Digital Commons Network^™

Silent At Sentencing: Waiver Doctrine And A Capital Defendant's Right To Present Mitigating Evidence After Schriro V. Landrigan, Dale E. Ho

Florida Law Review

The consideration of mitigating evidence—evidence that weighs against the imposition of the death penalty in a capital defendant’s individual case—has been deemed a “constitutionally indispensable” feature of a valid capital sentencing scheme. And yet, Jeffrey Landrigan, like many capital defendants, was sentenced to death without the consideration of any mitigating evidence whatsoever. Landrigan’s trial counsel failed to uncover substantial evidence of Landrigan’s history of severe physical and sexual abuse as a child, and of the possible biological effects of his mother’s alcohol and drug abuse. Every member of the Ninth Circuit en banc panel considering his case deemed his counsel’s …

Bending Nature, Bending Law, David G. Owen

Florida Law Review

No abstract provided.

Disability Stigma And Intraclass Discrimination, Jeannette Cox

Florida Law Review

By dramatically enlarging the Americans with Disabilities Act’s (ADA) protected class, the recent amendments to the ADA increase the opportunities for employers to replace one member of the ADA’s protected class with another. Although disparities in the social stigma associated with different disabilities suggests that such employment decisions are not automatically free from disability-based animus, many courts historically regarded such decisions as immune from ADA scrutiny. They held that the ADA only prohibited discrimination between persons inside and outside the ADA’s protected class. Today, this “no intraclass claims” approach persists in a modified form: Some courts limit intraclass claims to …

Gina: A Genetic Information Nondiscrimination Solution In Search Of A Problem, Patricia Alten

Florida Law Review

Genetic discrimination is unfair to workers and their families. It is unjustified—among other reasons, because it involves little more than medical speculation. A genetic predisposition toward cancer or heart disease does not mean the condition will develop. To address the potential use of genetic information by employers to discriminate against employees, Congress enacted the Genetic Information Nondiscrimination Act of 2008 (GINA). This Note proposes the need for modifications to GINA before it is effective in late 2009. In its current state, the provisions relating to employers are overly broad and could catch many employers in unknowing violations. Although GINA prohibits …

State Standing After Massachusetts V. Epa, Calvin Massey

Florida Law Review

No abstract provided.

Toward A More Strategic National Stockpile, Troy Rule

Texas A&M Law Review

The COVID–19 pandemic exposed major deficiencies in the United States’ approach to stockpiling for emergencies. States, cities, and hospitals across the country had meager inventories of critical medical items on hand when the pandemic first reached U.S. soil, and the federal government’s Strategic National Stockpile proved far too small to serve the country’s needs in the first several months of the crisis. As nationwide shortages spread, many state governments were compelled to bid against each other to procure scarce medical supplies—a distribution approach that disadvantaged low-income and minority communities and left countless healthcare professionals and staff ill-equipped to protect themselves …

Review Essay, Robert L. Bateman

The US Army War College Quarterly: Parameters

No abstract provided.

Book Reviews, Usawc Press

The US Army War College Quarterly: Parameters

No abstract provided.

Animating The U.S. War Crimes Act, Beth Van Schaack

International Law Studies

All war crimes are challenging to prosecute. Typical reasons include the technicality of some constitutive elements, the difficulties of amassing sufficient evidence, the vagaries of unreliable or unavailable witnesses, and the often-impenetrable khaki wall of silence. Adding to these challenges, the United States has erected a number of idiosyncratic structural barriers in the way in which it has incorporated the prohibitions against war crimes into its domestic legal frameworks, both military and civilian. This article addresses problems with the U.S. federal war crimes statute and proposes reforms that would (1) better conform to U.S. obligations under the Geneva Conventions and …

Race And Reasonable Suspicion, Ric Simmons

Florida Law Review

The current political moment requires society to rethink the ways that race impacts policing. Many of the solutions will be political in nature, but legal reform is necessary as well. Law enforcement officers have a long history of considering a suspect’s race when conducting criminal investigations. The civil rights movement and the progressive criminal justice decisions of the Warren Court mitigated the explicit use of race as a factor, but there is ample evidence that many modern police officers still openly or implicitly use race to guide their investigative decisions.

This Article examines and critiques how courts have historically analyzed …

Expanding Lgbt, Marie-Amélie George

Florida Law Review

In many circles, “LGBT” is an antiquated acronym that excludes many of the individuals that the movement is supposed to serve. “LGBTQ,” “LGBTQIA,” and other variations of the acronym have become ever more pervasive as nonbinary, intersex, and asexual individuals have become increasingly visible. The LGBT initials that once signaled solidarity and intersection are now appearing limited because they highlight only certain subgroups.

Although many movement organizations have adopted a more expansive formulation of LGBT, national legal rights organizations have limited their agendas to LGBT issues. Until recently, they devoted the bulk of their efforts to gay and lesbian concerns …

Male Same-Sex "Horseplay": The Epicenter Of Sexual Harassment?, Kimberly D. Bailey

Florida Law Review

In Oncale v. Sundowner Offshore Services, Inc., the U.S. Supreme Court recognized same-sex sexual harassment as a cognizable claim of sex discrimination under Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. At the time, many scholars found this recognition to be significant and important, but some also argued that the Court provided an incomplete analysis regarding the meaning of discrimination “because of sex.” Specifically, some scholars argue that the Court’s opinion reinforces the sexual desire paradigm in the analysis of sexual harassment cases. Building upon this critique, this Article focuses specifically on the harassment of men who generally …

Doomed To Fail: Ag-Gag Laws And The Canadian Charter, Samantha Lynne Skinner

LLM Theses

In late 2019, ag-gag laws began being introduced in Canada. Ag-gag laws are named for their intended effect of gagging activists from exposing the realities of the animal agriculture industry. Animal activists seek to gather and publicly disseminate information using means of bearing witness, undercover investigations, and civil disobedience. Ag-gag laws originated in the US in the 1990s, but saw a revival in the 2010s. In the US, animal law organizations such as the Animal Legal Defense Fund have been successfully challenging the constitutionality of ag-gag laws, with courts in six states finding ag-gag laws to violate the First Amendment …

Defining Antisemitism, Mark Goldfeder

Seton Hall Law Review

No abstract provided.

Perlindungan Hukum Terhadap Perawat Yang Terkena Penyakit Akibat Kerja Berdasarkan Peraturan Perundang-Undangan Yang Berlaku Di Indonesia, Siti Non Dwi Zulaeha

"Dharmasisya” Jurnal Program Magister Hukum FHUI

Occupational safety and health are the most important part of providing protection for workers. With the rapid development of technology raises the potential to threaten occupational safety and health. One example is the Hospital industry. At present the Hospital has been supported by sophisticated and modern tools to support the health services provided to patients. Hospital is a health service industry / workplace that has a high risk to the safety and health of hospital human resources such as patients, visitors, and the hospital environment. In this case the hospital human resources, one of them is Nurse. Nurses are health …

Article Iii And The Political Question Doctrine, Scott Dodson

Northwestern University Law Review

Courts and commentators have often sourced the political question doctrine in Article III, a repository of other separation-of-powers doctrines applicable to the federal courts. Rucho v. Common Cause, a blockbuster political question case decided in 2019, explicitly tied the doctrine to Article III. But the historical development of the doctrine undermines the depth of that connection. Further, sourcing the doctrine in Article III leads to some very odd effects, including leaving state courts free to answer federal political questions. This Article argues that the source of the political question doctrine is in substantive law, not in Article III. Such …

Upaya Perlindungan Dan Keselamatan Kerja Pekerja Anak Di Jermal, Hamidah Siadari

"Dharmasisya” Jurnal Program Magister Hukum FHUI

Poorness is the main factor of children forced to work, this job is to meet the needs of live to his or her family. Indonesia has provided a rule of law for children who are forced to work, but on the condition that the work does not interfere with education, does not harm its health and safety. But the fact is that there are still employers who dare to hire children for reasons of lower paid wages, but not necessarily the jobs given to the child are lighter or sometimes even as heavy as adults. One type of work that …

Pengendalian Peredaran Produk Secara Mandiri Sebagai Instrumen Wajib Dalam Pelaksanaan Tanggung Jawab Sosial Korporasi Rokok: Sebuah Perspektif Sosio-Legal, Auditya Firza Saputra

"Dharmasisya” Jurnal Program Magister Hukum FHUI

The number of smokers and cigarette sales in Indonesia has been increasing every year. In parallel with that, the latent risk faced by society is increased. In the socio-cultural context, the cigarette industry has been transformed into a hegemony whose expansion is unstoppable. The circulation of cigarette products is still become an unresolvable problem. Such problem expands from merely legal issues to the ethical dimension. The corporate social responsibility carried out by the corporation tends to be in favor of promotional motive, or creating false public reputation, which makes its implementation often deviate from its philosophy. Inevitably, the smoking phenomenon …

Are Good Deeds Being Punished?: Independent Charity Patient Assistance Programs And The Anti-Kickback Statute, John C. Hood

Florida Law Review

Largely funded by the pharmaceutical industry, Independent Charity Patient Assistance Programs (PAPs) dispense billions of dollars of aid annually to help financially vulnerable patients afford their prescription drugs. Recently, these charitable entities and their drug company donors have faced mounting legal scrutiny for allegedly funneling illegal kickbacks to Medicare beneficiaries. This Note examines Independent Charity PAPs and the issues they raise under the Anti-Kickback Statute (AKS). It explores the uncertain legal environment in which Independent Charity PAPs operate and concludes that a new AKS regulatory safe harbor may be necessary to preserve the viability of the safety net assistance that …

Asking The Menstruation Question To Achieve Menstrual Justice, Margaret E. Johnson

All Faculty Scholarship

Menstruation is a situs of discrimination, oppression, harassment, and microaggression. Employers fire workers for bleeding and experiencing period pain. Schools control menstruating students’ access to bathrooms, products, and menstrual education. Prisons control their residents’ free access to menstrual products. There are both “obvious and non-obvious relationships” between menstrual discrimination and discrimination on the basis of race, gender, class, gender identity, and disability. This Essay suggests we ask the “menstruation question” as part of our examination of all forms of intersectional oppressions and to achieve menstrual justice. For example, if we see something racist, we should ask “where is the menstrual …

Pediatric Covid-19 Vaccines: What Parents, Practitioners, And Policy Makers Need To Know, William J. Moss, Lawrence O. Gostin, Jennifer B. Nuzzo

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

The US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) granted Emergency Use Authorization for Pfizer-BioNTech’s mRNA COVID-19 vaccine (BNT162b2) for children 5 to 11 years of age on October 29, 2021. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention recommended use of the vaccine among children in this age group on November 2, 2021. Approximately 28 million children are now eligible for vaccination, with only those younger than 5 years remaining excluded from vaccine eligibility. The benefits of pediatric COVID-19 vaccines are clear. Vaccinations protect children, decrease spread to families and communities, and ensure educational continuity. What do parents, practitioners, and policy makers …

Semmy Lasco Kavinga V The People Appeal No 51/2018 (21 August 2019), O'Brien Kaaba

SAIPAR Case Review

The law on sentencing in Zambia is to a great extent chaotic and in disarray. No clear standards are set by the superior courts to guide lower courts and litigants. Often the sentences are at variance with constitutional norms and there has been no sustained effort to align the law of sentencing with constitutional standards, save for a few cases concerning corporal punishment. Somehow, a judicial culture has evolved and continues to grow of sentencing people without regard for constitutional norms. Yet the constitution is the supreme law, the ultimate source of all law and ought to permeate all laws …

Non-Patent Intellectual Property Barriers To Covid-19 Vaccines, Treatment And Containment, Sean Flynn, Erica Nkrumah, Luca Schirru

Joint PIJIP/TLS Research Paper Series

As the World Trade Organization considers a proposal to waive or otherwise address intellectual property barriers to the global response to the COVID-19 pandemic, most of the attention given by scholars and policy makers has been focused on patents. The original proposals by South Africa and India, as well as the groundbreaking support of the United States, however, explicitly applied to all forms of intellectual property. This paper documents many instances where non-patent forms of intellectual property create barriers to the global scale up of access to vaccines, treatments, and the ability to contain the virus through social distancing. Addressing …

Menstruation Discrimination And The Problem Of Shadow Precedents, Deborah Widiss

Articles by Maurer Faculty

A burgeoning menstrual justice movement calls attention to menstruation-related discrimination in workplaces, schools, prisons, and many other aspects of life. In recent years, a few courts have suggested such discrimination could violate Title VII, the federal law that prohibits sex discrimination in employment. Their analysis focuses on the Pregnancy Discrimination Act (PDA), an amendment to Title VII passed to override a Supreme Court case that had held pregnancy discrimination was not sex discrimination.

This essay, written for a symposium at Columbia Law School, applies my earlier research on the statutory interpretation of Congressional overrides to highlight two potential challenges this …

As Brown Has Waned, Aziz Z. Huq

University of Chicago Law Review

No abstract provided.

Property Law For The Ages, Michael C. Pollack, Lior Jacob Strahilevitz

Articles

Within the next forty years, the number of Americans over age sixty-five is projected to nearly double. This seismic demographic shift will necessitate a reckoning in several areas of law and policy, but property law is especially unprepared. Built primarily for young and middle-aged white men, the common law of property has been critiqued for decades for the ways in which it oppresses or simply leaves behind people based on their race, sex, Native heritage, and more. This Article contributes a new focus on property law’s treatment of people based on their advanced age. Burdened by higher relocation costs, more …

Chosen Family, Care, And The Workplace, Deborah Widiss

Articles by Maurer Faculty

Employees often request time off work to care for the medical needs of loved ones who are part of their extended or chosen family. Until recently, most workers would not have had any legal right to take such leave. A rapidly growing number of state laws, however, not only guarantee paid time off for family health needs, but also adopt innovative and expansive definitions of eligible family.

Several provide leave to care for intimate partners without requiring legal formalization of the relationship. Some go further to include any individual who has a relationship with the employee that is “like” or …

Coronavirus, Compulsory Licensing, And Collaboration: Analyzing The 2020 Global Vaccine Response With 20/20 Hindsight, Arjun Padmanabhan

Student Scholarship

In December 2019, COVID-19, a novel strain of the SARS-2 Virus, appeared in Wuhan, China. Within a year, over ninety million people had been infected, and two million had died. Amid all the death and desolation, humanity's ingenuity and willpower emerged in history's greatest vaccine race. The global community sought to find novel ways to protect innovation and intellectual property while still collaborating to roll out a vaccine in record time. Despite the presence of compulsory licensing provisions like 28 U.S.C. § 1498 and the Bayh-Dole Act in the U.S., and the TRIPS Agreement at the international level, the journey …

Vaccine Clinical Trials And Data Infrastructure, Ana Santos Rutschman

Utah Law Review

We find ourselves at a momentous turn in the history of vaccines. The COVID-19 pandemic triggered a quasi-global vaccine race that not only compressed vaccine research and development (R&D) timelines, but also paved the way for the administration of a new type of vaccine technology – mRNA vaccines, which work in substantially different ways from the vaccines in use before the pandemic.

While the process of bringing emerging COVID-19 vaccines to market has taken place in an unusually short timeframe, it was largely predicated on the same scientific and regulatory processes that govern the development, approval and deployment of new …

The Open Covid Pledge: Design, Implementation And Preliminary Assessment Of An Intellectual Property Commons, Jorge L. Contreras

Utah Law Review

Early during the COVID-19 pandemic, a number of widely-publicized incidents gave rise to concerns that holders of patents and other intellectual property (IP) rights could hinder the development, manufacture and distribution of essential medical devices, protective equipment and biomedical products. The global response to these concerns was swift and included the issuance of compulsory licensing orders by several national governments, as well as the proposal of a technology pool by the World Health Organization (WHO). Alongside these efforts, a group of scientific, engineering and legal experts created a lightweight, open framework under which IP holders could voluntarily pledge not to …