Digital Commons Network^™

Moving Beyond Worker Rights To Worker Justice, Shefali Milczarek-Desai

Texas A&M Law Review

Precarious workers’ on-the-ground realities offer a startling truth often obscured by the jurisprudence of work—that worker justice is greatly circumscribed by and often lies beyond the reach of worker rights laws. This Article is the first to evaluate whether the worker rights paradigm can fulfill the goals of worker justice and, if not, to prefigure what might.

The worker rights paradigm emerged from a quest for worker justice that has been transmuted by work law and the political economy into a workers-as-rights-holders status requiring robust enforcement of worker rights laws. This Article introduces the concept of empirical critical work law …

Energy Data Justice, Heather E. Payne, Joel B. Eisen

Texas A&M Law Review

As the energy system becomes increasingly data-driven, this Article proposes a new framework for treating access to and governance of that data—energy data justice—that synthesizes the insights of two rapidly developing bodies of scholarship: energy justice and data justice. In our view, energy data justice examines not only how data is used to shape outcomes within the energy system but also focuses on the power dynamics relating to the collection and use of energy-related data. Similarly to how scholars have advocated for curbing Big Tech’s most pernicious data practices, we argue for treating energy data not simply as a technical …

Ai And Legal Malpractice: Are We Due For A Reckoning?, John Browning

Texas A&M Law Review

As the rate of AI adoption by lawyers steadily climbs, unfortunately so has the number of incidents of AI misuse by attorneys. For some time, courts satisfied themselves with giving offending lawyers warnings, ordering them to take additional CLE, and/or administering relatively nominal monetary sanctions. Lately, however, frustrated judges throughout the country have upped the ante by not only assessing increasingly higher sanctions but also imposing case dismissals and suspensions or disciplinary referrals for the lawyers involved. As this article discusses, with their negligence exposed to the public eye and the harsh gaze of their clients, lawyers who misuse AI …

Care After Insurance, Elenore Wade

Journal of Law and Health

This essay describes the theoretical and doctrinal problems caused by viewing healthcare and medicine through the framework of risk-based insurance. It also explains how the framework affects agency and institutional behavior in non-insurance medical payment programs and how it affects public political discourse on healthcare.

Cookies Crumble: Reimagining Internet Personal Jurisdiction Post Briskin V. Shopify, Gabriel Wherley

University of Cincinnati Law Review

No abstract provided.

Punishing Homelessness: An Analysis Of Criminalizing Outdoor Sleeping, Maggie Hazelbaker

University of Cincinnati Law Review

No abstract provided.

Turning The Page Backward: Reconciling The Current Circuit Split On Whether The First Amendment Can Be Used To Challenge Modern Book Banning, Stella Brocker

University of Cincinnati Law Review

No abstract provided.

Did College Football Betting Markets Correctly Assess Game-Shortening Rule Changes?, Kevin Krieger, Justin Davis

UNLV Gaming Research & Review Journal

Established rules and norms are standard within competitive sports. However, changes are often made to create better functioning contests or improved viewer experiences. We examine the impact of one such change on sports wagering markets. To shorten college football games, starting in 2023, the National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA) adopted rule changes that would, in part, enable the game clock to run more frequently. This decision might create games with fewer plays, and scoring in such games might also be lower. We document the impact of these changes and question whether the sports betting markets quickly ascertained the impacts of …

When The Monsoon No Longer Returns: Climate Racism And Displacement In Pakistan, Ayman Irfan

Pace Environmental Law Review

International law does not recognize climate displacement as a distinct legal category. Refugee law protects those fleeing persecution, not environmental collapse. Climate treaties regulate emissions and finance but avoid enforceable responsibility for the human consequences of warming. Human rights law intervenes only at extreme thresholds. This fragmentation leaves millions displaced by climate-intensified disasters without coherent protection. Using Pakistan’s 2022 floods as a case study, this Article argues that climate-induced displacement must be treated as a foreseeable legal consequence of atmospheric harm. Pakistan contributes less than one percent of global greenhouse gas emissions yet ranks among the most climate-vulnerable states. The …

Citizenship At Sea: A Comparative Perspective On Blue Justice In The Andaman Sea And The Mediterranean In The Context Of Climate Change, Emilio Cocco

Pace Environmental Law Review

Discourses of the ocean in the sociological and socio-legal world have, until recently, been approached from majoritarian, terrestrial, profane and nation-centric perspectives. These perspectives are embedded in legal and regulatory regimes to the detriment of Indigenous and marginalized maritime communities. Drawing on the blue turn in sociology and socio-legal scholarship, this Article, in comparing the experiences of the Moken people of the Andaman Sea with those of migrants, fishers, and island communities in the Mediterranean, exposes the violence of such narratives. Through a comparative analysis of maritime borders, marine protected areas, tourism, and fisheries regulation, the Article explores how governance …

Mass Resettlement Politics And The Future Of Hyper-Local Climate Migration Strategies, Sarah Rogerson

Pace Environmental Law Review

Climate change is requiring state and local governments to engage in short- and long-term strategic thinking and municipal planning. Critically, the movement of people from communities that have become uninhabitable due to climate change to other communities in more resilient areas (sometimes called “climate havens”) is a reality that most municipalities in the United States are not currently well-equipped to address. Experts predict as many as 1.2 billion climate-related migrants worldwide by 2050, with at least 93 million Americans expected to relocate to more habitable places by 2070. To put this into perspective, 93 million people is just under the …

Climate Migration And Reparations: Reflections On The Icj Advisory Opinion On Climate Change, Carmen G. Gonzalez

Pace Environmental Law Review

Climate mobility governance is at an inflection point. Major developments, such as the International Court of Justice (ICJ) Advisory Opinion on climate change, are opening legal pathways to climate reparations and reshaping global policy debates on climate-induced migration. Climate-vulnerable states and peoples are calling for reparations for the intertwined injustices of slavery, colonialism and climate change and for legal frameworks that recognize the right to stay and the right to migrate based on the right to self-determination. This article examines the legal and ethical basis for reparative approaches to climate-induced migration. The article discusses the link between climate change and …

Perception Is Reality: The Obvious Interest Of State And Local Governments In Fighting Corruption Through The Enactment Of Contribution Limits, Jordan Al-Rawi

San Diego Law Review

Individual campaign contribution limits are one of the few remaining constitutional tools in a state or local government’s toolkit for fighting corruption, or its appearance, in elections.  Because contribution limits marginally burden a contributor’s First Amendment freedoms, a challenged limit must survive an arduous tailoring analysis to ensure that the limit is closely drawn to the government’s purported interest in combatting actual or perceived quid pro quo corruption.  However, before a challenged limit is subjected to this tailoring analysis, the government must first demonstrate that it has an individualized interest in addressing the existence of actual or perceived quid pro …

Calling Balls And Three Strikes, Tobie J. Smith

San Diego Law Review

The Supreme Court has revitalized the jury’s role in criminal sentencing over the past quarter century, reaffirming that the Sixth Amendment right to trial by jury extends to factfinding that increases the punishment range for a conviction.  But one class of sentencing findings—those related to a defendant’s criminal history—has been excluded.  The Court has upheld an exception to the jury right where the fact to be found is whether a defendant has a prior conviction.  Relying on that prior-conviction exception, many jurisdictions have continued to allow judges to increase the possible sentence based on their own preponderance-of-the-evidence findings about disputed …

Penetrating The Veil: Why Congress Regulating The Sperm Donation Process Is Not Nuts!, Matthew Leung

San Diego Law Review

The Commerce Clause is one of the strongest and most expansive powers granted to Congress under the U.S. Constitution.  While its strength has fluctuated throughout history, its power will undoubtedly be important in tackling modern problems, including regulating the Wild West of sperm donation.  The rapid expansion of the commercial sperm banking industry and the rise in the need for sperm donors have exposed significant regulatory gaps in the United States.  Although these groups support family formation for individuals facing infertility, same-sex couples, and single parents, federal oversight is largely limited when screening donors.  As a result, critical issues, including …

Zero-Sum Empathy: The Supreme Court's 2025 Term Decisions On Gender Identity, Susan Etta Keller

ConLawNOW

This past term, the Supreme Court majority continued to follow a pattern of rendering transgender individuals essentially invisible in the cases that concern their rights. In last year’s United States v. Skrmetti, the transgender youth affected by the ban on transgender care were largely absent from the majority opinion holding that such bans discriminated on the basis of neither sex nor transgender status. This term, the majority continued a similar trend, deciding two cases on the emergency docket that ignored the lived experience of transgender individuals while significantly affecting them, and one case on the merits, West Virginia v. …

Fines, Fees, And The Carceral Economic Conditions Of Public Education, Thalia González

Washington and Lee Law Review Online

In this Article, I apply an expanded concept of education carcerality to identify and analyze a largely unexamined modality of punitive economic governance—intra-system educational fines and fees. Distinguished from other forms of childhood financial sanctions, including the criminalization of ordinary child and adolescent behavior in schools through the use of municipal fines and fees, these carceral-penal practices are exclusively defined, imposed, and collected within school systems themselves. Drawing on original data from 101 publicly available policies governing the two largest school districts by student population in each state and the District of Columbia, this Article contributes to the literature with …

Deportation By Deception: Coerced Administrative Voluntary Departures And The Illusion Of Choice, Fonda Pham

Washington and Lee Law Review Online

Administrative voluntary departure allows noncitizens facing removal to leave the United States by waiving their right to a hearing before an immigration judge. Although this process provides noncitizens with a quicker alternative to a lengthy removal hearing, the process is not always as “voluntary” as its name suggests. Over the past four decades, noncitizens have alleged that immigration officers threatened and intimidated them in order to obtain waivers of consent, including threats against family members, prolonged detention, and physical abuse. Although the Fifth Amendment of the Constitution states that all persons physically present in the U.S. must receive due process …

International Law Can't Get No Respect, Cindy G. Buys

ConLawNOW

This Essay addresses the recent trend in the U.S. Supreme Court of refusing to seriously engage with the United States’ commitments under international law. It argues this refusal to acknowledge the role of international law in U.S. law disregards the U.S. Constitution’s inclusion of treaties as part of the Supreme Law of the Land and the Court’s own long-standing position that “international law is part of our law.” This Essay uses two cases from the Court’s 2025 term, Mullin v. Al Otro Lado and Cisco Systems, Inc. v. Doe to illustrate the Court’s disregard of international law and highlights some …

Voices Of Resistance: The People, The Press, And The Law, Robert S. Chang, Erica Lomeli Corcoran, Memo Torres, Gary Williams, Isais Benavides, Julie Morales, Astrid Hernandez

Loyola Interdisciplinary Journal of Public Interest Law

Loyola Public Interest Palooza Panel Transcription

Wednesday, March 25, 2026

Chin Music: Chilling Legal Advocacy Through Executive Orders Attacking Law Firms, Robert S. Chang

Loyola Interdisciplinary Journal of Public Interest Law

Introduction to amicus brief challenging executive orders targeting law firms.

The amicus brief itself is reproduced as filed with the Supreme Court of the United States.

Her Discerning Eye, Abigail Stepnitz

ConLawNOW

Court watchers read each Supreme Court term like tea leaves, seeking in the record a deeper meaning about who we are and where we are going. To read the recent term, this Essay takes up Oliver Wendell Holmes’s image of law as a tapestry woven for its initiates and Robert Cover’s account of courts as jurispathic, killing competing legal meanings to preserve a coherent archive. It sees the 2025–26 term not as a set of doctrinal developments or even political compromises, but as a weave of foreclosed claims, in which what the discerning eye can read is those foreclosures, those …

An Integrated Review Of Maritime Emission Reduction Through Regulatory Operational Fuel And Technological Approaches, Ehab S. Elabd, Ahmed M. Shama

Blue Economy

The research endeavor at hand is basically meant to trace the most prominent regulatory, operational, fuel-related, and technological approaches employed for maritime emission reduction. From a quantitative perspective, the conducted review comprises four major categories and 80 research contributions. Operational optimization and efficiency strategies and alternative-fuel solutions take the largest shares of the investigations reviewed. Operational optimization and efficiency strategies comprise 29 studies (36.3%), while alternative-fuel solutions comprise 28 studies (35.0%). Comparably, port-related emissions and mitigation strategies include 15 studies (18.8%), whereas design optimization and technological innovations incorporate 8 studies (10.0%). Considering the fact that maritime transport is responsible for …

Muscle Shoals: A Plan For The Use Of The United States Properties On The Tennessee Power By Private Industry For Of "The Manufacture Of Fertilizers And Other Useful Products", Muscle Shoals Commission, United States Government Printing Office Washington: 1931

Documents

A plan created by the Muscle Shoals commission for instituting a series of fertilizer production operations in the Tennessee Valley area. In addition to written analysis, the document contains multiple images, illustrations, charts, graphs, and maps of the area to illustrate the reasoning of the plan.

Although the plan was never fully brought to fruition, it represents a crucial piece of agricultural and infrastructural history in the Shoals, Alabama alongside existent history on the Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA) and the development of the nitrate plants.

Between Shut It Off And Keep It On: The Legality Of Internet Shutdowns Under International Law, Yohannes Eneyew Ayalew

Vanderbilt Journal of Transnational Law

Internet shutdowns are on the surge across the globe, at least four dozen states-imposed internet shutdowns in 2024 alone, in armed conflicts and other situations. In some states where an authoritarian propensity or “digital sovereignty” reigns, internet shutdowns are being imposed to control political narratives during the conduct of hostilities. These states justify their actions using a “shut it off” argument, claiming that the internet is a luxury and further asserting that access to the internet may be overridden by national security or other justifications. On the other hand, there are states that advance open access to the

Internet shutdowns …

Improving Case Management For Refugee Child Brides, Harper Kelly Esterle

Vanderbilt Journal of Transnational Law

A significant number of forcibly displaced persons throughout the world are not only children, but children who are married. When these married minor refugees arrive in host countries, they are often met with concern, judgment, or a critical lack of understanding or regulated procedure for handling their immigration cases. Children are often forcibly separated from their partners and thus isolated from the only family they came with, or they are forced to undergo an extensive judicial review process that, by the time it is resolved, is no longer relevant as the married minors at issue have since reached the age …

A Century Of Complexity: Reassessing Jurisdictional Veil Piercing In Light Of Modern Corporate Structures, Dominic Steve Brown

Vanderbilt Law Review

Modern corporate enterprises frequently operate through intricate networks of layered subsidiaries, yet courts continue to rely on a rigid and outdated presumption of corporate separateness rooted in a decision predating the current personal jurisdiction regime. In the context of jurisdictional veil piercing, this presumption of separateness has produced doctrinal confusion, inconsistent outcomes, and underenforcement against parent corporations that frequently control, and profit from, forum-based activities carried out by subsidiaries.

This Note argues that the prevailing approach, involving the importation of substantive corporate law doctrines into the jurisdictional analysis, contravenes both modern personal jurisdiction doctrine and contemporary corporate practice. Drawing on …

The Normative Canons Of Criminal Law, Brian G. Slocum

Vanderbilt Law Review

The rule of lenity is an ancient maxim directing that ambiguities in criminal statutes be interpreted in favor of defendants. Courts rarely rely on the rule of lenity, though, and its future is currently being debated. Justice Kavanaugh argues for its elimination, even as Justice Gorsuch argues for it to be strengthened. Most commentators agree with Justice Gorsuch, typically advocating that the rule of lenity be made more powerful. This Article argues for a different approach: The rule of lenity can be strengthened by limiting it to resolving linguistic ambiguity. 

This Article explains why the rule of lenity plays an …

Weird Cops (Agency Police), Farhang Heydari

Vanderbilt Law Review

The police badge has migrated deep into the administrative state. Parks, schools, transit, housing, revenue, conservation, insurance, and gaming agencies now field tens of thousands of sworn “Agency Police”—often with full arrest powers despite missions far removed from general public safety. The footprint of these officers is significant and expanding, outpacing the growth of traditional law enforcement. Far from being limited to certain communities, Agency Police attract support across the political spectrum, from law-and-order policymakers to reformers. And yet, Agency Police are largely ignored in legal scholarship. The result is that a large slice of U.S. criminal enforcement is poorly …

Marine Spatial Planning In The Asean Countries: Lesson Learned For Future Ocean Governance In Malaysia, Husni Alhan Md Salimun, Mohd Fadzil Akhir, Nazli Aziz, Che Din Mohd Safuan, Wan Izatul Asma Wan Talaat

Journal of Environmental Science and Sustainable Development

Marine Spatial Planning (MSP) has emerged as an important governance instrument for balancing ecological protection, economic development, and social inclusion amid the rapidly intensifying blue economy in Southeast Asia. Although several ASEAN Member States (AMS) have initiated MSP processes, the existing literature on MSP governance in this region  remains fragmented and largely descriptive, limiting systematic cross-country comparison and evidence-based lessons. This study addresses this gap by assessing MSP governance performance across ASEAN countries and againts internationally recognized MSP governance benchmarks. A structured narrative review was conducted using selected PRISMA-informed procedures for literature identification and screening. Academic publications from 2003 to …