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Front Matter

Journal of Air Law and Commerce

No abstract provided.

What The Wild West Can Teach Us About Space Exploration, Kody George

Journal of Air Law and Commerce

Currently, the laws governing property in outer space are inadequate and underdeveloped, yet space exploration by private entities is rapidly growing. In this legal vacuum, private companies’ actions heavily influence, and in some cases, provide the basis for, legal precedent. The policies that for-profit corporations prefer are different from those that most government actors will prefer and are much different from those that support the common heritage of mankind doctrine. Rewarding entrepreneurship, innovation, and investments by governments, while balancing the interest all mankind has in outer space is why this Article proposes a tiered, patent land system that would grant …

Effects Of Expropriation Of Private Real Estate For Public Benefit In Saudi Law And Islamic Law, Hayat Mohammadali Hassan Nimir

Theses and Dissertations

The expropriation of private real estate for public benefit represents one of the most sensitive and complex legal issues, as it directly intersects with the protection of individual ownership rights while simultaneously addressing the demands of public interest and state development. This research provides a comprehensive analytical study of the legal framework governing expropriation in Saudi Arabia, examining both historical and contemporary legislation, while assessing its consistency with the objectives of Islamic Sharia, which grants strong protection to ownership rights but allows their restriction under strict conditions to serve genuine public needs.

The dissertation explores the theoretical foundations of property …

Striving To Thrive: Balancing Digital Health Innovation And Patient Protection Under Thailand’S Legal Framework, Thidarat Liamsomboon

Theses and Dissertations

The digitalization of health care has fundamentally transformed how health care services are accessed, delivered, and experienced worldwide. Telemedicine, artificial intelligence–assisted diagnostics, electronic health records, wearables, and mobile health applications are no longer novelties, but have become a substantial part of a modern clinical practice. Although these technologies offer great prospects for making health care more accessible, reducing administrative burden, and improving the quality of care, they also pose significant legal and regulatory challenges. The rate of technological development has far outpaced Thailand’s existing legal frameworks for regulating medical practice, professional accountability, and patient protection. This regulatory “lag” has generated …

Front Matter

SMU Science and Technology Law Review

No abstract provided.

The Trump Administration’S Racial Dragnet: Immigration Enforcement In Los Angeles, Kevin R. Johnson

SMU Law Review

President Trump’s mass deportation campaign selected as one of its early targets Los Angeles, California, and its large Latina/o community. Comprising roughly half of the city’s population, Latina/os are being stopped, questioned, and rounded up by roving Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) patrols. A legal challenge claimed that the patrols are engaging in unlawful racial profiling on a mass scale. The litigation responds to the widespread belief among Latina/os that the Trump Administration is unduly, if not exclusively, relying on race in targeting people for questioning about their immigration status.

For years, courts and political leaders have roundly condemned racial …

Incapacitating The Immigration Courts, Jennifer Lee Koh

SMU Law Review

Amidst the dizzying array of developments taking place under the banner of mass deportation, the second Trump Administration is engaged in a sustained effort to fundamentally transform the country’s immigration courts by incapacitating them. Although the immigration courts have long been the subject of extensive criticism, they also seek to function as neutral forums in which the Department of Justice adjudicates the removability of noncitizens and certain types of immigration relief, governed by due process principles. Rendering those courts unable to perform their functions could potentially give rise to a more fundamental deterioration of even the semblance of due process …

The New Assault On Plyler V. Doe, Cori Alonso-Yoder, Gabriel Sanchez

SMU Law Review

The second Trump Administration has disregarded a history of bipartisan support in avoiding immigration enforcement actions in schools. Certain states have acted to further target children at school—advancing measures to exclude many from public education based on immigration status. While the Supreme Court in Plyler v. Doe affirmed the state and national interests in educating students regardless of status, the Heritage Foundation has called on states to pass legislation to overturn that decades-old precedent. While no state has yet adopted these measures, many states have tried, marking a new attack on the precedent in Plyler.

This Article builds on …

Re-Rethinking Asian Exclusion And Color-Blind Immigration, Gabriel J. Chin

SMU Law Review

During Reconstruction, as Congress debated the place of African-Americans in U.S. society, it evaluated how the principles it articulated would apply to Chinese-Americans. Rather than adopting a race-neutral jurisprudence, it began identifying the ways in which the law could be deployed to deny Asians economic and political opportunities, and the right to immigrate. Ultimately, a joint network of federal and state laws denied Asians the right to naturalize, to own land, and to immigrate. In a rare win, a divided Supreme Court held that the children of Chinese people born in the United States were citizens by virtue of the …

The Preemption Prescription: State Preemption Of Local Zoning Authority As A Means To Increase Housing Availability And Affordability, Molly Ryan

SMU Law Review

Over the past few decades, housing prices dramatically increased, while wages and salaries across many professions remained relatively stagnant. This widening gap has reduced housing availability and affordability for individuals from diverse socioeconomic backgrounds. If left unaddressed, restrictive zoning regulations may further intensify these challenges by limiting housing supply and contributing to the nation’s growing homeless population. In response to these issues, several states, including Texas, are preempting local zoning authority through statewide legislation designed to mitigate zoning’s impact on housing costs and availability. However, this approach remains contentious and may be insufficient, by itself, to resolve the complex issues …

Front Matter

SMU Law Review

No abstract provided.

Preface, Abigail Parnell

SMU Law Review

No abstract provided.

Second-Class Asylum, Third-Country Danger, Michael Kagan

SMU Law Review

The Trump Administration has aggressively pursued a policy of deporting people who have been found to be in danger of persecution or torture in their countries of origin to third countries. It has primarily impacted people who have two types of what may be called second-class asylum, namely withholding or deferral or removal. This Article examines the structural problems posed by second-class asylum as defined in the Immigration and Nationality Act (INA). The INA’s collection of tiered protected status for people in danger in their countries of origin was always illogical, though its incoherency was more manageable before 2025, when …

What Constitution? The Dual State Theory In Immigration Law & Practice, Elizabeth Keyes

SMU Law Review

Immigration law in the second Trump Administration has created profound disorientation and dissonance, where some legal matters proceed in largely familiar ways, and others seem to occur in an entirely new dimension. This Article avails itself of Ernst Fraenkel’s Dual State theory to examine this dissonance. It argues that a duality exists in U.S. immigration law today between the federal courts and the administrative immigration system. In Fraenkel’s terms, constitutional challenges to immigration policies and individual habeas cases demonstrate important features of the Normative State, one that is consistent with the Rule of Law. By contrast, the administrative system—comprising the …

Managing Deportation: How Docket Control Replaced Substantive Relief In Immigration Courts, R. Linus Chan

SMU Law Review

In the modern deportation era, immigration courts saw their ability to grant relief from deportation undergo significant restrictions, constraining individualized discretion in favor of "categorical" denials. Congress dramatically curtailed the discretionary tools available to immigration judges, with the latest being the pair of immigration reforms from 1996, shifting the locus of individualized decision-making away from the courts and toward enforcement officers and prosecutors. Immigration courts lost discretion in being able to decide who could formally be granted status and stay in the United States when facing deportation through various restrictive eligibility requirements written into the law.

This Article argues that …

Front Matter

SMU Law Review

No abstract provided.

Second Looks For Sentencing Equality, Joshua D. Weiss

SMU Law Review

This Article challenges a persistent assumption about the relationship between so-called “second look” laws and sentencing disparities. Courts, the United States Sentencing Commission, and scholars tend to assume that increasing judicial discretion to reduce previously imposed sentences on an individualized basis results in increased sentencing disparities. But this assumption is based on a limited focus on disparities caused by judges and fails to account for disparities caused by other institutional actors, especially prosecutors.

This Article examines the relationship between disparities and second-look laws by focusing on one such law: the federal reduction in sentence (RIS) statute, commonly referred to as …

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 …

Fda After Loper Bright, Erika Lietzan

SMU Law Review

Loper Bright Enterprises v. Raimondo, which overruled the Chevron, U.S.A. v. Natural Resources Defense Council decision from 1984, tells us that a court should determine the meaning of all statutory provisions for itself, rather than deferring to the views of the federal agencies that implement those provisions. But the overruling of Chevron may have less of an impact on the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) than conventional wisdom supposes. Most challenges to FDA action do not concern its statutory interpretations. And the agency prevailed in most cases involving statutory interpretation before the Chevron doctrine took hold. After 1984, …

The Pregnancy Draft, Meghan M. Boone

SMU Law Review

By severely limiting or outright banning abortion, states are requiring pregnant people to perform reproductive labor in the service of the state’s own interests. Unwilling pregnant people are compelled, through the force of law, to continue their pregnancies—to perform a task that is difficult, dangerous, and fundamentally alters their life’s course. The state justifies overcoming the pregnant person’s unwillingness by prioritizing its own interests in the continuation of the pregnancy—articulated at various times as an interest in potential life, the protection of health or the integrity of the medical profession, or the prevention of discrimination.

There is only one other …

Front Matter

SMU Law Review

No abstract provided.

A Mentor's Gift: In Tribute To Professor Thomas William Mayo, Erin Nealy Cox

SMU Law Review

No abstract provided.

Trademark Confusion After The Algorithmic Turn, Daryl Lim

SMU Law Review

Trademark confusion doctrine rests on an implicit theory of consumer perception. Courts infer confusion through proxies such as similarity, market proximity, intent, and evidence of actual confusion, presuming that consumers encounter trademarks in stable, human-designed environments. That premise no longer holds uniformly across contemporary markets. Today, consumers increasingly encounter trademarks through algorithmic systems that rank, cluster, recommend, and generate content on their behalf.

This Article argues that trademark law’s likelihood of confusion doctrine has not yet reckoned with this transformation. In algorithmically mediated markets, confusion often arises without copying, deception, or misleading conduct by traders. Instead, it often arises from …

The Good Samaritan Myth: Why Virtue-Based Food Waste Policy Fails And What Should Replace It, Tyson-Lord Gray

SMU Law Review

For nearly fifty years, federal corporate food waste legislation has consistently employed an aretaic (virtue-based) theoretical framework that assumes corporations will act as “Good Samaritans” when provided with appropriate incentives and liability protections. Beginning with Federal Tax Code Section 170(e)(3) in 1976 and continuing through the Bill Emerson Good Samaritan Food Donation Act (1996), the Federal Food Donation Act (2008), the Agri-cultural Improvement Act (2018), and the Food Donation Improvement Act (2022), United States policy has relied exclusively on voluntary compliance mechanisms rather than mandatory regulations. This Article argues that this approach is built on a myth, and that the …

Predictive Protest Policing, Christian Powell Sundquist

SMU Law Review

The policing of dissent in America is undergoing a radical transformation that threatens the fundamental right to protest. Demonstrations are no longer merely surveilled; they are algorithmically suppressed. Law enforcement agencies increasingly deploy algorithmic social media surveillance to predict protest violence, forecasting potential “riots” and justifying militarized responses before a single demonstrator takes to the street. This Article identifies and challenges what it terms “predictive protest policing,” arguing that these systems do not objectively detect threats but actively construct them, disproportionately targeting racial justice demonstrations. Drawing on evidence from the federal response to immigration protests in Minneapolis, the preemptive policing …

Preserving Gender Norms Through Harm-Based Reasoning: The Best Interest Of The Child Standard And Transgender Parents, Ariël Decoster

SMU Law Review

Contemporary custody law purports to have moved beyond dominant gendered understandings of parental roles and family life by resolving disputes under the ostensibly neutral “best interest of the child” (BIC) standard rather than through the explicitly gendered rules that once governed custody adjudication. This Article examines custody disputes involving transgender parents to reveal a structural feature of custody adjudication under the BIC standard, namely the continued reproduction of dominant gender norms under the guise of a neutral legal standard.

Analyzing transgender custody cases alongside scholarship documenting how the BIC standard’s indeterminacy has enabled bias against other marginalized parents, the Article …

Privatizing College Athletics: Using An Llc To Govern College Sports, Melinda Roth

SMU Law Review

In April 2025, the University of Kentucky, a member of one of the most powerful conferences in college sports, created Champions Blue, LLC. The board of trustees approved the transfer of Kentucky’s collegiate athletics operation into this new entity. A few months later, the University of Utah similarly created a limited liability company (LLC) to house its athletics program, though Utah’s model also incorporated a private equity investor into the LLC. Other schools, including Boise State, Clemson, Michigan State, Texas Tech, and West Virginia, among others, have also recently formed LLCs or formed partnerships with a private entity to hold …

The Corporate Capture Of Homeownership, Julie Gilgoff

SMU Law Review

What happens when the American dream of homeownership becomes a corporate asset class? Institutional investor ownership of single‑family rentals (SFRs) reduces the number of homes available for individual purchase and drives up home values—a trend that is beneficial for existing homeowners, but detrimental for prospective buyers. Although the creation of new single‑family rental units has been lauded as a public good to fill the housing gap for those who cannot afford to purchase, it is perpetuating a cycle in which individuals lose out on the opportunity to build equity and intergenerational wealth.

The topic of investor ownership of SFRs has …

Preserving A Liturgical Identity: The Liturgical And Musical Heritage Of Roman Catholic Apostolic Women Religious In The United States Of America, Andrew G. Jennings

Doctor of Pastoral Music Projects and Theses

This thesis examines the liturgical and musical heritage of Roman Catholic apostolic women religious in the United States and argues that their contributions represent a significant yet understudied dimension of American Catholic life. As many communities face declining numbers, the preservation of their liturgical and musical traditions becomes increasingly urgent. Using an interdisciplinary methodology that combines historical research, liturgical theology, pneumatology, phenomenology, narrative inquiry, and qualitative interviews, the study explores how women religious have shaped and preserved communal identity through liturgy, music, and apostolic ministry.

The research traces the historical development of apostolic women religious from their emergence in the …

Regulating Space-Based Solar Power: Challenges Under Both Space Law And Energy Law, Anne-Sophie Martin, Steven Freeland

Journal of Air Law and Commerce

Space-based solar power (SBSP) is emerging as a potential catalyst for global decarbonisation, driven by advances in wireless power transmission, in-orbit assembly, and photovoltaic technologies. Programmes such as the European Space Agency’s SOLARIS initiative, China’s planned megawatt-scale demonstrator, and private projects including Constant Aperture Solid State Integrated Orbital Phased Array and Caltech’s Space Solar Power Project illustrate the shift from theoretical models to operationalisation. SBSP offers continuous, weather-independent renewable energy capable of complementing terrestrial solar, wind, and hydro generation, enhancing grid stability, energy security, and progress toward the UN Sustainable Development Goals. It also supports future space activities by providing …