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An Argument To The State Of Maine, The Town Of Wells, And Other Maine Towns Similarly Situated: Buy The Foreshore - Now, Orlando E. Delogu May 2018

An Argument To The State Of Maine, The Town Of Wells, And Other Maine Towns Similarly Situated: Buy The Foreshore - Now, Orlando E. Delogu

Maine Law Review

This paper has its roots in the finality of what have come to be called the Moody Beach decisions. In the last of these two cases, Maine's Supreme Judicial Court, sitting as the Law Court, held that the public's right to use the intertidal zone was limited to those uses and activities spelled out in the Colonial Ordinance of 16411647: “We agree with the Superior Court's declaration of the state of the legal title to Moody Beach. Long and firmly established rules of property law dictate that the plaintiff oceanfront owners at Moody Beach hold title in fee to the …


Creating A Classroom Component For Field Placement Programs: Enhancing Clinical Goals With Feminist Pedagogy, Linda Morton May 2018

Creating A Classroom Component For Field Placement Programs: Enhancing Clinical Goals With Feminist Pedagogy, Linda Morton

Maine Law Review

There exists a historic conflict between the more traditional Langdellian philosophy of legal education, and the experiential philosophy of apprenticeship programs, now known as field placement programs. The conflict is most recently apparent in the American Bar Association's (ABA) attempts to impose a more traditional classroom format on field placement programs through its regulations, guidelines, and instructions pertaining to law school accreditation. The ABA argues that law schools need to allocate greater instructional resources toward their field placement programs, particularly programs that provide more than one-half a semester's credit. Such programs should include a classroom component that meets ABA guidelines. …


Confronting Silence: The Constitution, Deaf Criminal Defendants, And The Right To Interpretation During Trial, Deirdre M. Smith May 2018

Confronting Silence: The Constitution, Deaf Criminal Defendants, And The Right To Interpretation During Trial, Deirdre M. Smith

Maine Law Review

For most deaf people, interactions with the hearing community in the absence of interpretation or technological assistance consist of communications that are, at most, only partly comprehensible. Criminal proceedings, with the defendant's liberty interest directly at stake, are occasions in which the need for deaf people to have a full understanding of what is said and done around them is most urgent. Ironically, the legal “right to interpretation” has not been clearly defined in either statutory or case law. Although the federal and state constitutions do not provide a separate or lesser set of rights for deaf defendants, their situation …


Whose Public Interest Is It Anyway?: Advice For Altruistic Young Lawyers, Patricia M. Wald Apr 2018

Whose Public Interest Is It Anyway?: Advice For Altruistic Young Lawyers, Patricia M. Wald

Maine Law Review

The Third Annual Frank M. Coffin Lecture on Law and Public Service was held on September 28, 1994. The Honorable Patricia M. Wald, Judge, United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia, presented “Whose Public Interest Is It Anyway?: Advice for Altruistic Young Lawyers.”


A Measure Of Our Justice System: A Look At Maine's Indigent Criminal Defense Delivery System, Ronald W. Schneider Jr. Apr 2018

A Measure Of Our Justice System: A Look At Maine's Indigent Criminal Defense Delivery System, Ronald W. Schneider Jr.

Maine Law Review

This Comment will examine briefly the history of the right to counsel and the accompanying right to the effective assistance of counsel in this country. At the time the Sixth Amendment was included in the Bill of Rights, the United States rejected the English practice of denying the right to counsel to those accused of felonies while granting the right to those charged with misdemeanors. People in the United States have enjoyed the right to counsel in all criminal cases, felonies and misdemeanors, since 1791. Yet in a very real and dangerous sense, the courts have reversed the course of …


Nuccio V. Nuccio: The Doctrine Of Equitable Estoppel Will Not Bar The Statute Of Limitations Defense In A Child Sexual Abuse Case Involving Repressed Memory, Christina J. D'Appolonia Mar 2018

Nuccio V. Nuccio: The Doctrine Of Equitable Estoppel Will Not Bar The Statute Of Limitations Defense In A Child Sexual Abuse Case Involving Repressed Memory, Christina J. D'Appolonia

Maine Law Review

Kathleen Nuccio alleged that she was sexually abused by her father when she was three years old. He continued to sexually abuse her for ten long years. He threatened her life when he held a chisel to her throat and vowed to kill her if she ever told anyone of the abuse. Luke Nuccio not only sexually defiled his daughter but also verbally abused her and physically beat her until she was seventeen years old. One such beating caused damage so severe to Kathleen's ear that she was forced to have surgery. Kathleen never spoke of the abuse during the …


Report Of The Maine Commission On Gender, Justice, And The Courts, Maine Commission On Gender, Justice, And The Courts Mar 2018

Report Of The Maine Commission On Gender, Justice, And The Courts, Maine Commission On Gender, Justice, And The Courts

Maine Law Review

The Commission on Gender, Justice, and the Courts was established by the Maine Supreme Judicial Court in January 1993, pursuant to a resolution adopted by the Conference of Chief Justices in 1988 urging the creation of task forces to study gender bias and minority concerns within court systems. In recent years, forty-one states, the District of Columbia, and two federal circuits have established task forces on gender bias in the courts as part of a continuing effort to achieve equality for women and men in American society. These jurisdictions recognized that access to a neutral and unbiased court is essential …


Representing The Powerless: Lawyers Can Make A Difference, Alvin J. Bronstein Mar 2018

Representing The Powerless: Lawyers Can Make A Difference, Alvin J. Bronstein

Maine Law Review

The Fifth Annual Frank M. Coffin Lecture on Law and Public Service was held on October 8, 1996. This year’s lecturer, Alvin J. Bronstein, the founding Executive Director of the National Prison Project of the American Civil Liberties Union, presented “Representing the Powerless: Lawyers Can Make a Difference.”


To Be The Change: Finding Higher Ground In The Law, Paula A. Franzese Mar 2018

To Be The Change: Finding Higher Ground In The Law, Paula A. Franzese

Maine Law Review

The law is the cornerstone of our society, one of the pillars of civilization, the very “witness … of our moral life.” In the words of former Chief Justice Earl Warren, “[t]he greatest issue before the world today is law.” He continued: “But throughout history, and never more than in our own day, the great question has been whether that law was to be compatible with the basic instinct of all human beings for freedom, for opportunity, for dignity and for peace.” At a time when the challenge to realize this essential congruity has never been more pronounced, the soul …


What Happened To The American Social Compact?, Robert B. Reich Mar 2018

What Happened To The American Social Compact?, Robert B. Reich

Maine Law Review

The Sixth Annual Frank M. Coffin Lecture on Law and Public Service was held on October 6, 1997. Robert B. Reich, formerly the Secretary of Labor under the Clinton Administration, and currently a University Professor and the Maurice B. Hexter Professor of Social and Economic Policy at Brandeis University and its Heller Graduate School, presented “The American Social Compact: What It Was and Where It Went.”


Paying Attention To The Little Man Behind The Curtain: Destroying The Myth Of The Liberal's Dilemma, Deborah M. Boulette Taylor Mar 2018

Paying Attention To The Little Man Behind The Curtain: Destroying The Myth Of The Liberal's Dilemma, Deborah M. Boulette Taylor

Maine Law Review

Generally, feminists and other liberals, and in particular multi-culturalists, share the common goal of seeking to make American law reflective of a greater variety of voices and experiences beyond those of the dominant, white-male culture. There currently exists an issue, however, about which feminists find it necessary to depart from this goal: whether to permit a criminal defendant to introduce exculpatory cultural evidence. Much of the feminist literature on the use of the “cultural defense” argues that introduction of such evidence serves only to deny immigrant women and children the same protections afforded others in our criminal justice system because …


Commerce Clause Challenges Spawned By United States V. Lopez Are Doing Violence To The Violence Against Women Act (Vawa): A Survey Of Cases And The Ongoing Debate Over How The Vawa Will Fare In The Wake Of Lopez, Lisanne Newell Leasure Mar 2018

Commerce Clause Challenges Spawned By United States V. Lopez Are Doing Violence To The Violence Against Women Act (Vawa): A Survey Of Cases And The Ongoing Debate Over How The Vawa Will Fare In The Wake Of Lopez, Lisanne Newell Leasure

Maine Law Review

On September 14, 1994, in response to and in recognition of the epidemic of violence against women in the United States, Congress enacted the Violence Against Women Act (VAWA). The VAWA is a comprehensive statute designed to provide women greater protection from and recourse against violence and to impose accountability on abusers and those who commit crimes of violence based on gender animus. The VAWA, which contains seven parts, creates new federal crimes, strengthens penalties for existing federal sex crimes, and provides $1.6 billion over six years for education, research, treatment of domestic and sex crime victims, and the improvement …


Then And Now: A Perspective, Caroline D. Glassman Mar 2018

Then And Now: A Perspective, Caroline D. Glassman

Maine Law Review

I am very pleased to have been asked to speak to you tonight for it gives me, in the first instance, an opportunity to compare the status of women in the law when I entered law school with that in more current times. I do this without fear of contradiction for I can safely vouch for the fact that there is no other person present here tonight who was a woman law student 50 or so years ago.


Maine's "Act To Protect Traditional Marriage And Prohibit Same-Sex Marriages": Questions Of Constitutionality Under State And Federal Law, Jennifer B. Wriggins Mar 2018

Maine's "Act To Protect Traditional Marriage And Prohibit Same-Sex Marriages": Questions Of Constitutionality Under State And Federal Law, Jennifer B. Wriggins

Maine Law Review

In 1997, Maine's Legislature passed “An Act to Protect Traditional Marriage and Prohibit Same-Sex Marriages” (Act). The summary attached to the bill states that the bill “prohibits persons of the same sex from contracting marriage.” The bill was the verbatim text of an initiative petition. Civil marriage in Maine and other states is regulated by state statute, and marriage regulation is generally considered to be within the state's police power. However, the state's power to regulate marriage is subject to constitutional limitations. I maintain that “heightened scrutiny” should be applied to the Act because the Act creates a gender-based classification, …


Keeping Students Awake: Feminist Theory And Legal Education, Martha Minow Mar 2018

Keeping Students Awake: Feminist Theory And Legal Education, Martha Minow

Maine Law Review

I am not exactly sure why, but when I turned to think about legal education for today's conference, Mary Shelley's Frankenstein came to mind. It was not because of my own nightmares that my chosen profession as law professor involves turning ordinary people into monsters, although that's a thought we can explore perhaps over drinks. It was because of this comment Shelley makes in the book: “If the study to which you apply yourself has a tendency to weaken your affections, and to destroy your taste for those simple pleasures in which no alloy can possibly mix, then that study …


Feminist Microenterprise: Vindicating The Rights Of Women In The New Global Order?, Lucie E. White Mar 2018

Feminist Microenterprise: Vindicating The Rights Of Women In The New Global Order?, Lucie E. White

Maine Law Review

The subject of this symposium is “Law, Feminism & the 21st Century.” What are the greatest challenges for feminism in the coming century and how can the law help to meet them? I want to begin this essay by asking that question from two radically different vantage points. The first is very far removed from the usual starting point for feminist analysis, which is the “lived” experience of women's lives. Let us move far away from a place from which we can feel the lines on women's faces, and move to a place from which we can see only numbers, …


Global Intersections: Critical Race Feminist Human Rights And Inter/National Black Women, Hope Lewis Mar 2018

Global Intersections: Critical Race Feminist Human Rights And Inter/National Black Women, Hope Lewis

Maine Law Review

In this brief essay, I illustrate how Critical Race Feminist analysis could reconceptualize the human rights problems facing “Inter/national Black women” --in this case, Black women who migrate between the United States and Jamaica. This focus on Jamaican American migrants is very personal as well as political; I was raised by Jamaican American women. However, I have begun to focus on such women in my research not only in a search for “home” but also because there are important lessons to be learned from those who are the least visible in the legal literature. I draw the framework for a …


Intimate Partner Violence Strategies: Models For Community Participation, Jenny Rivera Mar 2018

Intimate Partner Violence Strategies: Models For Community Participation, Jenny Rivera

Maine Law Review

Over the last several years, states have passed legislation to address intimate partner violence, more commonly known as “domestic violence,” or violence and abuse between current and former spouses, or persons in similar intimate relationships. Much of this legislation is composed of civil and criminal provisions, including criminal sanctions for intimate partner violence. The constitutionality, practical impact, and present and potential benefits of these statutes are the topic of political debates, scholarly diatribes, and litigation. The passage and implementation of federal legislation specifically designed to address violence between present and former spouses and intimate partners reflects a sea change in …


Shattered Jade, Broken Shoe: Foreign Economic Development And The Sexual Exploitation Of Women In China, Elizabeth Spahn Mar 2018

Shattered Jade, Broken Shoe: Foreign Economic Development And The Sexual Exploitation Of Women In China, Elizabeth Spahn

Maine Law Review

Predicting the ways in which feminisms might develop in the next century is unfortunately well beyond my own capabilities. In the next decade or two, however, one thing I believe we might want to think about are the relationships between feminisms and global free market capitalisms. The question I am asking, simply stated, is the extent to which economic development (free-market global capitalism) advances, is neutral toward, or harms women. One traditional American way of viewing the global free market is to tout economic development as a panacea for the problems facing the world's poorest and most violated group, women. …


The Pregnancy Discrimination Act: Legitimating Discrimination Against Pregnant Women In The Workforce, Judith G. Greenberg Mar 2018

The Pregnancy Discrimination Act: Legitimating Discrimination Against Pregnant Women In The Workforce, Judith G. Greenberg

Maine Law Review

The Pregnancy Discrimination Act (PDA) has been effective in making the most egregious and obvious forms of pregnancy discrimination illegal. Unfortunately, the PDA has also acted as a shield behind which employers can hide as they discriminate against their pregnant employees. The result is that the PDA permits discrimination based on the very sort of stereotyping that it was expected to eradicate. There are two dominant stereotypes of pregnant women. Both are inconsistent with the image of a good worker. One stereotype connects pregnant women with the home. In one form or another it says, “Pregnant women are/should be preoccupied …


What If The Butchers In The Slaughter House Cases Had Won?: An Exercise In "Counterfactual" Doctrine, Jane L. Scarborough Mar 2018

What If The Butchers In The Slaughter House Cases Had Won?: An Exercise In "Counterfactual" Doctrine, Jane L. Scarborough

Maine Law Review

In a recent Harvard Law Review commentary, two well-known constitutional scholars called into question not only what Supreme Court cases are “canonized” in casebooks, but whether the “Court-centeredness” of our scholarship and teaching about constitutional law has led to an impoverishment of the discourse on justice. The authors document how “[c]ases become important to teach and remember because they serve as the icons (and demons) of an invented constitutional tradition” --a tradition that “comes into being at a particular point in history, and then regards itself as always having been there.” There is no better example of such an icon …


Grounded Applications: Feminism And The Law At The Millennium, Katharine Silbaugh Mar 2018

Grounded Applications: Feminism And The Law At The Millennium, Katharine Silbaugh

Maine Law Review

The conference topic is feminism in the twenty-first century, a dialogue between academics and practicing attorneys. The first order of business will be to resist the millennium invitation to come up with evermore novel, overarching formulations of the mission and means of feminism. At the end of the twentieth century we know quite a bit about the problems presented by feminists and the problems within feminism. We have had a long history of insightful intellectual discourse on questions of equality and on the meaning of gender. We also know that it takes time to absorb and apply broad insights in …


Standing Under State Search And Seizure Provision: Why The Minnesota Supreme Court Should Have Rejected The Federal Standards And Instead Invoked Greater Protection Under Its Own Constitution In State V. Carter, Rebecca C. Garrett Feb 2018

Standing Under State Search And Seizure Provision: Why The Minnesota Supreme Court Should Have Rejected The Federal Standards And Instead Invoked Greater Protection Under Its Own Constitution In State V. Carter, Rebecca C. Garrett

Maine Law Review

In State v. Carter, the Minnesota Supreme Court considered whether a criminal defendant had “standing” to challenge an alleged search under the Fourth Amendment and Article 1, Section 10 of the Minnesota Constitution. The defendant moved to suppress evidence obtained by a police officer who had peered in the window of an apartment where the defendant was participating in a drug-packaging operation with the apartment's leaseholder. A divided court held that the defendant had a legitimate expectation of privacy in the apartment. Therefore, the defendant had standing to challenge the legality of the police officer's observations pursuant to the Fourth …


Competing Liabilities: Responding To Evidence Of Child Abuse That Surface During The Attorney-Client Relationship, Alison Beyea Feb 2018

Competing Liabilities: Responding To Evidence Of Child Abuse That Surface During The Attorney-Client Relationship, Alison Beyea

Maine Law Review

Kevin Adams, a practicing attorney in Maine, represents John Brown in a dispute with Brown's landlord. Brown is facing eviction as a result of his inability to pay the rent. Over the course of the representation, Adams has come to believe that Brown is abusing his son. Brown--who is working two jobs but still cannot pay his rent--has told Adams of the incredible pressure he is facing. Brown has admitted that the pressure is getting to him and that he feels bad that he has been “taking it out on the kid.” Brown also told Adams that he had been …


Towering Figures, Enigmas, And Responsive Communities In American Legal Ethics, Thomas L. Shaffer Feb 2018

Towering Figures, Enigmas, And Responsive Communities In American Legal Ethics, Thomas L. Shaffer

Maine Law Review

The Annual Edward S. Godfrey Lecture at the University of Maine School of Law was held on November 12, 1998. Professor Thomas L. Shaffer, Edward S. Godfry Professor of Law, presented “Towering Figures, Enigmas, and Responsive Communities in American Legal Ethics.”


When You Should Have Known: Rethinking Constructive Knowledge In Tort Liability For Sexual Transmission Of Hiv, John A. Turcotte Feb 2018

When You Should Have Known: Rethinking Constructive Knowledge In Tort Liability For Sexual Transmission Of Hiv, John A. Turcotte

Maine Law Review

AIDS is a modern epidemic that has grabbed the forefront of this nation's attention like no other disease in the twentieth century. Despite vigorous medical research and experimentation, the disease remains incurable and ultimately fatal. Protecting the health of the citizens has always been a strong policy of the law. Tort liability for the spread of contagious diseases dates back to the early nineteenth century. Tort liability for sexual transmission of AIDS began to appear in the late 1980s, not long after the appearance of the disease. Based as it was on the tort actions arising from other transmittable diseases, …


Maine's Sex Offender Registration And Notification Act: Wise Or Wicked?, James A. Billings, Crystal L. Bulges University Of Maine School Of Law Feb 2018

Maine's Sex Offender Registration And Notification Act: Wise Or Wicked?, James A. Billings, Crystal L. Bulges University Of Maine School Of Law

Maine Law Review

The purpose of this Comment is to discuss both the constitutionality and advisability of such sex offender notification statutes with specific reference to Maine's Sex Offender Registration and Notification Act (the SORNA). This Comment will discuss, independent of their constitutionality, the advisability of such statutes on a policy level. It is the Authors' thesis that the SORNA will survive constitutional challenges, but as a means of alleviating the problem of sex offender recidivism in this country, the SORNA and similar statutes fail both in theory and in practice. Alternative approaches based on interdisciplinary study will be suggested.


In Pursuit Of The Public Good: Lawyers Who Care, Ruth Bader Ginsburg Feb 2018

In Pursuit Of The Public Good: Lawyers Who Care, Ruth Bader Ginsburg

Maine Law Review

The Eighth Annual Frank M. Coffin Lecture on Law and Public Service was held on November 22, 1999. The Honorable Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Associate Justice of the United States Supreme Court, delivered the lecture. Established in 1992, the lecture honors Judge Frank M. Coffin, Senior Circuit Judge of the United States Court of Appeals for the First Circuit and long-time friend of the University of Maine School of Law.


The Maine Civil Rights Act: History, Enforcement, Application, And Analysis, J. Christopher Parr Feb 2018

The Maine Civil Rights Act: History, Enforcement, Application, And Analysis, J. Christopher Parr

Maine Law Review

Since the passage of the “Maine Civil Rights Act” (MCRA, Act) in 1989, the Maine Department of the Attorney General has made enforcement of that civil “hate crime” law one of its highest priorities. According to one statistic, “more than 125 people have been prosecuted in Maine's civil courts on hate crime charges since 1994,” and only two of those actions have been lost by the State. The Attorney General at the time of this writing, Andrew Ketterer, has stated that he takes the perpetration of hate crimes seriously, and that it has been important to him “that the message …


Sovereign Immunity And The Crisis Of Constitutional Absolutism: Interpreting The Eleventh Amendment After Alden V. Maine, Matthew Mustokoff Feb 2018

Sovereign Immunity And The Crisis Of Constitutional Absolutism: Interpreting The Eleventh Amendment After Alden V. Maine, Matthew Mustokoff

Maine Law Review

Toward the end of her article, The History of Mainstream Legal Thought, Elizabeth Mensch identifies federalism as a dominant theme in recent Supreme Court decisions. The Court's focus on questions of federalism, however, cannot be directly attributed to the emergence of any specific social or political issues dividing champions of strong central government from defenders of state sovereignty. Instead, the Court's scrutiny seems to have arisen from a perplexing, frustrating, and self-contradictory body of Eleventh Amendment jurisprudence and the perpetual call for judicial clarification it has produced. While the text of the Eleventh Amendment is unambiguous—its language specifically bestows immunity …