Law Commons^™

Why U.S. States Need Their Own Cannabis Industry Banks, Christoph Henkel, Randall K. Johnson

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The legal cannabis trade is the fastest growing industry in the United States. In 2019, about 48.2 million Americans used the drug at least once. As such, it is easy to see why the legal cannabis trade may generate annual revenues exceeding $30 billion in Fiscal Year 2022 alone.

One inconvenient truth, however, is that the parties to any cannabis trade may face a range of difficulties due to conflicts between federal and state laws. These difficulties include the fact that many financial institutions are reluctant to handle cannabis proceeds. One reason is that a lack of alignment in terms …

What Is The Optimal Basis For Imposing Government Liens?, Randall K. Johnson

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By presenting a detailed case study, which focuses on who gets subjected to government liens, this essay helps U.S. states to make more informed decisions. It seeks to do so by critically assessing Illinois’ historic approach to lien imposition and enforcement, in part, because this state had the most forced sales of real property in recent years. In addition, Illinois also generated the largest amount of related economic losses in the U.S. during that same time period. This state did so despite adhering to the old majority rule for turning over surplus value from such sales. That rule required creditors …

Introduction: The Arc Of Race In Professional And Collegiate Sports Symposium, Kenneth D. Ferguson

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This introduction will highlight the five articles featured in the symposium issue of the UMKC Law Review and will also situate those articles in the Sports Law Symposium titled, The Arc of Race in Professional and Collegiate Sports. The goal of the two-day virtual symposium was to bring together leading legal, social science, and medical science scholars to engage in discourse concerning how race and gender have affected and continue to influence decision making in professional and collegiate sports. The symposium exposed how race, culture, ethnicity, and gender affect a wide range of phenomena in scientific fields such as neuropsychological …

Dobbs V. Jackson Women’S Health And The Post-Roe Landscape, Yvonne F. Lindgren

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This Article examines some of the important takeaways of the Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health decision and the likely reverberations it will have on other areas of law and reproductive healthcare more broadly. The Article proceeds in three parts. Part I examines the majority, concurring, and dissenting opinions to consider what they reveal about the new standard of review for abortion, the shift in power among the members of the Court itself, as well as what the opinion signals might come next. Part II explores the future of abortion in a post-Roe landscape as the abortion rights movement moves from …

28 U.S.C. § 1331 Jurisdiction In The Roberts Court: A Rights-Inclusive Approach, Lumen N. Mulligan

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In this symposium piece, I argue that the Roberts Court, whether intentionally or not, is crafting a 28 U.S.C. § 1331 doctrine that is more solicitous of congressional control than the Supreme Court’s past body of jurisdictional law. Further, I contend that this movement toward greater congressional control is a positive step for the court. In making this argument, I review the foundations of the famous Holmes test for taking § 1331 jurisdiction and the legal positivist roots for that view. I discuss the six key Roberts Court cases that demonstrate a movement away from a simple Holmes test and …

Constitutional Issues In Family Law: An Annotated Bibliography (Part 1 Of 2), Allen K. Rostron

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This bibliography covers some of the significant constitutional issues arising in the realm of family law today, as well as other legal and policy issues spinning off of the constitutional controversies. It focuses on issues discussed in the articles in this issue of the Journal of the American Academy of Matrimonial Lawyers.

Seila Law As Separation-Of-Powers Posturing, Edward Cantu

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The Court rarely decides separation-of-powers cases, and when it does, academics usually scramble to fit such decisions into a broader doctrinal narrative. Such was the case when in June of 2020 the Supreme Court decided Seila Law LLC v. Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. In short, the Court ruled that it is unconstitutional for Congress to restrict the President’s removal power of an agency head if that agency is headed by a single person. For some reason, the Court concluded that such removal restrictions are permissible when applied to multi-headed agencies but not single-headed agencies. This Article argues that an attempt …

Why Illinois Should Reevaluate Its Video Tolling (V-Toll) Subsidy, Randall K. Johnson

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Tolls are levies with a limited base. This base is made up of drivers that pay user fees, in cash or via electronic transponder, in exchange for access to state-administered roads. In Illinois, every single toll is a function of three factors: vehicle characteristics, tollway entry point, and how far a driver goes on state-administered roads.

It is commonly assumed that any toll violation, i.e., any failure to pay, results in a traffic ticket, administrative fees and state-imposed sanctions. Such an assumption, however, is only partly true due to overly forgiving Illinois state policies. Examples include the Traffic Ticket Exemption, …

The Iccpr, Non-Self-Execution, And Daca Recipients' Right To Remain In The United States, Timothy E. Lynch

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The United States is a party to the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (ICCPR). Article 12.4 states, “No one shall be arbitrarily deprived of the right to enter his own country.” Citizens clearly enjoy the rights of Article 12.4, but this Article demonstrates that this right reaches beyond the citizenry. Using customary methods of treaty interpretation, including reference to the ICCPR’s preparatory works and the jurisprudence of the Human Rights Committee, I demonstrate that Article 12.4 also forbids states from deporting long-term resident non-citizens – both documented and undocumented – except under the rarest circumstances. As a result, …

Uniform Enforcement Or Personalized Law? A Preliminary Examination Of Parking Ticket Appeals In Chicago, Randall K. Johnson

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This article is one in a series of papers that sets the record straight about the type, quality and quantity of information that U.S. cities may employ, in order to make more informed policy decisions. It does so, specifically, by examining information that is collected by the City of Chicago. The goal is to gauge the uniformity, as well as the relative cost-effectiveness, of the parking ticket appeals process. The article has six (VI) parts. Part I is the introduction, which sets the stage for a preliminary examination of the parking ticket appeals process in Chicago. Part II describes the …

Normative History And Congress's Enforcement Power Under The Reconstruction Amendments, Edward Cantu

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As an originalist matter, what degree of logistical power did the Framers of the Reconstruction Amendments want Congress to have in actualizing the substantive guarantees of those amendments? In the 1990s the Court, seeking to revive its federalism vigilance, answered: "relatively limited power." Scholars pounced, and it quickly became "settled" in the scholarly literature that the Court had misread the historical record regarding the Framers' intent. Despite the scholarly reactions, the Roberts Court has carried the Rehnquist Court's torch on this interpretative matter. As such, strident accusations of conservative judicial activism toward the Roberts Court have paralleled the charges leveled …

Foster V. Chatman And The Failings Of Batson, Patrick C. Brayer

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When the Supreme Court delivered its ruling in Foster v Chatman, the court described the actions of the prosecutors as being “motivated in substantial part by race” when they struck two potential jurors from hearing the capital murder case against Timothy Foster. This phenomenon of open and explicit racial intolerance is unfortunately still in existence thirty years after Foster first went to trial. What the Court failed to acknowledge was how new attitudes of exclusion are less intentional today and more nuanced, implicit, and rationalized. Black defendant’s in 2016 face prosecutors who are less engaged in open discrimination but more …

The Separation-Of-Powers And The Least Dangerous Branch, Edward Cantu

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A snapshot of controversies currently surrounding the President highlights a sobering, even if acceptable, reality: we live in an age of extremely amplified president power. From the executive use of military force with little or no congressional approval, to the use of executive orders to effectively make federal policy without congressional involvement, virtually all of these controversies have a common source: the Court’s relegation of enforcement of the separation-of-powers to the political process.

This Article provides an account of this relegation. It argues that all of the Court’s separation-of-powers decisions — even those seeming to strictly enforce the boundaries of …

Asking The First Question: Reframing Bivens After Minneci, Alexander A. Reinert, Lumen N. Mulligan

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In Minneci v. Pollard, decided in January 2012, the Supreme Court refused to recognize a Bivens v. Six Unknown Federal Narcotics Agents suit against employees of a privately run federal prison because state tort law provided an alternative remedy, thereby adding a federalism twist to what had been strictly a separation-of-powers debate. In this Article, we show why this new state-law focus is misguided. We first trace the Court’s prior alternative-remedies-to-Bivens holdings, illustrating that this history is one narrowly focused on separation of powers at the federal level. Minneci’s break with this tradition raises several concerns. On a doctrinal level, …

Frankfurter’S Champion: Justice Powell, Monell, And The Meaning Of “Color Of Law”., David J. Achtenberg

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In Monroe v Pape, over an impassioned dissent by Justice Frankfurter, the Supreme Court held that Section 1983 authorized suits against state and local officials for constitutional violations even if those violations were not authorized by state or local law.  But it also held that cities and other local governmental entities could not be sued under the statute.  Monell v. Department of Social Services overruled Monroe and held that cities could be sued under the statute.  But it added an odd limitation that became known as the “Monell doctrine”: local governments could not be sued for their employees’ constitutional wrongs …

Greene V. Fisher: Will The Aedpa Trump Uniformity And Equity In Constitutional Decision Making, Sean O'Brien

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No abstract provided.

Personal Autonomy: Towards A New Taxonomy For Privacy Law, Yvonne F. Lindgren

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In 1965 the Supreme Court in Griswold v. Connecticut protected the right of married couples to receive contraceptives as a right of privacy. Since that time, scholarship in the area of privacy law has coalesced around two main themes: First, commentators have classified privacy cases to present a unified concept broad enough to encompass many contexts — from tort, to Fourth and Fifth Amendment search and seizure, to decisional autonomy case law. Second, there is vigorous debate whether decisional autonomy is properly sourced in privacy law. These inquiries leave unanswered an important question: What, if anything, has been the lasting …

No Good Deed Goes Unpublished: Precedent-Stripping And The Need For A New Prophylactic Rule, Edward Cantu

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This paper addresses the “open secret” that federal appellate courts often strip their opinions of precedential value as a means to forgo fair, principled and/or thorough adjudication of issues raised in appeals. Is there a basis in contemporary constitutional doctrine for a presumption that appellants suffer constitutional injury when courts dispose of their appeals using non-precedential opinions? The author answers “yes.” The argument centers on case law establishing so-called “constitutional prophylactic rules,” which work to “overprotect” a given core right - that is, to create a presumption of constitutional injury without proof of it - when such is the only …

Did The Madisonian Compromise Survive Detention At Guantanamo?, Lumen N. Mulligan

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In this essay, I take up the Court’s less heralded second holding in Boumediene v. Bush - that a federal habeas court must have the institutional capacity to find facts, which in Boumediene itself meant that a federal district court must be available to the petitioners. Although this has gone largely unnoticed, I contend that this holding is inconsistent with the Madisonian Compromise - the standard view that the Constitution does not require jurisdiction in any federal court, except the Supreme Court. In fact, it appears that the Court adopted Justice Story’s position that the Constitution requires vesting of jurisdiction …

Mothers And Sons: The Lloyd Schlup Story, Sean O'Brien

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This article tells the back story of the near-execution of Lloyd Schlup, condemned to die in Missouri for the 1984 murder of fellow Missouri State Penitentiary prisoner Arthur Dade, Jr. Mr. Schlup came within hours of execution before the Supreme Court granted certiorari on his case to decide whether a prisoner who is probably innocent can avail himself of the habeas corpus remedy. Mr. Schlup's and Mr. Dade's mothers played pivotal roles in the ultimate outcome of Schlup v. Delo, 513 U.S. 298 (1995). Dedicated to the memory of Nancy Slater.

The Gendered Nature Of Domestic Violence: Statistical Data For Lawyers Considering Equal Protection Analysis, Molly Dragiewicz, Yvonne F. Lindgren

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In Woods v. Horton, the California’s Third District Court of Appeal in Sacramento ruled that a state Health and Safety Code section funding domestic violence shelter services specifically for battered women and their children violated equal protection. Using the strict scrutiny standard of review, the court held that under the state’s Equal Protection Clause, women and men are “similarly situated” with regard to domestic violence and, therefore, the language in the code should be revised to make state funding for domestic violence shelter services under that code gender-neutral. Woods is the first successful legal decision for the anti-feminist “fathers’ rights” …

Pressures Toward Mediocrity In The Representation Of Children, Barbara Glesner Fines

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When children are the subject of dependency, adoption or guardianship proceedings, protecting those children requires attention to a variety of interests. Children need a voice: an advisor and an advocate whose judgment is unclouded by conflicting interests. Courts need information that the adult parties to the proceedings may not easily discover or willingly provide. The families and social services agencies need monitors and mediators. The attorney guardian ad litem (GAL) is, in many situations, called upon to meet all these needs. During the past decade, major academic conferences and professional organizations have devoted thousands of hours to developing standards of …

Why Bivens Won't Die: The Legacy Of Peoples V. Cca Detention Centers, Lumen N. Mulligan

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Interpreting recent Supreme Court precedent, the Tenth Circuit, in Peoples v. CCA Detention Centers, held that a federal prisoner confined in a privately run prison may not bring a Bivens suit against the employees of the private prison for violations of his constitutional rights when alternative state-law causes of action are available. The author first reviews the Supreme Court's evolving Bivens jurisprudence and turns next to an overview of the Tenth Circuit's opinion. Third, the author argues that, despite the Tenth Circuit's new approach, putative constitutional claims brought under state-law theories of recovery will often be re-federalized, producing uniform federal …

Taking History Seriously: Municipal Liability Under 42 U.S.C. §1983 And The Debate Over Respondeat Superior, David J. Achtenberg

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The Monell doctrine - the most important obstacle to municipal § 1983 liability for constitutional wrongs - hangs by a thread. Four Justices of the United States Supreme Court have called for reexamination of Monell's conclusion that cities are exempt from respondeat superior liability for their employees' unconstitutional conduct. Plaintiffs' civil rights lawyers wait only for the right case and a single change in the Court's personnel before urging the Court to overturn Monell.

This Article is intended to provide those lawyers - and those who will oppose them - with a comprehensive, accurate examination of the relevant historical background, …

The Supreme Court Report 2004-05: The End Of The Rehnquist Era, Julie M. Cheslik

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No abstract provided.

A 'Milder Measure Of Villainy': The Unknown History Of 42 U.S.C. Sec. 1983 And The Meaning Of 'Under Color Of' Law, David J. Achtenberg

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Chapter 42 U.S. C. § 1983, was originally enacted as section 1 of the Ku Klux Act. Not surprisingly, the history of the Ku Klux Act has played an important role in the interpretation of 42 U.S. C. § 1983. Unfortunately, the generally accepted history of the Ku Klux Act is incomplete, distorted, and, in some respects, demonstrably wrong.

The conventional history of the Ku Klux Act is flawed in three respects. First, it omits the first several chapters of the story. The conventional history begins with Grant's March 23, 1871, message to the Forty-second Congress and completely overlooks the …

Windfall Analysis: A New Look At Uncharged Conduct Evidence, David J. Achtenberg

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In criminal cases, the prosecution frequently offers evidence of uncharged conduct (usually prior criminal activity), claiming that it will tend to prove the mens rea element of the charged offense. When such an offer is made, Rule 404(b) of the Federal Rules of Evidence (FRE) creates a dilemma for the trial court. On the one hand, the rule forbids the introduction of uncharged conduct evidence (UCE) for one purpose: proof of a person's character in order to show that the person acted in conformity with that character trait on a particular occasion. On the other hand, it permits the introduction …

With Malice Toward Some: United States V. Kirby, Malicious Prosecution, And The Fourteenth Amendment, David J. Achtenberg

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In 1869, the Supreme Court treated United States v. Kirby as a simple case. In 1994, it treated Albright v. Oliver as a case divorced from history. Understanding the factual complexity of Kirby provides the historical framework missing from Albright and casts new light on the issue of whether the Fourteenth Amendment forbids malicious prosecution.

United States v. Kirby appeared straightforward. John W. Kirby was indicted for interferring with the United States mail by detaining a mail agent, Dr. Cyrus W. Farris, and a mail steamer. John Kirby's defense was simple. He was the sheriff of Gallatin County, Kentucky. The …

The Other Right-To-Life Debate: When Does Fourteenth Amendment Life End, Douglas O. Linder

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No abstract provided.

Can Employment Law Arbitration Work?, Mark Berger

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Over the course of the 1960s through early 1990s, a wave of Federal and State legislation modified the presumption of an at-will employment relationship with a number of statutes that gave workers rights to not be terminated for suspect reasons. However, these protections made conflicts following termination of employment far more likely, and measures were taken to try to lessen the chance of these becoming litigation. Following the Supreme Court’s decision in Gilmer v. Interstate/Johnson Lane Corporation, the use of mandatory alternative dispute resolution, primarily arbitration, to resolve employment rights claims began to be considered. This article examines whether …