Law Commons^™

Decoding Dobbs: A Typology To Better Understand The Roberts Court's Jurisprudence, Katie Yoder

Honors Projects

The U.S. Supreme Court first recognized Substantive Due Process (“SDP”) in the early twentieth century. In Lochner v. New York, the Court established that there are certain unenumerated rights that are implied by the Fourteenth Amendment.Though SDP originated in a case about worker’s rights and liberties, it quickly became relevant to many cases surrounding personal intimate decisions involving health, safety, marriage, sexual activity, and reproduction.Over the past 60 years, the Court relied upon SDP to justify expanding a fundamental right to privacy, liberty, and the right to medical decision making. Specifically, the court applied these concepts to allow for freedoms …

Power Play: The President's Role In Shaping Renewable Energy Regulation And Policy, Luke Bartol

Honors Projects

With the impacts of climate change becoming more and more apparent every day, finding means of effective action to mitigate its effects become increasingly critical. While localized work can play an important role, federal action is necessary to have the most widespread and effective impact, especially on interconnected issues such as clean energy. Congressional action is the avenue of change at this level, however in an increasingly partisan and divided environment, progress on this front is far short of what is needed.

Looking to the president is logical here, both as a single actor more insulated from partisan fights, but …

Campaigning For The Court: The Effect Of Presidential Campaign Rhetoric On The Supreme Court, Mackey O'Keefe

Honors Projects

This paper investigates how presidential candidates speak about the Supreme Court on the campaign trail, and how the ideological tenor of their rhetoric influences outcomes on the Court. Rhetoric is a powerful and well-researched tool of the presidency and has often been called “the power to persuade.” Much of judicial politics scholarship works to describe judicial decision making, investigating what constrains the actions and decisions of the Supreme Court. Though some scholarship has examined how presidential rhetoric affects the Supreme Court, little has been conducted in the area of presidential campaigns. This paper argues that presidential campaign rhetoric influences the …

What Can We Learn From Vulnerability Theory?, Phillip Rich

Honors Projects

Martha Albertson Fineman frames philosophies of justice, freedom, equality, and human nature alongside original insights about the role of vulnerability and institutions in people’s lives to argue for increased government intervention. The conglomeration of these ideas form vulnerability theory, an emerging legal theory providing a loose framework for evaluating and creating public policy. The following article can be broken down into two parts. The first part defines vulnerability theory by identifying, evaluating, and discussing the interaction among the five major components of vulnerability theory: the rejection of the liberal subject in favor of a vulnerable subject, the universality and constancy …

New York Times’ And Wall Street Journal’S Coverage Of Deferred Action For Childhood Arrivals (Daca): A Content Analysis, Estefany Paniagua-Pardo

Honors Projects

This paper investigates how Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) has been depicted in the U.S specifically by examining the media’s coverage of immigration during the Obama and Trump presidencies in two elite newspapers, The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal between June 2012 (when DACA was signed into law) and October 2017 (9 months into Trump’s presidential term).

The findings from the analysis indicate that the tone of the newspapers’ coverage of DACA was both negative and conflict oriented. The news articles were consistently unfavorable; out of a total of 170 articles analyzed and examined, 53.83% were …

Africa And The International Criminal Court: Behind The Backlash And Toward Future Solutions, Marisa O'Toole

Honors Projects

Fifteen years into its operation as the preeminent international institution charged with the prosecution of the most serious international crimes, the International Criminal Court (ICC) has faced and continues to face intense backlash from the African continent. Once the Court’s most fervent advocates, many African leaders now lambast the ICC. In recent months, three African countries and the African Union en masse have attempted withdrawal from the Court, thus pushing the ICC-Africa relationship into the international spotlight as a topic of acute global interest. This paper seeks to explore the critiques behind this backlash through both a historical and present-day …

Who We Are: Incarcerated Students And The New Prison Literature, 1995-2010, Reilly Hannah N. Lorastein

Honors Projects

This project focuses on American prison writings from the late 1990s to the 2000s. Much has been written about American prison intellectuals such as Malcolm X, George Jackson, Eldridge Cleaver, and Angela Davis, who wrote as active participants in black and brown freedom movements in the United States. However the new prison literature that has emerged over the past two decades through higher education programs within prisons has received little to no attention. This study provides a more nuanced view of the steadily growing silent population in the United States through close readings of Openline, an inter-disciplinary journal featuring …