Law Commons^™

Do Androids Dream Of Bad Tv?: Un/Originality In Neil Burger’S Voyagers, Tom Ue, Callum M. Mcnutt

Proceedings from the Document Academy

Critics did not take kindly to Neil Burger’s Voyager (2021). On Rotten Tomatoes, the film scored a dismal 25%, and the consensus is that it’s a trip best not taken: “It has a game cast and a premise ripe with potential, but Voyagers drifts in familiar orbit rather than fully exploring its intriguing themes.” This article seeks neither to reclaim the film as an unjustly neglected cinematic masterpiece nor to assert its importance in the canon of dystopian works. Rather, it treats Voyagers as a test case for exploring our own critical investment in the genre. Our aims are …

The Nineteenth Amendment And Dobbs, Paula A. Monopoli

ConLawNOW

There was a surge in legal scholarship around the Nineteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution—the Woman Suffrage Amendment—leading up to its centennial in August 2020. But this scholarly interest around the Nineteenth peaked two years before the U.S. Supreme Court’s historic decision in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization in June 2022. This paper revisits the Nineteenth Amendment in light of the Court’s decision in Dobbs. It argues that the Nineteenth should be understood as a ban on sex discrimination that extends beyond the right to vote. The Amendment expands the scope of women’s citizenship as a matter …

Symposium: Gender, Health & The Constitution: On The Constitutional Requirement For Adequate Prenatal Care Post-Dobbs, Ainslee Johnson-Brown

ConLawNOW

This Essay argues that state abortion statutes codifying government interests in the health and welfare of the unborn trigger a constitutional right to prenatal care where adequate medical care is constitutionally required in the penal system. It explores the healthcare mandates required by the U.S. Constitution in the era before the passage of the Supreme Court’s decision in Dobbs, specifically looking at abortion access and prenatal provisions in the penological system. It then dissects abortion-related legislation passed by various states in the wake of Dobbs—emphasizing language within the legislative findings that could trigger a constitutional obligation for prenatal …

Symposium: Gender, Health And The Constitution: The Misalignment Of Medical Capacity And Legal Competence For Perinatal People With Serious Mental Illness, Melisa Olgun, Carlos Larrauri, Sonja Castaneda-Cudney, Elyn Saks

ConLawNOW

This Article evaluates the misalignment of medical capacity and legal competence for perinatal people with serious medical illnesses (SMI), an issue that has had limited discourse in legal academia. It delineates the contours of these concepts, dissecting their theoretical underpinnings and practical applications. While medical capacity is often considered an iterative, context-specific determination, legal competence is typically treated as a rigid, binary legal categorization. It then illustrates how the disparate scope and aims of capacity and competence lead to a precarious misalignment for people with fluctuating mental states, particularly perinatal people with SMI. The Article proposes solutions to harmonize the …

Symposium: Gender, Health, And The Constitution: Gender-Affirming Care And Children's Liberty, Dara E. Purvis

ConLawNOW

This essay addresses the wave of statutes banning gender-affirming care for transgender and gender-diverse minors passed in states across the country over the last three years. It argues that an underdeveloped understanding of children’s rights makes it more difficult to explain how harmful gender-affirming care bans are and to challenge them in court. After explaining the nature of gender-affirming care, the essay discusses the grounds underlying existing challenges to gender-affirming care bans, highlighting the emphasis on equal protection and parental rights. It concludes by reframing the children’s liberty argument and exploring what the broader consequences of courts recognizing such a …

Beyond The Ban: One Major Challenge Facing The Ftc Non-Compete Rule, Brendan Mohan

ConLawNOW

This article analyzes the implications of President Biden's Executive Order 14036 and the subsequent notice of proposed rulemaking (NPRM) by the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) to ban non-compete agreements. It examines the legal basis for the NPRM, including Sections 5 and 6(g) of the FTC Act, and anticipates potential challenges to its implementation, most notably under the major questions doctrine. It explores the broader ramifications of the NPRM for labor and employment law, emphasizing its potential to reshape administrative agency regulation and the regulatory landscape. It concludes by analyzing the rule under the major questions doctrine and the possible outcomes …

Symposium: Gender, Health And The Constitution: More Than Merely "Two-Legged Wombs": Lessons On Metaphor And Body Politics From Atwood's The Handmaiden's Tale (1985), Rachel Conrad Bracken

ConLawNOW

This essay explores the dehumanizing potential of metaphors used to describe women’s reproductive biology through literary analysis of Margaret Atwood’s canonical feminist novel The Handmaid’s Tale (1985). Attending to the rhetoric that both justifies and contests ritualized rape and forced surrogacy in Atwood’s novel, this essay begins by interrogating the ubiquitous cultural and biomedical metaphors that reduce women and pregnant people to their bodies’ reproductive potential. The first section draws from scholarship in medical anthropology, medical rhetoric, and literary studies to illuminate how gendered stereotypes pervade biomedical, cultural, and legal representations of reproduction, reifying the conflation of women and people …

Symposium: Gender, Health, And The Constitution: Reforming Clinical Trial Pregnancy Exclusions, Jennifer D. Oliva

ConLawNOW

This essay argues the exclusion of pregnant people from drug and biologic clinical trials is paternalistic, unjust, and counterproductive because the failure to include pregnant people in experimental trials can enhance risks to maternal and fetal health. Bioethicists, legal scholars, and other researchers have pleaded for reform in this context for decades. This article describes pregnancy medical drug use and the genesis and evolution of federal regulations and policies that operate to exclude pregnant people from clinical trials. It argues that the implementation of legal reforms that ensure the inclusion of pregnant people in clinical trials is imperative given Covid, …

Symposium; Gender, Health, And The Constitution: Hysteria Redux: Gaslighting In The Age Of Covid, Jane Campbell Moriarty

ConLawNOW

This article addresses the relationship among hysteria, gaslighting, and gender during the Covid pandemic in the political and public-health messaging about Covid. It analyzes the U.S. public health messaging in the age of Covid, explaining how individualism, gender, and gaslighting have shaped the public response to the virus and negatively affected public health. In explaining the poor U.S. public health outcomes during Covid, the article evaluates the role of disinformation about vaccines, the “feminization” of masking, and the “vax and relax” public mantra, which suggested that those who did not relax were perhaps a bit hysterical. Finally, the article considers …

Symposium: Gender, Health, And The Constitution: The New Gender Panic In Sport: Why State Laws Banning Transgender Athletes Are Unconstitutional, Deborah L. Brake

ConLawNOW

This essay considers the role of sport in the new gender panic of legislative activity targeting transgender individuals, which now extends into health and family governance. Sport was one of the first settings—the gateway—to ignite the current culture war on transgender youth. This analysis examines how Title IX of the Education Act of 1972, the popular law responsible for the growth of opportunities for girls and women in sports, has been mobilized in service of a broader gender agenda. Far from providing a persuasive justification for the state laws banning transgender girls from girls’ sports, Title IX, properly understood, supports …

Understanding And Adressing Elder Abuse In Contemporary Society, Olivia Nash

Williams Honors College, Honors Research Projects

The purpose of this paper is to spread awareness of what Elder Abuse is. Although we have all heard of it, do we truly know what it is. This piece explains what elder abuse is, focusing on the different types of abuse, why it is a growing problem today, and what we can look for to prevent these issues.

The Importance Of Gender Diversity On Police Culture, Haley Vasko

Williams Honors College, Honors Research Projects

This paper outlines the problem of historical underrepresentation of women in the police force and its potential impact on police culture, effectiveness, and community relations. This paper aims to investigate the importance of gender diversity within law enforcement.

The research framed the context of organizational behavior and diversity management, exploring how gender diversity affects group dynamics, organizational culture, and policing. The literature review covered historical trends in gender diversity in policing, challenges faced by women in the profession, and the influence of gender diversity on police culture.

The methodology involved an extensive literature review, case studies from different regions, and …

Morality Vs. Mortality: The Ethics Of Physician-Assisted Death In The United States, Ashley Price

Williams Honors College, Honors Research Projects

According to the American Academy of Hospice and Palliative Medicine, physician-assisted death is defined as a physician providing, at the patient’s request, a prescription for a lethal dose of medication that the patient can self-administer by ingestion, with the explicit intention of ending life. This paper will examine the different perspectives on the prevalent issue revolving around the ethics and criminality of physician-assisted death and euthanasia in the medical field – a heavily debated topic since the concept was conceived. It will explore the history and controversy revolving around the practice using ethical, faith-based, and scientific perspectives relating respectively to …