Law Commons^™

The Confusion Of Mcdonnell Douglas: A Path Forward For Reverse Discrimination Claims, Christian Joshua Myers

Seattle University Law Review

It is no secret that Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 is one of the most significant pieces of legislation ever passed by the United States Congress. Fiercely debated and enacted during the Civil Rights Movement of the 1960s, Title VII prohibits employers from engaging in various forms of discrimination within the workplace. For instance, employers may not unlawfully consider race, color, religion, sex, or national origin in employment decisions. Given Bostock v. Clayton County’s recent extension of Title VII’s protections to lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer workers, this Article posits that evaluating Caucasian workers’ “reverse …

Systemic Racism And Immigration Detention, Carrie L. Rosenbaum

Seattle University Law Review

The denouement of the Trump presidency was a white supremacist coup attempt against a backdrop of public reawakening to the persistence of institutionalized racism. Though the United States has entered a new administration with a leader that expresses his commitment to ending institutionalized racism, the United States continues to imprison Central American and Mexican immigrants at the southern border. If the majority of the people in immigration jails at the border are Latinx, does immigration law disparately impact them, and do they have a right to equal protection? If they do, would equal protection protect them? This Article explores whether …

Power And Statistical Significance In Securities Fraud Litigation, Jill E. Fisch, Jonah B. Gelbach

All Faculty Scholarship

Event studies, a half-century-old approach to measuring the effect of events on stock prices, are now ubiquitous in securities fraud litigation. In determining whether the event study demonstrates a price effect, expert witnesses typically base their conclusion on whether the results are statistically significant at the 95% confidence level, a threshold that is drawn from the academic literature. As a positive matter, this represents a disconnect with legal standards of proof. As a normative matter, it may reduce enforcement of fraud claims because litigation event studies typically involve quite low statistical power even for large-scale frauds.

This paper, written for …

“Rule Of Inclusion" Confusion, Dora Klein

Faculty Articles

Some rules of evidence are complex. The federal rules governing the admissibility of hearsay statements,' for example, include at least forty different provisions. Numerous judges and scholars have commented on the complexity of the hearsay rules. Not all rules of evidence are complex, however. For example, the federal rules governing the admissibility of character evidence are relatively straightforward: evidence that is offered for the purpose of proving character is inadmissible, subject to a few well-defined exceptions. Despite this relative straightforwardness, many of the federal circuit courts of appeals have overlaid the rules regarding character evidence particularly Rule 404(b)--with unnecessary interpretive …

A Monopoly Of Thought—How Growing Anticompetitive Practices On The Internet Affect Creative Work, Laurel Brown

Seattle University Law Review

This Note will address how dominant Internet companies detrimentally impact creative work and how legal solutions might be employed to combat the damage inflicted by online monopolies. Part I will focus on how certain Internet companies became dominant, showing an evolution from egalitarian ideals to the consolidated control of the World Wide Web (the web) by companies like Google, Facebook, and Amazon. In Part II, this Note will focus on how two particular companies—Google and Facebook—affect creative endeavors in their control of access to audiences and by determining the economics of content production on the Internet. Part III details what …

“No Earlier Confession To Repeat”: Seibert, Dixon, And Question-First Interrogations, Lee S. Brett

Washington and Lee Law Review

The Supreme Court’s 2004 decision in Missouri v. Seibert forbade the use of so-called question-first interrogations. In a question-first interrogation, police interrogate suspects without giving Miranda warnings. Once the suspect makes incriminating statements, the police give the warnings and induce the suspect to repeat their earlier admissions.

Lower courts are increasingly interpreting a per curiam Supreme Court case, Bobby v. Dixon, to significantly limit the scope and applicability of Seibert. These courts claim that postwarning statements need only be suppressed under Seibert when there is an “earlier confession to repeat.” In this Note, I argue that this reading …

Duress In Immigration Law, Elizabeth A. Keyes

Seattle University Law Review

The doctrine of duress is common to other bodies of law, but the application of the duress doctrine is both unclear and highly unstable in immigration law. Outside of immigration law, a person who commits a criminal act out of well-placed fear of terrible consequences is different than a person who willingly commits a crime, but American immigration law does not recognize this difference. The lack of clarity leads to certain absurd results and demands reimagining, redefinition, and an unequivocal statement of the significance of duress in ascertaining culpability. While there are inevitably some difficult lines to be drawn in …

Confronting The Biased Algorithm: The Danger Of Admitting Facial Recognition Technology Results In The Courtroom, Gabrielle M. Haddad

Vanderbilt Journal of Entertainment & Technology Law

From unlocking an iPhone to Facebook “tags,” facial recognition technology has become increasingly commonplace in modern society. In the wake of the Black Lives Matter movement and call for police reform in the United States, it is important now more than ever to consider the implications of law enforcement’s use of facial recognition technology. A study from the National Institute of Standards and Technology found that facial recognition algorithms generated higher rates of false positives for Black faces—sometimes up to one hundred times more false identifications—than white faces. Given the embedded bias of this technology and its increased prevalence, the …

Comment: Wysiati And False Confessions, Michael R. Hoernlein

Washington and Lee Law Review

Decades after the Supreme Court mandated in Miranda v. Arizona that police advise suspects of their constitutional rights before custodial interrogation, confusion remains about the contours of the rule, and some law enforcement officers still try to game the system. In his excellent Note, “No Earlier Confession to Repeat”: Seibert, Dixon, and Question-First Interrogations, Lee Brett presents a careful analysis of the legal landscape applicable to so-called question-first interrogations. Mr. Brett offers a compelling argument urging courts not to interpret Bobby v. Dixon as limiting the application of Missouri v. Seibert to two-step (i.e., question-first) interrogations only when …

Neither “Post-War” Nor Post-Pregnancy Paranoia: How America’S War On Drugs Continues To Perpetuate Disparate Incarceration Outcomes For Pregnant, Substance-Involved Offenders, Becca S. Zimmerman

Pitzer Senior Theses

This thesis investigates the unique interactions between pregnancy, substance involvement, and race as they relate to the War on Drugs and the hyper-incarceration of women. Using ordinary least square regression analyses and data from the Bureau of Justice Statistics’ 2016 Survey of Prison Inmates, I examine if (and how) pregnancy status, drug use, race, and their interactions influence two length of incarceration outcomes: sentence length and amount of time spent in jail between arrest and imprisonment. The results collectively indicate that pregnancy decreases length of incarceration outcomes for those offenders who are not substance-involved but not evenhandedly -- benefitting white …

Completing The Quantum Of Evidence, Edward K. Cheng, Brooke Bowerman

Vanderbilt Law School Faculty Publications

In "Evidentiary Irony and the Incomplete Rule of Completeness," Professors Daniel Capra and Liesa Richter comprehensively catalog the many shortcomings in current Federal Rule of Evidence 106 and craft a compelling reform proposal. Their proposal admirably solves the identified problems, keeps the rule reasonably succinct, and furthers the accuracy and fairness goals of the rules of evidence. In this Response, we focus on Capra & Richter's proposal to formally recognize a "trumping" power in Rule 106, which would allow an adverse party to offer a completing statement even if it would be "otherwise inadmissible under the rule against hearsay."

Recollections Refreshed And Recorded, Leonard M. Niehoff

Articles

Witnesses forget stuff. When they do, the evidence rules give us two tools to help solve the problem. Lawyers call one "refreshed recollection" and the other "past recollection recorded," labels just similar enough to guarantee confusion. Nevertheless, these principles get at very different things and are well worth the effort necessary to distinguish and understand them.

So how do we get there?

Assertion And Hearsay, Richard Lloret

Dickinson Law Review (2017-Present)

This article explores the characteristics and functions of assertion and considers how the term influences the definition of hearsay under Federal Rule of Evidence 801. Rule 801(a) defines hearsay by limiting it to words and conduct intended as an assertion, but the rule does not define the term assertion. Courts and legal scholars have focused relatively little attention on the nature and definition of assertion. That is unfortunate, because assertion is a robust concept that has been the subject of intense philosophic study over recent decades. Assertion is not a mere cypher standing in for whatever speech or conduct one …

The Easterbrook Theorem: An Application To Digital Markets, Joshua D. Wright, Murat C. Mungan

Faculty Scholarship

The rise of large firms in the digital economy, including Amazon, Apple, Facebook, and Google, has rekindled the debate about monopolization law. There are proposals to make finding liability easier against alleged digital monopolists by relaxing substantive standards; to flip burdens of proof; and to overturn broad swaths of existing Supreme Court precedent, and even to condemn a law review article. Frank Easterbrook’s seminal 1984 article, The Limits of Antitrust, theorizes that Type I error costs are greater than Type II error costs in the antitrust context, a proposition that has been woven deeply into antitrust law by the Supreme …

Exposing Police Misconduct In Pre-Trial Criminal Proceedings, Anjelica Hendricks

All Faculty Scholarship

This Article presents a unique argument: police misconduct records should be accessible and applicable for pre-trial criminal proceedings. Unfortunately, the existing narrative on the value of police misconduct records is narrow because it exclusively considers how these records can be used to impeach officer credibility at trial. This focus is limiting for several reasons. First, it addresses too few defendants, since fewer than 3% of criminal cases make it to trial. Second, it overlooks misconduct records not directly addressing credibility—such as records demonstrating paperwork deficiencies, failures to appear in court, and “mistakes” that upon examination are patterns of abuse. Finally, …

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

Faculty Works

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 Euclid Proviso, Ezra Rosser

Articles in Law Reviews & Other Academic Journals

This Article argues that the Euclid Proviso, which allows regional concerns to trump local zoning when required by the general welfare, should play a larger role in zoning's second century. Traditional zoning operates to severely limit the construction of additional housing. This locks in the advantages of homeowners but at tremendous cost, primarily in the form of unaffordable housing, to those who would like to join the community. State preemption of local zoning defies traditional categorization; it is at once both radically destabilizing and market-responsive. But, given the ways in which zoning is a foundational part of the racial and …

State V. Medina, 222 A.3d 1246 (R.I. 2020), Brendan Horan

Roger Williams University Law Review

No abstract provided.

Not An Ocean Away, Only A Moment Away: A Prosecutor's Primer For Obtaining Remotely Stored Data, Robert J. Peters, Alicia D. Loy, Matthew Osteen, Joseph Remy, Justin Fitzsimmons

Mitchell Hamline Law Review

No abstract provided.