and challenges of progressive prosecution through the lens of the election of Jason R. Williams to Orleans Parish District Attorney’s Office. Orleans Parish was the epicenter of mass incarceration, wrongful convictions, violence, and racism over the last thirty years. The election of Jason Williams as District Attorney in 2021 resulted in policy changes in the Orleans Parish District Attorney’s Office. In the first two years of the administration, incarceration rates dropped by one-third, impacting over one thousand people. Dozens of individuals serving draconian punishments for lowlevel offenses were resentenced. Eighteen individuals were exonerated. But …

21st Century Churches And Federal Tax Law, Lloyd Hitoshi Mayer, Ellen P. Aprill

Journal Articles

Federal tax treatment matters to churches, the term the IRS uses for all types of religious congregations, including synagogues, mosques, and temples. The federal tax provisions most significant for churches and certain entities closely related to them, however, are not those that the public and commentators often assume. Exemption from income tax and the ability of donors to deduct contributions, the benefits that receive the most public attention, in fact provide surprisingly little benefit either to churches in the aggregate or to most individual churches. Their status as organizations taxexempt under section 501(c)(3) of the Internal Revenue Code, moreover, imposes …

A Democratic Restraint On Incarceration, Marah S. Mcleod

Journal Articles

From the Article

This Article proposes a new sentencing model that employs the democratic voice of the jury to restrain individual injustice and mass incarceration by having the jury establish the maximum term that an individual defendant deserves and confining judicial sentencing discretion within that upper bound.

Police Diversity Theory, Trevor George Gardner

Scholarship@WashULaw

In light of both the tragic death of Tyre Nichols in Memphis at the hands of Black police officers and the mixed results of studies of Black same-race policing, this Article proposes a conceptual framework by which to better understand the utility of police diversity. The framework maps the relational possibilities among three factors: (i) the Black officer’s approach to same-race policing; (ii) the Black officer’s performance in the context of same-race policing; and (iii) the policing priorities of the Black communities the Black officer is taken to represent.

Responsive to the conceptual framework for police diversity theory, the Article …

The False Promise Of Jurisdiction Stripping, Daniel Epps, Alan M. Trammell

Scholarship@WashULaw

Jurisdiction stripping is seen as a nuclear option. Its logic is simple: by depriving federal courts of jurisdiction over some set of cases, Congress ensures those courts cannot render bad decisions. In theory, it frees up the political branches and the states to act without fear of judicial second-guessing. To its proponents, it offers the ultimate check on unelected and unaccountable judges. To critics, it poses a grave threat to the separation of powers. Both sides agree, though, that jurisdiction stripping is a powerful weapon. On this understanding, politicians, activists, and scholars throughout American history have proposed jurisdiction stripping measures …

The Major Questions Doctrine: Unfounded, Unbounded, And Confounded, Ronald M. Levin

Scholarship@WashULaw

As explicated by the Supreme Court in West Virginia v. EPA in 2022, and reaffirmed in Biden v. Nebraska in 2023, the “major questions doctrine” provides that an administrative agency’s rule in a “major” case must rest on “clear congressional authorization.” Many commentators have deplored the major questions doctrine on the basis of its policy consequences. This Article offers a critique of the doctrine from a different angle. It primarily contends that the reasons the Court has given for enforcing the doctrine do not withstand scrutiny, even on their own terms.

In West Virginia and Nebraska, the Court relied heavily …

The Slow Drip Of Decarceration: Reversing The Flood Of Mass Incarceration And Its Racist Impact, Olinda Moyd

Scholarly Articles in Law Reviews & Journals

For the last four decades, the flood of African Americans pouring into our jails and prisons can be likened to a watershed where someone turned on a faucet full force and opened the floodgates to all the prison doors. Despite the multitudinous efforts to secure the release of people unwittingly swept up in this flood, most spending decades behind bars, their releases have been mediocre and only a few have slowly dripped towards freedom. Racism seeps into every facet of American life and nowhere is it more prevalent than in our criminal legal system and the crisis of mass incarceration. …

Protecting Free Speech In Social Media: A Pathway To Self-Determination In International Law, Sydney Marie Harley

Emory International Law Review Recent Developments

With the growth of Internet and social media usage, state regulatory action to surveil and censor citizens is running rampant. As the principle of self-determination stands, minority populations are typically bearing the brunt of these attacks, receiving little protection under domestic and international law. Self-determination within international law must be restructured into a definitive pathway that includes protecting the freedom of speech to encourage discourse and tolerance between the State and its minority populations. This article proposes a solution that could fill the gap in international law formed by insufficient domestic rule in States that neglect to protect these populations …

Artificial Intelligence In The Courtroom: Forensic Machines, Expert Witnesses, And The Confrontation Clause, Ian Maddox

Journal of Law, Technology, & the Internet

From traditional methods like ballistics and fingerprinting, to the probabilistic genotyping models of the twenty-first century, the forensic laboratory has evolved into a cutting-edge area of scientific exploration. This rapid growth in forensic technologies will not stop here. Considering recent developments in artificial intelligence (“AI”), future forensic tools will likely become increasingly sophisticated. To be sure, AI-enabled forensic tools are far from theoretical; AI applications in the forensic sciences have already emerged in practice. Machine learning-enabled acoustic gunshot detectors, facial recognition software, and a variety of pattern recognition learning models are already disrupting law enforcement operations across the country. Soon, …

Ten Is Too Young: South Dakota's Need For A Legislative Amendment Raising The Minimum Age Of Criminal Responsibility To Fourteen, Taylor Graves

South Dakota Law Review

No abstract provided.

Virtual Justice?: An Analysis Of Access To Court For People Experiencing Homelessness, Kaitlin Humer

Theses and Dissertations (Comprehensive)

Homelessness in Canada remains a wicked social problem that often intersects with compounding forms of marginalization. The criminalization of homelessness and living life in the public sphere explain, in part, why this population is likely to interact with the criminal justice system. Following the onset of the pandemic, the courts were forced to modernize and embrace digital technologies to maintain operations. Now four years since these changes, there are no signs of turning back and the court system is continuing forward with a hybrid model. Despite this, there is minimal research on the impact of virtual court proceedings on people …

Remote Repossession, Rebecca Crootof

Law Faculty Publications

Ford’s February 2023 patent application raises a new possibility: that after a default, an internet-connected vehicle might autonomously drive itself off of the owner’s premises—to a public space, to the repossession agency, or even to a junkyard. But while this “remote repossession” would minimize the risks of harm that attend in-person repossessions, it creates at least three new risks. First, a danger of bodily injury and property damage to the owner. Second, an increased likelihood of physical harm to a third-party with no obviously responsible entity. And third, most invisibly but also perhaps most importantly: further erosion of consumers’ current …

How To Connect The Unconnected: Broadband Policy In Colorado, Nicole Genevieve Ela

Colorado Technology Law Journal

No abstract provided.

Asylum, Title 42, & Female Foreign Nationals, Cecilia I. Morin

Notre Dame Journal of Law, Ethics & Public Policy

No abstract provided.

Exacting Assessments: Sheetz And The Problem Of Stategraft, Christopher Serkin

Vanderbilt Law School Faculty Publications

In the spring of 2024, the United States Supreme Court decided Sheetz v. County of El Dorado. The case resolved a long-standing question: whether the constitutional rules applying to ad hoc development exactions also apply to legislated exactions. They do. It is an important case, and one that may reconfigure the financing of municipal infrastructure. This Essay examines the case through the lens of Professor Bernadette Atuahene's concept of "stategraft," or the government illegally using its regulatory power to raise money from the poor and politically powerless. This Essay compares legislative exactions to other forms of municipal finance like special …

Promoting And Reforming Kenya’S Customary Justice Systems In Criminal Cases, Daniel S. Mcconkie Jr.

Emory International Law Review

Kenya’s indigenous customary justice systems developed over time to administer African justice rooted in local community harmony. British Colonialists imposed a foreign legal system, and Kenya formally retained that system even after gaining independence in 1963. Nevertheless, ordinary Kenyans today continue to resort to customary justice systems for their legal problems, including many crimes. The 2010 Constitution requires the judiciary to promote customary justice systems because they are trustworthy and accessible. Paradoxically, though, the Constitution also forbids these customary justice systems from contravening other constitutional provisions. Therein lies the difficulty. Customary justice systems’ procedures do not always comport with …

Standing In The Way Of Environmental Justice, Lauren Cormany

Utah Law Review

Private citizens need an avenue for justice through the judicial system on the siting of hazardous facilities. The health impacts of exposure to toxic facilities—like cancer, respiratory illnesses, and birth defects—are severe and victims deserve their day in court. While initiatives by government agencies and grassroots organizations provide influential roads to improvement, the judiciary stands to only bolster the efficacy of the work in the environmental justice field. The most effective way to include the courts is through the legislature creating a cause of action targeting the issues that communities face. Solutions to the issue of citizen standing in challenging …

Principles Of Prosecutor Lenience, Jeffrey Bellin

Faculty Publications

[T]here are profound questions about the when and why of lenience, and particularly prosecutor lenience. The answers speak to one of the great mysteries of American criminal law: the role of the prosecutor. I have taken on this mystery in recent years and continue the effort here by offering a skeletal framework for prosecutor leniency. The framework proposes three principles of prosecutor lenience. Prosecutor lenience should be (1) non-arbitrary, (2) equal, and (3) abundant.

[...]

This Symposium Essay explores prosecutorial lenience through the lens set out above. Part I defines prosecutorial lenience and proposes three principles to guide its exercise. …

Second Amendment Immigration Exceptionalism, Pratheepan Gulasekaram

Publications

This Essay critiques the decision to uphold federal gun restrictions on unlawfully present noncitizens on the basis of "immigration exceptionalism." It argues that courts should avoid applying bespoke constitutionalism to criminal laws, including gun laws, simply because the law regulates noncitizens. This Essay shows why such exceptional modes misapprehend long-decided Supreme Court cases and well-established legal doctrine. Further, it warns that an exceptional approach to Second Amendment claims by unlawfully present noncitizens cannot be cabined to either firearms or the unlawfully present. Rather, it portends a wider gulf in constitutional protections for all noncitizens across a variety of fundamental criminal …

Ai Malpractice, Bryan H. Choi

Publications

Should AI modelers be held to a professional standard of care? Recent scholarship has argued that those who build AI systems owe special duties to the public to promote values such as safety, fairness, transparency, and accountability. Yet, there is little agreement as to what the content of those duties should be. Nor is there a framework for how conflicting views should be resolved as a matter of law.

This Article builds on prior work applying professional malpractice law to conventional software development work, and extends it to AI work. The malpractice doctrine establishes an alternate standard of care—the customary …

Showing Mercy Through A Presumption Of Retribution, Marah S. Mcleod

Journal Articles

From the Article

This Essay proposes a path toward the systematic consideration of mercy in American sentencing. America does not have to choose between retributive blame on the one hand and nonjudgmental mercy on the other. Inspired by Whitman's description of the European "presumption of mercy," America can implement a presumption of its own-one that opens the door to the nonarbitrary exercise of mercy, while retaining a clear focus on retributive desert. Such a presumption, tailored to American political realities and moral norms, might be called a "presumption of retribution"-and this presumption could be codified in law while explicitly made …

Oklahoma V. Castro-Huerta: Oklahoma’S Latest Power Grab And Its Implications For Native Women In A Post-Roe World, Camryn A. Conroy

American Indian Law Review

No abstract provided.

Debunking Criminal Restitution, Lula Hagos

GW Law Faculty Publications & Other Works

Criminal restitution—the money paid by a defendant to a victim—is often overlooked amidst growing scholarly consensus about the adverse impact of criminal court fines and fees. Restitution receives less attention because it is perceived as a fair and unobjectionable sanction with legitimate goals, while fines and fees are now widely condemned as primarily serving as a funding source for local and state governments. Consequently, the animated and extensive discourse around financial punishment largely excludes criminal restitution.

Though criminal restitution may appear to have legitimate penological purposes, it serves to perpetually punish defendants who are poor—the vast majority of those in …

Protecting The U.S. National Security State From A Rogue President, Laura T. Dickinson

GW Law Faculty Publications & Other Works

The presidency of Donald Trump revealed weaknesses in the U.S. constitutional structure and its legal rules, weaknesses that had been covered over for most of our history because presidents of all political parties voluntarily obeyed norms of behavior that kept the presidency within the bounds of constitutional democratic governance. Unfortunately, there is no guarantee that such norms have been permanently restored. Thus, scholars, policymakers, and judges must consider now how to protect the rule of law from a rogue president, rather than waiting for the next crisis to occur. This Article provides a comprehensive set of achievable reforms targeted specifically …