Digital Commons Network^™

Making Environmental Cancer Risk Legally Visible: Legal Epidemiology, Chemical Regulation, And The Failures Of Cancer Cluster Investigations, Beverley C. Thompson

Emory Law Journal

Environmental cancer risks remain difficult to detect, investigate, and remediate despite decades of federal regulation under the Toxic Substances Control Act (TSCA). Cancer cluster investigations are designed to identify unusual patterns of cancer and their environmental causes, but fragmented authority, inconsistent methodologies, and narrow investigative frameworks routinely prevent these investigations from addressing population-level harms. By failing to detect and address cancer clusters, public health systems inadvertently perpetuate environmental injustices, disproportionately harming communities already underserved and overburdened by pollution.

These failures are not merely scientific but reflect legal and institutional design choices that determine which cancer risks are visible, investigable, and …

Predators And Precedents: Grizzly Bears, Joe Pickett, And The Law Of Delisting, Temple Stoellinger, Kelly Dunning, David Willms, Arthur Middleton, Bethany Aragon

Wyoming Law Review

When a grizzly bear kills a fisherman in C.J. Box’s Three-Inch Teeth, the attack occurs in Wyoming’s Bighorn Mountains—territory where bears “weren’t supposed to be.” This fictional scenario reflects a real dilemma: grizzly bears have recovered so successfully that they now roam beyond designated recovery zones, yet federal delisting efforts have repeatedly failed, caught between contested science and competing narratives about connectivity requirements, ESA policies, federal authority, state and local control, and the prospects for coexistence with apex other predators.

This Article examines how popular culture, legal frameworks, and conservation science intersect to shape wildlife policy. Box’s novel— mixing …

Male Disposability, Law, And Feminism, Edward Cantu

Faculty Works

This article explores scientific evidence that societies care more about the welfare and safety of females than that of males, and that this dynamic of "male disposability" is deeply entrenched in culture, and thus in law. The recognition and integration of male disposability theory would mean an evolutionary leap in modern theorizing about gender and the law, but it is ignored. Why? Feminist theory dominates current academic gender discourse. Far from appreciating the explanatory power of male disposability theory, feminist theorists are often invested in theorizing gendered problems in ways that mischannel compassion away from men and toward women. The …

Comparing Microgrids With Nuclear Energy: Which Is Better To Catapult New York Toward Its Green Energy Future?, Justin R. Ochs

Natural Resources Journal

This Note examines New York’s climate goals under the Climate Leadership and Community Protection Act (CLCPA) by comparing two pivotal energy solutions: nuclear energy and microgrids. Microgrids remain notably underexplored in legal scholarship, particularly their potential to achieve compliance with the CLCPA. By analyzing the economic, environmental, regulatory, and public perception challenges associated with nuclear energy and microgrids, this Note argues that microgrids offer a safer, more flexible, and sustainable option for accelerating New York’s path toward its green energy future. This Note evaluates microgrid projects across New York, along with common critiques regarding the scalability and viability of hybrid …

Table Of Contents

FIU Law Review

No abstract provided.

The Law And Ai As An “Apex Collaborator”: Legal Frameworks For Optimized Cooperation, David S. Filippi, Bill Tomlinson, Andrew W. Torrance

FIU Law Review

Law fundamentally exists to enable human cooperation, providing frameworks for everything from basic contracts to complex international agreements. As artificial intelligence systems grow more sophisticated, they may enable new ways that collaborative activity can occur. We posit the possibility of a new kind of AI entity: the “Apex Collaborator,” a computational system with capabilities for cooperation and partnership that are superior, in at least some ways, to those of humans. Just as apex predators shape the ecosystems in which they live through predation, Apex Collaborators would shape human-AI networks through their ability to enhance peaceful coexistence, collective problem-solving, and shared …

Let’S Talk About The Biological Reality Of Sex, Baby, John Parsi

FIU Law Review

Sex is at the very core of individual identity. It affects the conception of the self and the way others view the individual. Every day, one’s sex may open and close doors, access to communities, and opportunities. Laws that define sex may affirm scientific knowledge and protect people, or threaten to unravel the facts and the reality of sex. A deep unmooring of sex is underway, and this Article aims to halt it. On day one of the current presidential term, January 20, 2025, President Trump signed an Executive Order on “Defending Women from Gender Ideology Extremism and Restoring Biological …

Cruel And Unusual Punishments And The Constitutional Status Of The Idea Of Progress, R. George Wright

FIU Law Review

To this point, we have developed some idea of what progress might have meant to the constitutional Framers, ratifiers, and later judges. We need not attempt the fruitless task of doing any precise head count of the variations of the concrete meaning, perceived likelihood, or value of progress among those parties. Doubtless some persons were more optimistic than others.178 But we need only assume that enough constitutional Framers, ratifiers, and judicial interpreters sufficiently shared any mainstream understanding of progress. Any such constitutional legitimacy of the idea, or the multiple ideas, of progress licenses the language of progress embraced in Trop.

Indigenous Land Seizure & Environmental Injustice: Impacts Of Settler Colonialism, Lydia Moorman

Journal of Earth and Life Science

The fields of conservation and environmentalism prioritize ecosystem health, yet both emerged from western frameworks that displaced and criminalized Indigenous land stewardship. The idealization of “pristine wilderness” narratives served to justify the removal of Indigenous peoples from their homelands and erased millennia of sustainable land stewardship that had maintained ecological balance long before western conservation existed. These narratives not only misrepresented Indigenous relationship with land but also constructed a false dichotomy between humans and nature that positioned Indigenous presence as a threat rather than a source of ecological knowledge. Simultaneously, anthropogenic expansion; such as pipelines, mining, railroads, and other extractive …

Powering The Machine, Draining The Planet: Whether U.S. Environmental Law Is Equipped To Regulate The Energy And Water Demands Of Ai Data Centers, Michael Marcu

Journal of Earth and Life Science

Artificial intelligence (AI) data centers have become one of the United States' fastest-growing and least-regulated sources of environmental stress. In 2024 alone, U.S. data centers consumed 183 terawatt-hours (TWh) of electricity more than the entire nation of Pakistan and consumed an estimated 17 billion gallons of water (IEA, 2025; Berkeley Lab, 2024). By 2030, electricity demand from these facilities is projected to reach 426 TWh, a 133% increase in six years (Pew Research Center, 2025). This paper examines whether the existing U.S. environmental regulatory framework put by the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA), the Clean Water Act (CWA), and the …

Dan Subotnik—Three Encounters And One Strong Memory, Honorable Robert S. French

Touro Law Review

No abstract provided.

Reclaiming The Constitution: "For There Is Always Light, If Only We're Brave Enough To See It", Palma Joy Strand, Gregory J. O'Meara S.J.

Marquette Law Review

As citizens—and as lawyers—we are schooled to view the U.S. Constitution as what—indeed—“constitutes” us as a nation and as a people. As lawyers— and as citizens—we are also schooled to understand that the Constitution is law and that its meaning is to be ascertained through the process of law and by lawyers and judges. This Article builds on a popular constitutionalism frame to describe the profound limitations of restricting constitutional meaning-making to a legal enterprise performed primarily by judges—especially in regard to positive rights written into the Constitution but under-protected in constitutional law. In addition, litigation’s either–or mindset has come …

Re-Evaluating Deshany In An Era Of Gun Violence And Government Inaction, Bonnie Carlson

Marquette Law Review

In DeShaney v. Winnebago County Department of Social Services, the Supreme Court held that the State has no constitutional duty to protect individuals from violence committed by private third parties. An exception to this rule exists when the State has a special relationship to the plaintiff immediately preceding the harm. The DeShaney Court sharply proscribed the scope of the special relationship exception, holding that it only applies when the State has a plaintiff in custody. This effectively closes the door on relief for the vast majority of 42 U.S.C. § 1983 plaintiffs.

This Article proposes a new special relationship test …

Litigating The "Forever Chemical" Problem Through The Endangered Species Act, Charlotte A. Ramirez

Emory Law Journal

Per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS), a class of man-made, resiliently bonded chemicals, cause harm to both humans and animals. These “forever chemicals” can compromise immunity, increase cancer risks, and cause reproductive harm. Addressing the harms caused by PFAS variants is crucial to protect public health, environmental health, and biological diversity. However, the United States’ current regulatory scheme takes a disjointed approach to PFAS regulation. This is complicated by the frequent development of new PFAS variants, whose effects and environmental presence are largely unknown and understudied. While even the protections provided for humans under the current regulatory scheme fall short of …

When Machines Collude: Rebooting Antitrust Law For The Age Of Algorithmic Markets, William K. Knight

Emory Law Journal

Increasingly, our lives are being dominated by algorithms. From social media feeds to credit scoring, algorithms play a major role in our day-to-day lives, whether we recognize it or not. An emerging issue in the modern technology landscape is the potential for algorithms to cause anticompetitive harm to free markets. As pricing algorithms become more advanced and more widespread, they could facilitate collusive arrangements in a manner that bypasses antitrust laws, thereby adversely impacting consumers through higher prices. American competition law, primarily governed by the Sherman Antitrust Act, suffers from glaring deficiencies and ambiguities that remain unresolved, leaving it manifestly …

Governing Ai Without Agencies: Self-Regulatory Organizations And The Federal Backstop, Aram A. Gavoor

GW Law Faculty Publications & Other Works

Artificial intelligence is accelerating American innovation and strategic advantage. The governance task is to provide predictable compliance baselines that support scale and competitiveness while remaining workable under executive branch policy, statutory baselines, and the rules that now govern the administrative state. Congress remains slow and factional, and agencies face rising procedural and remedial constraints. Recent Supreme Court doctrine has reduced the administrative state’s interpretive and enforcement leverage. Regulated entities can challenge agency rules when those rules newly impose concrete harm, litigate statutory meaning without Chevron-style mandatory deference to agency statutory interpretations with limited exceptions, and invoke strengthened procedural safeguards in …

Sex Equality After Skrmetti, Naomi Schoenbaum

GW Law Faculty Publications & Other Works

The Supreme Court’s decision in United States v. Skrmetti upholding a ban on gender-affirming medical care for minors marked a foundational shift in constitutional sex equality doctrine. Rather than recognize the challenged ban’s sex-based line-drawing, the Court recast the statute as a neutral regulation of medical purpose and age. In so doing, it narrowed the definition of what constitutes a sex-based classification and embraced a conception of biological sex as a natural kind—objective, apolitical, and outside the scope of constitutional scrutiny.

The Article identifies this move as a doctrinal departure and a conceptual reconfiguration. The law’s challengers argued that it …

The Promise Of Artificial Intelligence For Identifying And Interpreting The Sources Of International Law, Sean D. Murphy

GW Law Faculty Publications & Other Works

Sir Michael Wood’s remarkable career was deeply enmeshed in the pragmatics of international law; how to make it work as a part of the lawyering that occurs daily in foreign ministries, international organizations, and courts or tribunals. Yet that focus on practical lawyering did not allow him to eschew broader considerations of doctrine and even theory. While his work on the International Law Commission as Special Rapporteur for Identification of Customary International Law was motivated by a sense that national court judges struggled to understand the basic parameters of that source of law, the work necessarily entailed grappling with some …

Racial Disparities In Maternal Mortality: The Role Of Explicit And Implicit Bias In U.S. Healthcare, Lailah Allen

Capstone Showcase

Maternal mortality in the United States remains a critical public health crisis, with disproportionately high rates among Black and other minority women. Despite advances in obstetric medicine, racial disparities in pregnancy-related deaths persist due to structural inequities, implicit bias in healthcare delivery, unequal access to prenatal and postpartum care, and broader social determinants of health. Nationally, Black women are significantly more likely to experience severe maternal morbidity and mortality compared to White women, reflecting longstanding inequities embedded within the healthcare system. This paper examines the relationship between race, healthcare access, and maternal outcomes through a focused case study of and …

Food Stamp Participation And Health Outcomes In Ca Immigrants, Esther Kang

Scripps Senior Theses

The U.S. social welfare system includes programs aiming to increase access to nutritious food to reduce nutrition insecurity. However, studies suggest that immigrants continue to face disproportionate risks of nutrition insecurity and may face barriers to enrollment due to legal status. This study, using secondary data from the 2023 California Health Interview Survey, examines the associations between food stamp participation, food insecurity, and clinical diagnosis of diabetes among adult U.S.-born, naturalized, and non-citizen adults in California. The findings suggest that those enrolled in food stamps are more likely to report food insecurity than those who are not enrolled, and that …

Neurobiological Determinants Of Psychopathy And Their Ethical Implications In Capital Punishment Cases, Brooklyn Lewis

Williams Honors College, Honors Research Projects

This literature review examines the relationship between the neurobiological determinants of psychopathy and the ethical implications of applying capital punishment to violent offenders. Drawing on research from neuroscience, psychology, and criminal justice, the paper explores how structural and functional differences in brain regions associated with emotional processing, impulse control, and moral reasoning are linked to psychopathic traits. The review synthesizes findings on how these neurobiological factors may contribute to an increased risk of violent behavior while emphasizing that such influences are not deterministic. The paper further analyzes how neuroscientific evidence is interpreted within legal contexts, particularly in relation to assessments …

Embryonic Option-Hood, Elissa Philip Gentry, Mackenzi Barrett, W. Kip Viscusi

SMU Law Review

A frozen embryo represents not merely a potential human life but a deferred decision to trigger this potential. Parties value this opportunity for deferral because it allows them to retain the option to attempt conception after any uncertainty about future events or desires has resolved. Failing to recognize this “option value” of embryos has resulted in confusion over the best approach to allocating ownership of embryos and calculating damages for reproductive harms. This Article provides a novel paradigm showing that embryos should be treated as neither persons nor mere property; instead, a significant portion of their value is in their …

Racing To Safety: Tax Policy For Ai Safety-By-Design, Mirit Eyal-Cohen, Yonathan Arbel

SMU Law Review

The White House recently announced its vision of artificial intelligence (AI) policy: AI development is a race and America must win it. To that end, a new America’s AI Action Plan directs federal agencies and states to remove regulatory barriers to AI development and accelerate innovation. This approach leaves limited room for regulatory measures that would address the safety risks of powerful AI systems: their behavior in novel domains remains unpredictable, their decision-making opaqueness, and their alignment with human values is uncertain. While experts warn of large-scale accidents, policymakers find themselves in a bind: Regulate AI and cede ground to …

The Futility Of “Genocide” In Ending A Genocide, Shannon Fyfe

Scholarly Articles

After the horrors of World War II, the Genocide Convention of 1948 sought to invest the international community in creating legal obligations that “sovereign” states commit to preventing and punishing future genocides. Unfortunately, this has not succeeded. International legal jurisprudence pertaining to identifying and punishing genocide has developed at the International Court of Justice and at other international criminal courts and tribunals. Yet the invocation of the term “genocide” in public, academic, or legal discourse has generally failed to ensure the participation of the international community in stopping a genocide. The United States, for instance, has failed to play the …

Navigating The Double Helix: Patent Law, Bioethics, And The Regulatory Future Of Gene Editing, Kayla Flanders

Cardozo Arts & Entertainment Law Journal

No abstract provided.

Digital Emblems In Cyberspace: A Deterrent Or A Target?, Fatemah Albader

Emory International Law Review Recent Developments

In 2022, the ICRC proposed a digital emblem to identify and protect medical and humanitarian digital assets during armed conflict. While this initiative marks a pivotal evolution of IHL into cyberspace, its effectiveness depends on whether states can ensure accountability, attribution, and compliance. This article argues that digitalizing IHL’s distinctive emblems, such as the red cross, is not optional but mandatory under both conventional and customary law. Once developed, states must adopt and regulate the digital emblem to protect hospital networks and medical personnel online as they are protected offline. However, emblem digitalization alone cannot deter deliberate cyberattacks or unintentional …

Beyond Judicial Intent: The Agency Of The Defense Counsel In Ozawa’S And Thind’S Supreme Court Cases, Bret K. Luchs

Master's Theses or Doctor of Nursing Practice

This thesis seeks to examine how specific legal strategies by the defense counsel in Ozawa v. United States, 260 U.S. 178 (1922), and United States v. Bhagat Singh Thind, 261 U.S. 204 (1923), compelled the Supreme Court of the United States into a reactive and contradictory position. A re-examination of Ozawa and Thind delves deeper into the legal briefs and arguments made by Takao Ozawa and Bhagat Singh Thind, alongside their legal teams. These briefs, opinions of the court, past lower court cases, and personal statements by Ozawa and Thind demonstrate how they did not surrender to the confines of …

Constitutionalizing Parents’ Rights, Akshat Agarwal

Case Western Reserve Law Review

No abstract provided.

Uncharted Waters: Barriers To Ocean Carbon Removal In The High Seas Under Unclos And The Bbnj, Connor Stevens

Vanderbilt Journal of Transnational Law

No abstract provided.

Nest Eggs And Lifelines: The Overlooked Strain Of Economic Volatility On 401(K) Participants, Samantha Prince

Faculty Scholarship

Many Americans rely on defined contribution plans like 401(k) plans for retirement savings. These plans do not guarantee a fixed retirement benefit; rather, the benefit is based on accumulated contributions and investment performance. When the stock market drops, so do retirement account balances. When inflation hikes living expenses, money does not go as far. President Donald Trump's policies, including those associated with tariffs, are causing economic and resource volatility leading to financial hardship. Americans worry as they watch living costs increase and their retirement savings diminish. It is well known that retirees rely on 401(k) plan balances to fund their …