Digital Commons Network^™

The Anonymous Officer, Shawn E. Fields

Faculty Scholarship

(Forthcoming 2026) Masked, plainclothes immigration agents in unmarked vans have terrorized communities in Chicago, Los Angeles, Minneapolis, and beyond. The indiscriminate violence committed by federal officers who at times appear indistinguishable from paramilitary units has forced immigrants into hiding and left lawmakers scrambling to address a growing and largely legal anonymity crisis in law enforcement. This Article explores the undertheorized implications of anonymous law enforcement, situating the rise of masked policing within a larger project of democratic retrogression and executive aggrandizement. Anonymity in policing and immigration enforcement frustrates core democratic norms of transparency, accountability, and legitimacy, providing the opacity needed …

Police Reform As System Justification, Shawn E. Fields

Faculty Scholarship

System Justification Theory (SJT) provides a useful lens through which to critique recent police reform efforts. SJT posits that members of society tend to justify and maintain existing social and political systems even when those systems disadvantage them, because the predictability of the status quo provides palliative, epistemic, and existential comfort in what otherwise appears to be an unjust and inequitable societal structure. Contrary to “false consciousness” theories, SJT claims that disadvantaged groups may intentionally rationalize what they know to be an unfair status quo, because doing so reduces social anxiety and threat while providing much desired order and meaning …

Post-Chevron Deference In Asylum Proceedings, Shawn E. Fields

Faculty Scholarship

The Supreme Court held for four decades that Chevron deference should apply in all immigration proceedings. How, then, will asylum proceedings change in a post-Chevron world? When, and under what circumstances, will courts continue to defer to the findings of immigration judges and the Board of Immigration Appeals (BIA)? And why does it matter? This Article answers those questions.

These issues require urgent examination for three reasons. First, they directly confront an issue pending before the U.S. Supreme Court in Urias-Orellana v. Bondi: Without the protection of Chevron insulating BIA decisions from meaningful judicial review, can certain legal questions like …

Havens For Corporate Lawbreaking, William J. Moon

Faculty Scholarship

Whether corporations are obligated to maximize profits or if they ought to consider societal interests more broadly remains one of the most highly contested debates in corporate law. Yet even the fiercest defenders of the firm’s profit motive concede that the corporation’s profit-seeking function cannot justify breaking the law. As a matter of American corporate law, directors and officers are in breach of their fiduciary duties if they facilitate or engage in profit-maximizing illegal activities. Or so we thought.

This Essay reveals a troubling trend of jurisdictions undercutting the legal compliance obligations of directors and officers. The current legal architecture …

Campus Crises And The Limits Of Title Vi, Suzanne B. Goldberg, Olatunde C.A. Johnson

Faculty Scholarship

This Piece examines the deployment of Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 as a mechanism for regulating campus conflict following the 2023 to 2024 campus protests and seeks to reset the discourse in light of the statute’s history, doctrine, and role in higher education. Title VI is an important tool for addressing identity-based harassment, epithets, and violence between students, but it is neither designed nor effective as a tool for negotiating clashes between universities’ cornerstone commitments to robust debate and an optimal learning environment for all students. In converting the statute from a source of protection against …

Impact Of Powdered Tart Cherry Supplementation On Performance Recovery Following Repeated Sprint Exercise, Anthony M. Hagele, Kyle S. Levers, Kevin F. Holley, Alex C. Schrautemeier, Joesi M. Krieger, Joshua M. Iannotti, Connor J. Gaige, Ralf Jäger, Chad Kerksick

Faculty Scholarship

Background: Due to its high polyphenol content and purported capability to mitigate post-exercise muscle soreness and promote recovery, tart cherry (TC) supplementation has been proposed to enhance recovery and athletic performance. This study examined the effects of powdered TC supplementation on various recovery and performance metrics following a repeated sprint exercise protocol in physically active young adults.

Methods: 40 (18 M, 22 F) healthy, active participants (24.6 ± 5.5 yrs, 171.5 ± 11 cm, 71.7 ± 14.5 kg, 24.2 ± 3.1 kg·m−2) participated in this randomized, double-blind, placebo-controlled, parallel study design. Placebo (PLA) or powdered TC supplementation (500 …

Understanding Child Welfare, Richard P. Barth, Jill Duerr Berrick, Melissa Jonson-Reid, Antonio R. Garcia, Johanna Greeson, John Gyourko, Brett Drake

Faculty Scholarship

This volume provides a foundational overview of the means by which the United States (and, to a more limited extent in coverage, other peer nations) endeavor to protect children from child maltreatment and related harms. Readers will be exposed to the best evidence available on the ways that child welfare and ancillary services operate and the results they achieve. This entails a comprehensive review of recent scholarship on scores of child welfare topics.

Incarceration As Sexualized Violence, Leigh S. Goodmark

Faculty Scholarship

Sexual violence—rape, sexual assault, strip and body cavity searches, surveillance, and reproductive abuse—is a regular occurrence in women’s prisons. Some of that violence is clearly illegal; some occupies a legally gray middle ground; and some is considered essential to the operation of the prison system. All of it, however, could violate the law if the victims were not incarcerated. Sexual violence is so pervasive within women’s prisons that incarceration can only be understood as a form of sexualized violence. Given the certainty that people incarcerated in women’s prisons will experience some form of sexual abuse, continued incarceration can only be …

Renegotiating The Energy Transition, Hannah Jacobs Wiseman, Jennifer Baka, Kaitlyn Spangler

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

50 State Survey On “Harmful To Minors” Laws And Library Exemptions/Defenses, Rebecca A. Mattson, Shay Elbaum, Amanda Mccormick, Dan Sawall, Victoria Tokar, Eric Yap

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Weaponizing Religion Against The Human Emotion Of Empathy: A Call To Fight Coercive Settlement Attempts On The Merits, Jeffrey Dodge

Faculty Scholarship

In March 2023, America First Legal filed a lawsuit against West Shore School District in Camp Hill, Pennsylvania. In the complaint, the plaintiffs argued that empathy related instruction from the district’s social emotional learning curriculum violated their parental and religious rights. Nearly every headline about the lawsuit included a quote from a plaintiff parent asserting that “Not every human is deserving of my child’s empathy.” At the time of filing, America First Legal and counsel, Wally Zimolong, argued that students in this school district were illegally being subjected to a radical and invasive curriculum.

School officials denied wrongdoing in receiving …

Disconsents, Daryl J. Levinson, David E. Pozen

Faculty Scholarship

Consent is an indispensable standard and organizing principle in any liberal legal order that prizes self-directed autonomy, self-identified preferences, and collective agreement. Yet consent’s capacity to advance those values has become increasingly uncertain in a society beset by power imbalances, information asymmetries, and multiple forms of polarization. In this Article, we document how the rise of neoliberalism has led to greater reliance on consent throughout U.S. law, while at the same time leading to greater doubts about its moral efficacy and empirical feasibility. Connecting and generalizing pathologies of consent-based regulation that have been identified within myriad domains, the Article identifies …

Mahmoud V. Taylor: Cause Or Effect Of Disruptions In Public Schools?, Richard B. Katskee, Ira C. Lupu

Faculty Scholarship

Mahmoud v. Taylor represents an extraordinary departure from long-standing constitutional norms about the rights of parents of children in public schools. In Mahmoud, the Supreme Court upheld a Free Exercise Clause claim by parents in Montgomery County, Maryland, who sought to have their children (grades K–5) excused from readings that contain LGBTQ characters and themes. The majority opinion by Justice Alito rests on a highly controversial reading of Wisconsin v. Yoder.

Part I of the paper provides the doctrinal and historical backdrop to Mahmoud, which reflects the acute tension between a once-narrow understanding of Yoder and the post-Obergefell backlash against …

Export Controls As Intellectual Property Regulation, Doni Bloomfield

Faculty Scholarship

Export-control laws have long regulated information created outside of the U.S. government. Legal scholars have paid little attention to these national-security laws, and have not recognized that the government uses them specifically to assert a right to suppress information held in patent applications and trade secrets. In this Article, I present a new history of the relationship between export controls and intellectual property to show how the government regulates IP transfers, and how the state uses IP laws to national-security ends. Export-control laws regulate IP by controlling how people in the United States and beyond can share or use inventive …

Gamification: The Viability Of Using Genai To Create Games To Teach Legal Concepts, Nicole Belbin

Faculty Scholarship

This Essay examines whether generative artificial intelligence (GenAI) can lower the technical, time, and cost barriers that have limited the use of game-based learning (GBL) in legal education. It first considers the science of learning, focusing on spaced practice, retrieval practice, and concrete examples, and explains how GBL can incorporate these strategies. It then evaluates four general-purpose GenAI tools—Perplexity, Gemini, ChatGPT, and Claude—by testing their ability to state legal rules accurately and create games that teach personal jurisdiction.

The results demonstrate both GenAI’s promise and its limitations. Although all four tools incorporated core concepts of general jurisdiction, each omitted at …

Cold Comfort: Japan’S “Comfort Women” Litigation Under Transnational Law, Timothy Webster

Faculty Scholarship

Transnational human rights litigation has emerged as a powerful tool to remediate state and corporate abuses. Courts, however, rarely evince the same enthusiasm for these lawsuits as practitioners, scholars, and activists. For the past thirty-five years, “comfort women,” or survivors of wartime sexual exploitation, have used transnational litigation to seek redress from the Japanese government. Yet they have lost nearly all their cases. This Article uses ten “comfort women” lawsuits from Japan to test the limits of transnational human rights litigation. While judges rarely found for the comfort women, their verdicts nonetheless advanced the redress issue by showing the illegality …

2026 Supplement To The Corporations Curriculum - Caremark: The Board's Duty Of Oversight Regarding Work Force Safety And Sexual Misconduct, Sarah Haan

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Searches And Seizures Of The Unhoused, Shawn E. Fields

Faculty Scholarship

The United States recorded its largest ever unhoused population in 2024. Acute affordable housing shortages and climate-fueled natural disasters have exacerbated a decades-long unaddressed humanitarian crisis, straining resources in cities and rural areas alike. In response, state and local governments have pivoted to a more punitive approach to houselessness. Draconian "anti-camping" ordinances subject houseless people to fines or arrests while police destroy their property in encampment "sweeps," disconnecting the unhoused from critical social structures. Quality-of-life laws criminalize basic biological functions in public. New York, California, and other states have expanded the reach of involuntary civil commitment procedures, forcibly hospitalizing and …

Privacy’S Autonomy Thicket: Disentangling Choice, Consent And Control, Jordan Francis, Woodrow Hartzog, Neil Richards

Faculty Scholarship

When it comes to talking about autonomy, privacy law could use a little clarity. Its discourse uses terms like “choice,” “consent,” and “control” to evoke autonomy, but these terms are too rarely defined and too often used interchangeably, even though they can mean very different things. The three terms have become entangled in a way that has become confusing and counterproductive. We call this problem “privacy’s autonomy thicket,” and it matters because it encourages talking past each other in policy debates, enabling the redefinition of these terms in misleading ways that produce weak and disempowering “notice and choice” regimes.

In …

Ain’T Nothing Like The Real Thing: How Legal Research Programs Can Provide The Needed Safety Rails For Pro Se Litigants Using Ai In Litigation, Nicole Belbin

Faculty Scholarship

An estimated 92% of legal needs go unmet in America, leaving a growing number of pro se litigants to “manage their own cause.” Between 2000 and 2019, 27% of all civil cases filed in U.S. District Courts, totaling 1,501,079 cases, had at least one party without attorney representation. The legal profession is abuzz about the potential for generative artificial intelligence (GenAI) tools to “smooth out any mismatch between available resources and urgent needs in our court system”; however, “hallucinations” have quickly proved a limitation to reaching this technology’s full potential. The complexity of legal research and analysis increases the chance …

Kim Gyeong-Seok And The Origins Of Northeast Asia’S Corporate Accountability Movement For War And Colonialism, Timothy Webster

Faculty Scholarship

Campaigns to review Japan’s wartime legacy and legal liability have recurred throughout postwar Japan. While most of these efforts have targeted the Japanese government, an important subset of actors has also focused on the role of Japanese corporations. And perhaps no one played a larger role in directing attention towards Japan, Inc. than Kim Gyeong-seok, a Korean forced laborer in the 1940s turned redress activist in the 1990s. As described in this Article, Kim’s 1991 lawsuit against Nihon Kokan launched the corporate accountability piece of the reparations project, an endeavor that continues to create ripples even now. The Article briefly …

U.S. Administrative Law: A Casebook (6th Ed.), Jud Mathews

Faculty Scholarship

The number of administrative law texts is vast. The approach of this one, now in its fifth edition, is simple. It is: (1) to focus on the richest and most canonical cases; (2) to provide more extensive extracts of them than most casebooks; and (3) to keep the notes to a bare minimum. Updated through October 2025, the book contains a number of significant decisions from recent Supreme Court terms, as well as foundational classics that many contemporary casebooks cut, and much in between.

Traveling Waves For A Diffusive Sir Epidemic Model With Delay In The Diffusion Term, William Barker

Faculty Scholarship

This paper investigates the existence of traveling waves in a diffusive SIR model with delay incorporated in the diffusion terms and a nonlinear incidence rate with delay. By employing a cross-iteration scheme and partial monotonicity conditions, we establish that the existence of quasi-upper and lower solutions, along with suitable super and sub-solutions, provides sufficient conditions for the existence of a traveling wavefront. This existence result is obtained via Schauder’s fixed-point theorem. Furthermore, given an appropriate basic reproduction number, the traveling wavefront transitions from the disease-free steady state to the endemic steady state. To illustrate our approach, we explicitly construct super- …

The Complex Decision-Making Processes Of Rural Emerging Adults: Counseling Beyond Dualism, Donna M. San Antonio Dr.

Faculty Scholarship

Rural adolescents approach the transition out of high school with individual concerns about making an emotionally or financially expensive “mistake,” family concerns about young people leaving home, and national and local concerns about declining rural economies and out-migration. The literature concerning this topic considers factors that influence youth aspirations in rural areas, such as economic barriers, the way higher education is valued, and perceptions of rural places as lacking in opportunity. However, there has been little study of the myriad interpersonal, emotional, and self-identity inputs that are part of the decision-making processes of rural emerging adults, and little is known …

Measuring Lawyer Mental Illness: Evidence From Two National Surveys, Benjamin David Pyle, Clifford Rosky

Faculty Scholarship

The American Bar Association declared a “well-being crisis” among lawyers, but the empirical basis for this claim has been contested in recent years. This study systematically compares two high-quality, nationally representative surveys —the National Health Interview Survey (NHIS) and the National Survey on Drug Use and Health (NSDUH)—to measure the prevalence of mental illness and alcohol misuse among lawyers. In both surveys, lawyers report elevated rates of alcohol misuse compared to the general public and similarly educated peers. The NHIS finds that lawyers experience psychological distress at rates lower than the general public and similar to, or moderately higher than, …

Regulating Crisis Pregnancy Centers After Nifla And Dobbs: Controversies Over When Government Is Imposing An Orthodoxy About Abortion, Linda C. Mcclain

Faculty Scholarship

How does this broader sense of Barnette’s proscription of government from imposing “what shall be orthodox” implicate governmental restrictions on reproductive autonomy? Battles over reproductive freedom centrally implicate objections that government is unconstitutionally imposing a gender orthodoxy. Arguments for a right of personal autonomy embodying an antitotalitarian principle of liberty are arguments for a right to resist governmental imposition of an orthodoxy— for example, an idea about the natural or traditional role of women as mothers together with a view about how best to respect the sanctity of life. Rights to reproductive autonomy, grounded in personal autonomy and equality, …

Technology-Facilitated Labor Trafficking Power And Control Wheel, Julie A. Dahlstrom

Faculty Scholarship

This wheel is based on the Article, "Digital Servitude":

Taking Scale Seriously In Technology Law, Mark P. Mckenna, Woodrow Hartzog

Faculty Scholarship

Issues of scale—the relationship between the amount of an activity and its associated costs and benefits—permeate discussions around law and technologies. Indeed, it’s not much of an exaggeration to say that scale is the reason for most technology regulation.

But it’s not always clear how lawmakers and judges conceptualize “scale” when approaching questions around automated technologies. Scale is often used intuitively, just to mean “more.” But scale is not always just about more—scale can introduce new harms and benefits along different dimensions, not simply costs or efficiencies of greater magnitude.

In this Article, we argue for a more sustained interrogation …

Informed Applicants: Anti-Discrimination Enforcement Based On The Use Of Criminal Records, Benjamin David Pyle

Faculty Scholarship

Navigating the labor market with a criminal record is treacherous. Countless job applicants will be turned down immediately after a potential employer learns they have had contact with the criminal legal system. Criminal records reflect and exacerbate long-standing racial and economic inequalities in the United States. Thus, the use of records in employment decisions will often implicate anti-discrimination laws. However, successfully enforcing these protections requires job applicants to, at minimum, understand why they were not hired. Many applicants never learn why they were not hired and thus will never be able to protect their rights. This Article argues that understanding …

Against Ai Half Measures, Woodrow Hartzog, Neil Richards, Ryan Durrie, Jordan Francis

Faculty Scholarship

So far, U.S. consumer protection policy for artificial intelligence (AI) accountability has largely consisted of industry-led approaches such as encouraging transparency, mitigating bias, promoting principles of ethics, and empowering people. These approaches are vital, but they are only half measures. To bring AI within the rule of law, lawmakers must start drawing substantive lines.

In this Article, we identify four AI regulatory approaches to consumer, data, and democratic harms as half measures. First, transparency does not produce accountability on its own. Second, while mitigating bias in AI systems is critical, even unbiased systems are a threat to the vulnerable. Third, …