Digital Commons Network^™

The Evasive Epidemic Of Missing Black Children, Trinity D. Garlick

Criminal Law Society Blog

The Evasive Epidemic of Missing Black Children” brings to light the disproportionately low amount of media support for missing Black Children. It draws on examples of missing Black Children, like Adam Walsh and other Atlanta Black children, to illustrate how Black children have gone ignored by the public for too long. It discusses factors such as failure of state legislatures, lack of media exposure, unfair and racial fixed labels, and law enforcement discretionary conduct, as the leading drivers of the epidemic of missing Black children. This Article then dives into efforts to reform the American system to adequately address when …

Legal Pluralism And The Reception Of Trial By Jury In The Republic Of Georgia, Anna Dolidze, Valerie P. Hans

International Law Journal

This Article explores the historical, political, and socio-legal dimensions of the introduction and evolution of jury trials in the Republic of Georgia, framed through the dual lenses of legal pluralism and legal transplantation. It examines Georgia’s historical practices of peer judgment, its adoption of jury trials in the early 20th century, the abolition of jury trials under Soviet rule, and their revival after constitutional reforms in 2004. The study incorporates insights from legal pluralism theory, which emphasizes the influence of indigenous legal traditions and the dynamic interplay of official and unofficial laws. The Article describes the significant role of U.S. …

Sports Equality In The Ring: All Genders Can Catch These Hands, Gordon Chan

International Law Journal

This Article examines the intersection of sports governance, gender identity, and international human rights law, using boxing as a central case study to explore the inclusion of transgender and nonbinary athletes. Tracing the historical and cultural evolution of gender participation in sports from ancient civilizations to contemporary institutions, the Article highlights how colonial, patriarchal, and pseudoscientific ideologies have long shaped the regulatory frameworks of modern sports. The doctrine of lex sportiva, which governs international sports through autonomous legal norms, is analyzed for its exclusionary gender practices and resistance to external legal oversight. Focusing on the World Boxing Council (WBC), the …

Property Taxes And Educational Inequality: How Funding Structures Perpetuate Social Class Divides In San Antonio, Texas, Kristanna Martinez, Camila Ore

Posters - 2026

The U.S education system relies heavily on property taxes, creating an unhealthy dependence where property value dictates the quality of education depending on the school district

• In the historical case Edgewood v. Kriby, the Texas Supreme Court ruled that the reliance on local property taxes for school funding was unconstitutional, as it violated the state requirement that all children receive a “thorough and efficient” education. The court ruled that every district must be provided the same ability to obtain educational funds regardless of their local property wealth. • The purpose of this study is to examine if the 2025-2026 …

Some Or None? How Ab 1412 Closes The Gap In Interstate Special Education Transfers, Hope Austin

University of the Pacific Law Review

No abstract provided.

Representation In Removal Proceedings, Emily Ryo, Ian Peacock, Weston Ley, Christopher Levesque

Indiana Law Journal

Millions of immigrants in the United States are facing threats of mass deportation under the second Trump Administration. At the same time, the Administration has sought to end federal programs aimed at providing basic information and guidance to immigrants in removal proceedings. In addition, large numbers of immigration judges have been fired from immigration courts that already face massive backlogs. Amidst these upheavals, deportation defense lawyers have come to occupy a more central role than ever in ensuring fairness and due process in immigration courts. Are certain groups of immigrants more likely to obtain legal representation than others? Among those …

The Racialized Treadmill Of Robotic Agriculture: Colonial Legacies, Legal Exceptionalism, And Labour Control, Vasanthi Venkatesh

Canadian Journal of Law and Technology

The title of this paper draws on two historical meanings of the word ‘‘treadmill”. First, it references the economic concept of the ‘‘agricultural technology treadmill”, which describes how technological advances in farming lead to market consolidation, pushing smaller producers out while benefiting agribusiness oligopolies. Second, it invokes the literal treadmill, which was invented in 1818 as a punitive labour technology and a ‘‘rational” tool to discipline racialized and indentured labourers in colonial plantations. By connecting these two threads in agricultural technology — economic domination and racialized labor control — this paper examines how robotics and automation in modern agriculture perpetuate …

Consensus Ad Artificialis: Contract Theory Meets The Genai Mind, Katie Szilagyi, Marina Pavlovic´

Canadian Journal of Law and Technology

The advent of generative AI (GenAI) has generated shockwaves across industries. Many established professions are grappling with how GenAI’s functionality transforms their daily activities, staying power, and raison d’eˆtre. GenAI’s newfound facility with words and language has rapidly encroached upon the purview of lawyers, whose trade has long been expertise with words. While some worry about lawyers’ place in a GenAI-oriented future economy, others are optimistic about the transformative potential GenAI offers as a tool to the practicing lawyer. Legal service providers have been quick to adopt GenAI tools in the name of efficiency, harnessing its generative power for tasks …

Climate Change Litigation Cases In Context, Camille Cameron, Patricia Galvão Ferreira, Riley Weyman

Books

This book provides a timely and detailed analysis of key climate change cases in domestic courts across the globe, examining the procedural, evidentiary, legal, and strategic dimensions of the complex climate governance landscape. It reveals how, as the threats of climate change grow and as policy fails to respond, individuals and groups have increasingly been turning to national courts to seek relief and clarity through litigation.

Chapters:

1. The climate governance tightrope: novel strategies and the role of courts in climate change
2. Mathur v Ontario: youth-led constitutional challenge to government climate policy lights the path to future recognition of climate …

Childhood, Likelihood, And Probative Value: A Further Call For Greater Probity And Less Childism In Evidence Law, Mae C. Quinn

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

A Problem For Traditionalism, Marc O. Degirolami

Notre Dame JLEPP: In Limine

Prof. DeGirolami explains traditionalism and why it might pose a problem in the United States.

The Crime We Forget? White-Collar Crime: Problems In Defining Motive And Enforcement Of Followers, John Stillman

Notre Dame JLEPP: In Limine

John Stillman explains problems in defining and enforcing against white-collar crime, focusing on followers.

Purpose Over Perception: Distinguishing Status From Viewpoint In A University’S Limited Public Forum, Haleigh J. Bachman

Missouri Law Review

In nearly every university, cultural centers and student organizations quietly provide tangible, essential support: one student finds a community to celebrate his shared heritage; another student finds guidance after struggling to obtain her necessary accommodations in class; an international student rehearses for a cultural showcase that will be the highlight of his semester. These spaces provide community, safety, and a sense of belonging that classrooms and lecture halls often do not. Nevertheless, public universities often face challenges in allocating physical space and funding resources to student organizations— particularly to those supporting cultural and affinity groups. On one hand, universities can …

Social Murder, Marissa Jackson Sow

Washington and Lee Law Review

In recent years, variations on Engels’s concept of social murder have been adopted into British legal and sociological lexicons to conceptualize the state’s reckless sacrifices of its most vulnerable populations—people deemed socially undesirable, legally undeserving, and economically redundant. The state allows these populations to die a multitude of deaths by failing to protect them; notably, victims of social murder are relegated to society’s underclasses, if not completely excluded from the body politic, before they are physically eliminated. Social murder is neither genocide nor ethnic cleansing; instead, social murder captures the elimination of groups of people via atrocious events for which …

Beyond The Individual: Exploring Structural Explanations Of Homelessness Through Thematic Analysis Of Extant Research, Madison R. Mcclain

Senior Theses

This thesis examines how homelessness is defined, explained, and addressed within contemporary U.S. research using Critical Race Theory (CRT) and Intersectionality as guiding frameworks. Through a qualitative, deductive thematic analysis of 16 peer-reviewed articles, this study identifies six key themes related to structural causation, policy governance, measurement practices, racial inequality, dominant narratives, and intersecting systems of disadvantage. Findings reveal that while structural explanations of homelessness are widely acknowledged, they are inconsistently defined and often insufficiently theorized. Institutional systems primarily function to manage rather than resolve homelessness, while measurement practices and definitions actively shape who is recognized and prioritized. Additionally, structural …

Bridging Theory And Practice: A Criminal Justice Course Collection, Penny Geyer

Open Educational Resources

Dr. Penny Geyer compiled a full reading list, course calendar, set of weekly discussion questions, in-class experiential exercises, a death penalty case-study module, and a final paper assignment into a single, organized course packet that can be easily accessed, revised and remixed by other instructors teaching theory-to-practice criminal justice courses.

A Real Account Of Deep Fakes, Benjamin L.W Sobel

Michigan Law Review

Laws regulating pornographic deepfakes are written to prohibit “digital forgeries,” “false” images, or media “indistinguishable” from “authentic” recordings. Yet the typical anti-deepfake law covers materials that aren’t forgeries, aren’t false, and that reasonable observers can easily distinguish from authentic recordings. Though drafted as if they regulate statements of fact, anti-deepfake laws actually target certain outrageous depictions per se—and rightly so, because pornographic deepfakes cause harm irrespective of their truth or falsity. However, the inapposite language of facts results in statutes with crucial ambiguities. Moreover, because anti-deepfake laws ban outrageous depictions irrespective of the factual assertions they make, they differ fundamentally …

Rhetorical Violence: The Rhetorics Of Women's Counter Political Violence, Kylie Rowland

Department of English: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research

Protest is omnipresent, and yet not much is known about the efficacy and impacts of its different rhetorical strategies—particularly so for marginalized populations, whose available means of protest are already limited by both material realities and assumptions that govern who and what can make waves. This bind is further exacerbated by gendered and racialized civility politics that determine which bodies can be disruptive and which already are considered “violent.” To address this gap, I turn toward the under-researched rhetorical potentials of marginalized people’s—specifically women and queer folks’—use of symbolic protest “violence,” which works to strategically make evident the larger ongoing …

R-Ai-Sing Questions: Exploring The Ethical And Legal Landscape Of Artificial Intelligence-Generated Media Of Medicalized Children, Kristen Thomasen, Gregorio Zuniga-Villaneuva, Muhammed Mukadam, David Lysecki

Canadian Journal of Law and Technology

When it comes to complex medical care for children, even in a country like Canada with many publicly funded healthcare services, much of the necessary research and holistic support for children and families is financed through private donations. Fundraising campaigns for children’s hospitals and services are common, often featuring movie stars, professional athletes, and many child patients. A range of important charitable activities, providing comfort, services, and necessities such as food and accommodation to children and families, are carried out through fundraising and donations. Fundraising for children’s services is a multibillion-dollar global undertaking. What’s more, it is largely dependent on …

Patenting The Unexpected, Sean B. Seymore

Vanderbilt Law School Faculty Publications

Unexpected discoveries have transformed human existence. They’ve revolutionized science and spawned entire new fields of research. While unexpected discoveries seem inventive and worthy of patent protection, they don’t formally align with traditional patent theory. The bedrock principle that an invention begins with the conception of an idea in the inventor’s mind and ends with implementation doesn’t apply to unexpected discoveries. This misalignment is most acute for pharmaceuticals, where the discovery of new uses for old drugs has tremendous social and economic importance. Since a drug can inherently treat multiple conditions in a patient—even those unknown to the patient, doctor, or …

Slurry-As-A-Service: A Modest Proposal On Scalable Pluralistic Alignment For Nutrient Optimization, Rachel Hong, Yael Eiger, Jevan Hutson, Os Keyes, William Agnew

Articles

Pluralistic alignment has emerged as a promising approach for ensuring that large language models (LLMs) faithfully represent the diversity, nuance, and conflict inherent in human values. In this work, we study a high-stakes deployment context—mulching—where automated systems transform selected individuals into nutrientrich slurry for the dual purposes of food security and aesthetic population management. Building on recent pluralistic alignment frameworks, we introduce ValueMulch™, a reproducible training, deployment, and certification pipeline for aligning mulching models (MMs) to a wide range of community norms. Through a real-world testbed spanning 32 communities, we show that ValueMulch™ improves distributional agreement with community mulching preferences …

How To Transform Capitalism Through Law, Katharina Pistor

Faculty Scholarship

This essay is based on the presentation of my book, The Law of Capitalism and How to Transform It, at the University of Miami Law School on October 14, 2025. I am grateful for the opportunity to share a summary of this work in the University of Miami Law Review and to my colleagues Ingo Venzke and Martijn Hesselink, who were kind enough to offer their thoughts on it for this mini symposium.

Listening To Survivors: A Community Conversation, Jonathan Jackson

Dignity: A Journal of Analysis of Exploitation and Violence

No abstract provided.

Core Elements Of Policy Solutions, Audrey Morrissey

Dignity: A Journal of Analysis of Exploitation and Violence

No abstract provided.

Targeting Unfairness, Omolara Bewaji Joseney

Vanderbilt Law Review

Companies often engage in racially targeted marketing practices whereby they target and tailor their advertisements to racially segmented consumer populations. As a result, a targeted racial group of consumers may receive advertisements for a product or service that is intentionally customized to appeal to them (a “pull”) or may be specifically untargeted or excluded from receiving advertisements as members of a nontargeted racial group (a “push”). This Article examines the marketing environment created by these pull-push dynamics as a consumer protection concern. Legal scholarship on targeted advertising has focused either on its risks to privacy due to the growing reliance …

Continued Resistance And Resilience After Dobbs, David S. Cohen, Carole Joffe

Fordham Law Review Online

No abstract provided.

Lowering Of The Lowered: The ‘Spectacular’ Construction Of ‘Humiliation’ In The Indian Prevention Of Atrocities Act 1989, Ashna Singh

National Law School of India Review

The Scheduled Castes and the Scheduled Tribes (Prevention of Atrocities) Act, 1989 is the only law in India that explicitly recognises caste-based insults or hate speech as an offence. In doing so, it captures the distinctive harm of such speech as humiliation. This article focuses on Section 3(1)(r) of the Act and argues that this recognition is significantly qualified by the “public view” requirement. Drawing on socio-political scholarship on humiliation, I show that judicial interpretation of this requirement has produced an extra-legislative condition of spectacularity. Courts tend to read caste-based humiliation through the paradigm of visible, overt, and collective atrocity, …

การปฏิรูปงานแก้ไขฟื้นฟูผู้กระทำผิด: การประเมินผลกระทบจากการแปรรูปรัฐวิสาหกิจแบบบางส่วนในงานคุมประพฤติของสหราชอาณาจักร (Transforming Rehabilitation: Evaluating The Impact Of Part-Privatisation In The Probation Services Of The United Kingdom), Suphat Phoophanichjaroenkul

Chulalongkorn University Law Journal

บทความนี้วิเคราะห์ผลลัพธ์ของนโยบาย “Transforming Rehabilitation” ซึ่งเป็นการปฏิรูปโครงสร้างงานคุมประพฤติในสหราชอาณาจักรโดยให้ภาคเอกชนเข้ามามีส่วนร่วมในการดำเนินงาน ภายใต้ความประสงค์ในการลดอัตราการกระทำผิดซ้ำ เพิ่มประสิทธิภาพในการปฏิบัติงาน และเสริมสร้างนวัตกรรมในการบริหารจัดการผู้กระทำผิด การปฏิรูปนี้ได้มอบหมายหน้าที่โดยให้บริษัทเอกชนที่เป็นผู้รับผิดชอบในการดูแลผู้กระทำผิดที่มีความเสี่ยงต่ำถึงปานกลางผ่านวิสาหกิจเพื่อการแก้ไขฟื้นฟูผู้กระทำผิดในชุมชน (Community Rehabilitation Companies) ในขณะที่หน่วยงานคุมประพฤติแห่งชาติ (National Probation Service) ยังคงรับผิดชอบผู้กระทำผิดที่มีความเสี่ยงสูง การประยุกต์ใช้เครื่องมือทางการเงิน เช่น “ค่าตอบแทนตามการให้บริการ” และ “การจ่ายเงินตามผลลัพธ์” ถูกนำมาใช้เพื่อดึงดูดการลงทุนจากภาคเอกชนและคาดหวังว่าจะเกิดนวัตกรรมด้านเทคโนโลยี จากการศึกษาพบว่าผลการดำเนินงานตามแผนปฏิรูปไม่เป็นไปตามเป้าหมายที่กำหนด ผู้ให้บริการเอกชนไม่สามารถจัดทำบริการเพื่อสนับสนุนการกลับคืนสู่สังคมได้อย่างเพียงพอ ส่งผลให้ผู้กระทำผิดที่ได้รับการแก้ไขฟื้นฟูไม่ได้รับความช่วยเหลือ การให้บริการงานคุมประพฤติขาดความคิดริเริ่มใหม่ และมาตรฐานงานและคุณภาพลดลง ซึ่งสาเหตุหลักเกิดจากการขาดการทดลองนำร่องที่เพียงพอก่อนการขยายผล รวมถึงข้อบกพร่องในกระบวนการประเมินความเสี่ยง ปัญหาทางการเงินทำให้วิสาหกิจเพื่อการแก้ไขฟื้นฟูผู้กระทำผิดในชุมชนหลายแห่งล้มละลาย ผลกระทบต่อเสถียรภาพของงานคุมประพฤติและความเชื่อมั่นของประชาชนที่ลดลง จนกลายเป็นปัจจัยให้แนวคิดการลงโทษได้รับความนิยม ขณะที่แนวทางการแก้ไขฟื้นฟูผู้กระทำผิดในชุมชนถูกลดบทบาทลง บทความเสนอแนวทางแก้ไขที่สำคัญ ได้แก่ การจำกัดบทบาทของภาคเอกชนให้เป็นเพียงผู้สนับสนุนงานคุมประพฤติ เสริมสร้างความแข็งแกร่งให้กับหน่วยงานคุมประพฤติแห่งชาติในฐานะผู้ให้บริการในการจัดทำงานคุมประพฤติ และการออกแบบเครื่องมือทางการเงินใหม่ที่สร้างแรงจูงใจและส่งเสริมการมีส่วนร่วมของภาคีเครือข่ายและภาคประชาชน นอกจากนี้ บทความยังเสนอแนะให้มีการนำร่องอย่างเป็นระบบเพื่อให้สามารถประเมินความเสี่ยงได้อย่างแม่นยำ และสร้างกลไกการกำกับดูแลที่มีประสิทธิภาพ เพื่อรักษาคุณภาพบริการและสร้างความเชื่อมั่นต่องานคุมประพฤติอย่างยั่งยืน

Law As A Form Of Life: On Capitalism And Critical Theory, Justin Deystone

Law and Contemporary Problems

No abstract provided.

Marx, Marxism, And The Critique Of Law, Umut Özsu

Law and Contemporary Problems

No abstract provided.