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Full-Text Articles in Law

Voting Rights At A Crossroads: Return To The Past Or An Opportunity For The Future, Barbara Arnwine Jan 2005

Voting Rights At A Crossroads: Return To The Past Or An Opportunity For The Future, Barbara Arnwine

Seattle University Law Review

This keynote address for the 2005 Symposium: Where's My Vote? Lessons Learned from Washington State's Gubernatorial Election was presented by Barbara Arnwine. The focus of the presentation was on "Voting Rights at a Crossroad: Return to the Past or an Opportunity for the Future?" To students who are on the career path to becoming practitioners of law, and to attorneys and law professors, no role is more important than enhancing democracy. Ms. Arnwine's speech addresses the topics of voting rights from a national perspective highlighting the most pressing challenges. In addressing this theme, four areas of voting rights are covered …


Screening The Law: Ideology And Law In American Popular Culture, Mark Niles, Naomi Mezey Jan 2005

Screening The Law: Ideology And Law In American Popular Culture, Mark Niles, Naomi Mezey

Faculty Articles

This paper reevaluates Frankfurt School theory, and other cultural critiques, in an effort to bring a more sophisticated analysis to bear on popular culture depictions of law. It invokes the cultural critiques of the Birmingham School in order to assess the more subtle ideological content more often found in film. The focus is not only on how popular culture functions as a mechanism for communicating and reproducing ideologies, but also what this function is based on, a theoretical analysis that asks what images of law and legal justice one might expect to see in popular media. The article also assesses …


The Code For Corporate Citizenship: States Should Amend Statutes Governing Corporations And Enable Corporations To Be Good Citizens, Elisa Scalise Jan 2005

The Code For Corporate Citizenship: States Should Amend Statutes Governing Corporations And Enable Corporations To Be Good Citizens, Elisa Scalise

Seattle University Law Review

Corporations are important social actors. They are created by law and create products, services, jobs, and wealth upon which modem societies rely. Investments injected by corporations bring jobs, capital, and technology to communities, thereby raising living standards and creating derivative rights such as education, health and housing, and political freedoms. Modem corporations allow entrepreneurs to raise massive amounts of capital for large projects and research, which results in innovation and a wide range of products and services. However, these same corporations can also cause social harm. They are structured in such a way that it is possible for agents in …


Allegory From The Cave: A Story About A Mis-Educated Profession And The Paradoxical Prescription, Natasha Martin Jan 2005

Allegory From The Cave: A Story About A Mis-Educated Profession And The Paradoxical Prescription, Natasha Martin

Faculty Articles

The article reviews and engages Professor Derrick Bell’s more recent scholarship on the nature of the legal profession and the practice of law – ETHICAL AMBITION: LIVING A LIFE OF MEANING AND WORTH – placing Bell’s work in the broader framework of the entire legal enterprise highlighting its relevance to legal ethics, the ills of the profession and legal training. The article juxtaposes Bell’s more contemporary critique of the legal profession and practice with the observations of Carter G. Woodson in THE MIS-EDUCATION OF THE NEGRO, another African-American educator largely unfamiliar to the broader legal academy. The author proposes that …


Freedom In A Regulatory State?: Lawrence, Marriage And Biopolitics, Dean Spade, Craig Willse Jan 2005

Freedom In A Regulatory State?: Lawrence, Marriage And Biopolitics, Dean Spade, Craig Willse

Faculty Articles

This paper attempts to trace the links between the Lawrence v. Texas decision and campaigns for gay marriage rights in order to envision movements that seek justice for more than just the most racially and economically privileged lesbians and gay men. The authors outline the limits of the agenda represented by Lawrence and propose alternative modes for resisting the coercive regulation of sexuality, gender, and family formations.


Crawford V. Washington: The End Of Victimless Prosecution?, Andrew King-Ries Jan 2005

Crawford V. Washington: The End Of Victimless Prosecution?, Andrew King-Ries

Seattle University Law Review

The article explores the Crawford decision in the context of victimless prosecutions. Part II discusses current trends in victimless domestic violence prosecution and the power and control dynamics of domestic violence relationships, including how these dynamics relate to, and create the need for, victimless prosecutions. Part III discusses the Crawford decision. Part IV explores possible interpretations of Crawford within the context of victimless domestic violence prosecutions. Part V explains why courts should interpret Crawford in a way that allows prosecutors to continue to prosecute batterers without a participating victim.


Death By A Thousand Signatures: The Rise Of Restrictive Ballot Access Laws And The Decline Of Electoral Competition In The United States, Oliver Hall Jan 2005

Death By A Thousand Signatures: The Rise Of Restrictive Ballot Access Laws And The Decline Of Electoral Competition In The United States, Oliver Hall

Seattle University Law Review

This Article explores one instance of the countermajoritarian problem in American democracy: how to protect the rights of minor parties and independent candidates participating in an electoral system dominated by two major parties. In particular, this Article focuses on the effect of modern ballot access laws on candidates' rights, arguing that courts ought to treat these laws as a presumptively impermissible form of "collusion in restraint of democracy." Although the article borrows the language of antitrust law, this argument is rooted in core constitutional principles and rights guaranteed under the First and Fourteenth Amendments. Nevertheless, the analogy to antitrust law …


Partisanship Redefined: Why Blanket Primaries Are Constitutional, Deidra A. Foster Jan 2005

Partisanship Redefined: Why Blanket Primaries Are Constitutional, Deidra A. Foster

Seattle University Law Review

In 2003, the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals rendered a decision that would pave the way for drastic changes in Washington State's election process. In Democratic Party of Washington v. Reed, the court held that Washington's nearly seventy-year-old blanket primary was unconstitutional, and the Supreme Court declined to review the case. The Ninth Circuit professed to be bound by California Democratic Party v. Jones, the Supreme Court case that ruled California's blanket primary unconstitutional just three years earlier, ignoring the argument that Washington's blanket primary differed materially from California's. What followed was a melee of voter disapproval and …


Dispensing With The Public Interest Requirement In Private Causes Of Action Under The Washington Consumer Protection Act, Jonathan A. Mark Jan 2005

Dispensing With The Public Interest Requirement In Private Causes Of Action Under The Washington Consumer Protection Act, Jonathan A. Mark

Seattle University Law Review

It has been more than eighteen years since the Washington Supreme Court handed down its landmark decision in Hangman Ridge Training Stables v. Safeco Title Insurance Company. This was the final decision in a string of cases in which the court attempted to resolve problems arising from the application and interpretation of the right to a private cause of action under Washington's Consumer Protection Act ("CPA"). This Article explores the application of the public interest requirement since the decision in Hangman Ridge and considers whether the tests devised by the Hangman Ridge court to determine public interest are still …


The Afterlife Of The Meretricious Relationship Doctrine: Applying The Doctrine Post Mortem, John E. Wallace Jan 2005

The Afterlife Of The Meretricious Relationship Doctrine: Applying The Doctrine Post Mortem, John E. Wallace

Seattle University Law Review

The meretricious relationship doctrine has received increased attention in recent years largely due to its application to same-sex couples' and the national debate on same-sex marriage. However, the importance of the doctrine, applicable also to heterosexual couples, extends beyond this recent focus. The number of unmarried, committed persons cohabitating has been increasing rapidly. Over eleven million people reported being unmarried but living with a partner in 2000, an increase of seventy-two percent since 1990. As the number of unmarried persons cohabitating increases, so will the importance of the doctrine. The meretricious relationship doctrine is a judicially-created equitable doctrine that allows …


The Washington 2004 Gubernatorial Election Crisis: The Necessity Of Restoring Public Confidence In The Electoral Process, Joaquin G. Avila Jan 2005

The Washington 2004 Gubernatorial Election Crisis: The Necessity Of Restoring Public Confidence In The Electoral Process, Joaquin G. Avila

Seattle University Law Review

This Article details the plethora of problems associated with Washington State's 2004 gubernatorial election and explores the proposed electoral reforms in light of prior threats to the electoral process. The Article postulates that electoral reforms in the administration of elections also present an important opportunity to provide minority communities with greater access to the political process. Part II of this Article begins with a history ofvoting discrimination in the United States. This history provides a context to the 2004 gubernatorial election in Washington. In addition, this history provides an important background context for assessing whether reforms in the administration of …


Internet Voting With Initiatives And Referendums: Stumbling Towards Direct Democracy, Rebekah K. Browder Jan 2005

Internet Voting With Initiatives And Referendums: Stumbling Towards Direct Democracy, Rebekah K. Browder

Seattle University Law Review

Imagine that it is Tuesday, November 4, 2008, and you realize that you have not yet voted for the candidate that you want to be President of the United States. The polls close at 7 p.m., and it is already 6:45 p.m. Instead of rushing off to the nearest polling place, you simply go to your computer, log in, fill out a ballot, and email your ballot to your designated polling website. The whole process takes fewer than ten minutes, and you have done your civic duty. Leading proponents of Internet voting point to five possible benefits of electronic voting: …


Limit Horizons & Critique: Seductions And Perils Of The Nation, Tayyab Mahmud Jan 2005

Limit Horizons & Critique: Seductions And Perils Of The Nation, Tayyab Mahmud

Faculty Articles

This essay introduces four contributions on nation and nationalism that form a cluster in the 2005 Annual Symposium of Latina/o Critical Legal Theory (LatCrit). It puts forward the concept of "limit horizons": the hegemonic ontological categories that so imprint the imaginary of an age the even critique remains imprisoned in the normalcy of these categories - an imprisonment that curtails the transformatory potential of critique. It is argued that the modern concept of the nation is such a limit horizon. Consequently, any critical engagement with the concept of the nation must concurrently be an exercise in self-critique to ensure that …


Citizen And Citizenship Within And Beyond The Nation, Tayyab Mahmud Jan 2005

Citizen And Citizenship Within And Beyond The Nation, Tayyab Mahmud

Faculty Articles

This review essay deploys critical social theory and critical race theory to interrogate concepts of citizen and citizenship. It reviews three submissions to a Lationa/o Critical Legal Theory (LatCrit) Symposium. One explores the relationship between law, race, and nation-building. The second examines the relationship between race and citizenship through the prism of police round-up of undocumented workers in Arizona. The last located the question of citizenship and legal subjecthood beyond the traditional confines of the nation-state.


Lawrence Summers’ Speech On “Innate” Differences Between Men And Women--A Different Perspective, Thomas Fischer Jan 2005

Lawrence Summers’ Speech On “Innate” Differences Between Men And Women--A Different Perspective, Thomas Fischer

Faculty Articles

In this article, Professor Fischer outlines his experience in the admissions department at Georgetown University Law Center as well as other legal academic settings, and the perspective he gained with regard to women in the sphere of legal academia. The article outlines a careful reflection over the role of gender in these settings, in contrast with Lawrence Summer's perspective on innate gender differences.


The Practical Soul Of Business Ethics: The Corporate Manager's Dilemma And The Social Teaching Of The Catholic Church, Leo L. Clarke, Bruce P. Frohnen, Edward C. Lyons Jan 2005

The Practical Soul Of Business Ethics: The Corporate Manager's Dilemma And The Social Teaching Of The Catholic Church, Leo L. Clarke, Bruce P. Frohnen, Edward C. Lyons

Seattle University Law Review

This Article focuses on and attempts to dispel an overly narrow view of the moral responsibilities of corporations and their managers. Many businessmen and lawyers, relying on prevailing approaches to business ethics, labor under the misperception that the moral ladder in the business world has only one rung: "Be honest." Americans, however, should, can and do expect more from the managers of our large corporations, and virtually every Fortune 100 company publicly espouses a "social responsibility" far exceeding mere honesty. Further, as is demonstrated, American jurisprudence is consistent with those expectations. This Article's thesis is that Catholic Social Teaching provides …


Competing Values Or False Choices: Coming To Consensus On The Election Reform Debate In Washington State And The Country, Tova Andrea Wang Jan 2005

Competing Values Or False Choices: Coming To Consensus On The Election Reform Debate In Washington State And The Country, Tova Andrea Wang

Seattle University Law Review

This Article examines the problems revealed in Washington State's election system as a result of its staggeringly close gubernatorial election, and compares such problems to those encountered by other states in the 2004 election. It examines the challenge of fixing these problems through the prism of the ongoing debate over what values and goals are most important when making election administration decisions. The various values and goals of expanding voter access, increasing voter participation and election efficiency, preventing voter fraud, ensuring the count of every vote, and creating finality in the voting system are included in this examination. Throughout this …