Law Commons^™

How Should The Statute Of Frauds Apply To Reliance-Based Contracts?, Gregory Scott Crespi

SMU Law Review Forum

The “sufficient writing” requirements of the Statute of Frauds were formulated with bargain-based contracts in mind. It is often difficult if not impossible for persons to meet those requirements for reliance-based contracts, since this would require them to produce a writing signed by the promisor that not only sufficiently evidenced the promise, but also provided sufficient evidence of the other elements of such reliance-based contracts: the foreseeability of their subsequent reliance upon the promise, the fact of their reliance, and that failure to enforce the promise would be unjust.

There are several ways that courts can avoid the harsh results …

“Firm Offers” Under Ucc Section 2-205 Should Be Treated The Same Way As Are Offers Included In Option Contracts, Gregory Scott Crespi

SMU Law Review Forum

“Firm offers” under Section 2-205 of the Uniform Commercial Code are irrevocable for a period of time in accordance with the terms of that provision. But should those statutorily irrevocable offers be treated the same way as offers that are included in option contracts, and that are thereby contractually irrevocable, for the application of the “death or legal disability of the offeror” doctrine, or the “rejection or counteroffer” rules, or the “mailbox rule”? Or should firm offers be treated in a different fashion, as are offers not included in option contracts, for those purposes? This article argues that firm offers …

Law Firm Dynamics: Don’T Hate The Player, Hate The Game, Tom Kimbrough

SMU Law Review Forum

This paper concerns the business of law, a subject ignored by legal academia and sugarcoated by the organized bar. If law professors express little or no interest in this subject, their students most certainly do. Indeed, I have found that students are desperately hungry for information on the day-to-day realities of working in a law firm. Students are especially keen to learn about possible paths for career advancement within firms, across them, or across the organizations served by the firms.

Paths for career advancement do exist, but they are not easy to find or pursue. Law firms are hardly going …

Corpus Linguistics Criticisms Of Heller Misuse Corpus Linguistics, Michael Showalter

SMU Law Review Forum

A number of linguistics experts have asserted that new corpus-linguistics evidence undermines the U.S. Supreme Court’s conclusion in District of Columbia v. Heller that the Second Amendment phrase keep and bear arms means to possess and carry weapons. At the time of ratification, the term bear arms carried both an idiomatic sense meaning “to serve as a soldier” and a literal sense meaning “to carry weapons.” The Heller majority concluded that the Second Amendment uses the literal sense, partly because the idiomatic reading has the absurd implication of causing the Amendment to protect a right to serve as a soldier. …

Equal Protection And Scarce Therapies: The Role Of Race, Sex, And Other Protected Classifications, Govind Persad

SMU Law Review Forum

The allocation of scarce medical treatments, such as antivirals and antibody therapies for COVID-19 patients, has important legal dimensions. This Essay examines a currently debated issue: how will courts view the consideration of characteristics shielded by equal protection law, such as race, sex, age, health, and even vaccination status, in allocation? Part II explains the application of strict scrutiny to allocation criteria that consider individual race, which have been recently debated, and concludes that such criteria are unlikely to succeed under present Supreme Court precedent. Part III analyzes the use of sex-based therapy allocation criteria, which are also in current …

The "Divisive Concepts" Laws And Americans Of Asian Descent, Ilhyung Lee

SMU Law Review Forum

In the past year, a number of states have enacted laws that prohibit public schools from teaching certain lessons about race. The main target of these laws appears to be “critical race theory,” once a theory advanced in legal academia that has now become a “catchall term” for discussions of race and racism. The states mean business and seek to enforce their new or proposed laws by prohibiting state funding for teaching the banned content, withholding funding to local educational agencies or schools in violation, subjecting offending teachers to disciplinary action, and allowing those aggrieved to bring an action at …

Reproductive Originalism: Why The Fourteenth Amendment's Original Meaning Protects The Right To Abortion, David H. Gans

SMU Law Review Forum

The conventional wisdom among conservative originalists is that Roe v. Wade and Planned Parenthood of Southeastern Pennsylvania v. Casey are abominable rulings unmoored from the text and history of the Constitution. In the eyes of conservative originalists, the Supreme Court created the right to abortion out of whole cloth, without a shred of support from the Constitution’s text.

These so-called originalists are deeply misguided. As this Essay shows, the text and history of the Fourteenth Amendment, in fact, protect unenumerated fundamental rights, including rights to bodily integrity, to marry and have a family, and to reproductive liberty. The right to …

Judging Biden, John P. Collins Jr.

SMU Law Review Forum

It would have been easy for President Joe Biden to approach judicial appointments (and, particularly, circuit court appointments) the same way as the Administration he served as Vice President. Like President Obama, President Biden inherited a country in turmoil. A deadly pandemic had killed nearly 400,000 Americans. Necessary quarantine orders shuttered schools and businesses, and ground the economy to a halt. Partisan tensions were still raging, culminating in the violent storming of the Capitol by right-wing insurrectionists. People needed the vaccine, economic relief, and a return to some semblance of normalcy. Also, like President Obama (and thanks to President Trump), …

The Decline Of Natural Law And The Rise Of Exclusive Positivism, Bill Watson

SMU Law Review Forum

Stuart Banner’s The Decline of Natural Law: How American Lawyers Once Used Natural Law and Why They Stopped addresses a “fundamental change in American legal thought that took place in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.” Prior to this change, lawyers routinely relied on natural law in their arguments, and judges took those arguments seriously. Natural law gave judges “a reservoir of principles. . .to draw upon” in cases that positive law could not cleanly resolve, which made it easy to see judges as discovering law in those cases. After the change, however, natural law dropped out of the …

Dislike: Facebook's Anticompetitive Monopoly On Social Media And Why U.S. Antitrust Laws Must Adapt To The Technological Era, Elizabeth I. Nielson

SMU Law Review Forum

Although Facebook started as a way to connect with college classmates, it has grown into one of the largest technology companies in the world. Facebook is no longer solely a way to connect with classmates. Instead, it is the powerhouse of social networks and dominates the online advertising business. Facebook has grown at an unprecedented rate—acquiring businesses and gathering users’ privacy along the way—partially because of the failure of U.S. antitrust laws to adequately protect against anticompetitive and monopolistic behavior in the technological arena.

Historically, antitrust laws have used the consumer welfare standard to determine if entities are engaging in …

Post-Pandemic Recommendations: Covid-19 Continuity Of Court Operations During A Public Health Emergency Workgroup, Honorable Samuel A. Thumma, Marcus W. Reinkensmeyer

SMU Law Review Forum

In this report, the COVID-19 Continuity of Court Operations During a Public Health Emergency Workgroup (Plan B Workgroup) makes recommendations about best practices and technologies that should be retained or adapted post-pandemic. The recommendations in this final Plan B Workgroup whitepaper are based on experience and feedback from Arizona’s courts addressing pandemic and post-pandemic practices. Although the original report, issued on June 2, 2021, included a May 2021 Survey of Arizona’s Courts, this updated report also includes information from a July 2021 State Bar of Arizona Survey and a September 2021 State of Arizona Public Opinion Survey addressing those practices. …