Law Commons^™

303 Creative, Exclusive Private Enforcement, And Blue-State Revenge, Charles W. "Rocky" Rhodes, Howard W. Wasserman

Faculty Publications

Red states have made exclusive private enforcement schemes targeting locally unpopular but constitutionally protected conduct a cornerstone of culture-war legal strategy. Laws such the Texas Heartbeat Act (“S.B. 8”) in 2021 and anti-“WOKE” laws forego public enforcement in favor of private enforcement; this precludes federal rights-holders from vindicating their rights through pre-enforcement offensive litigation in federal court against the government or government officials responsible for enforcing the law. This threatens rights-holders with defending a state-court wave of costly and burdensome litigation to adjudicate the law’s constitutional validity.

Blue states and liberal scholars and advocates have sought a progressive counterpart targeting …

Abuse Of Contract: Boilerplate Erasure Of Consumer Counterparty Rights, Andrea Boyack

Faculty Publications

Contract law and the new Restatement of the Law of Consumer Contracts generally treats the entirety of a company’s boilerplate as presumptively binding. Entrusting the content of consumer contracts to companies creates a fertile legal habitat for abuse through boilerplate design.

There is no consensus on how widespread or severe abuse of contract is. Some consumer law scholars have warned of dangers inherent in granting companies unrestrained power to sneak waivers into their online terms, but others contend that market forces adequately constrain potential abuse. On the other hand, in the absence of adequate consumer knowledge and power, market competition …

The Problems Of Commencement Speech, R. George Wright

Missouri Law Review

The 2024 graduation season was marked with protests over and university oversight of commencement speeches. Commencement speech-related incidents are nothing new. History has shown that they are, in fact, American tradition. What is less settled is what type of speech commencement speech falls under, whether courts or academia should exercise control over it, and if so, to what degree. In seeking to answer this question, this Article discusses government speech, the public forum doctrine, and the purpose of commencement speeches. Through examples, both real and hypothetical, this Article demonstrates the difficulties in classifying the forum and intent of commencement speech. …

Masthead

Missouri Law Review

No abstract provided.

Table Of Contents

Missouri Law Review

No abstract provided.

Faculty List

Missouri Law Review

No abstract provided.

Silenced On Campus: Unveiling The Injustice Of Speaker-Based Restrictions In Public University Spaces, Emily E. Bomball

Missouri Law Review

The preservation of free speech within public universities is essential to fostering open dialogue and cultivating an environment where diverse perspectives can flourish without fear of censorship. As a result, public universities have often found themselves at the center of First Amendment disputes. While First Amendment freedom of speech cases have traditionally focused on content-based discrimination, the Supreme Court has recently addressed the problematic nature of discrimination based on the identity of the speaker as well. In the landmark case, Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission, the Court stated: “The First Amendment protects speech and speaker, and the ideas that …

Copyright

Missouri Law Review

No abstract provided.

Federalism And The Blue Sky Laws: Reevaluating U.S. Securities Regulation, Jessica E. Lees

Missouri Law Review

Securities regulation in the United States is an important example of federalism-in-action, given the overlapping jurisdiction of state and federal authorities over securities-related matters. However, the existing system has long been criticized as both overly burdensome and ineffective at achieving its core aims. In particular, the extensive network of state securities laws, often referred to as the “blue sky” laws, has been the subject of, and has exacerbated, many of these critiques. Tensions between federal and state activities in this area are ongoing and subject to numerous reform proposals. Yet, recent proposals to refashion the U.S. securities regulatory scheme have …

The Second Bite At The Apple Watch Through The United States Customs And Border Protection: A Further Whittling Of Patent Rights Post-Ebay, Thomas R. Langdon

Missouri Law Review

Underlying the patent system is a bargain between the general public and patent owners. In exchange for the limited-time right of the patentee to exclude others from making, using, or selling their patented invention or process, the public receives the benefit of both the disclosure of new and useful inventions and processes and the increased incentive to innovate. The Supreme Court’s eBay v. MercExchange decision, however, fundamentally changed this bargain by removing the presumption of injunctive relief for patent owners upon a finding of infringement in Article III courts. The Court replaced this presumption with a four-factor test, making it …

A Return To The Wild West: Missouri’S Heightened Standard Under The Known Third Person Exception, Liz Eastlund

Missouri Law Review

Picture this: a crowded saloon packed with patrons enjoying food, drinks, and each other’s company—for the Western movie lover, the imagery is familiar. While establishments like saloons were essential social centers of the West in the later years of the nineteenth century, violence from brawls took the lives of many. Lawmen were tasked with keeping the peace and tracking down dangerous outlaws on the American frontier. Despite the existence of these fabled sheriffs, revolvers and alcohol were a lethal combination that led to dangerous gun battles between community members.

Burdening Caregivers With But-For Causation, Jessie L. O'Brien

Missouri Law Review

It is human nature to depend on one another. You may depend on your friend for a laugh after a hard day or your classmate to bring a strong work ethic to a group project. Whether the dependence stems from a comfortable bond, a familiar relationship, or a passing expectation, we rely on each other daily. However, some people experience a deeper level of need where they are dependent on another person to navigate even the basic necessities of life. Imagine if your loved one required this level of dependence—where even the smallest of tasks required your support. Now imagine …

Bad Paper & The Problems With Moral Turpitude In The Va Context, Rebecca L. Feldmann

Missouri Law Review

Moral turpitude serves as a way to exclude former servicemembers from the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs (“VA”) definition of a veteran. As a result, servicemembers who commit offenses deemed morally turpitudinous cannot access VA disability compensation, burial in a VA cemetery, education benefits, many types of VA healthcare, or any other of the multitude of benefits offered by the VA. This issue is especially problematic for veterans with “bad paper”—i.e., those with a less than fully honorable discharge—whose underlying misconduct is related to post-traumatic stress disorder (“PTSD”), a traumatic brain injury (“TBI”), or another mental health condition.

Causation's Due Process Dimensions, Cassandra Burke Robertson, Charles W. "Rocky" Rhodes

Faculty Publications

For decades, courts have grappled with the tension between compensating victims of mass harms and maintaining fairness to defendants when causation is difficult to prove. This Article argues that the Supreme Court’s due process jurisprudence provides a relevant framework for navigating this tension. We contend that the Court over the last three decades has established a consistent Fourteenth Amendment due process approach in punitive damages and personal jurisdiction cases, which is rooted in antecedents tracing to the nineteenth century and relies on a nexus of interests that balances individual rights, state interests, and federalism concerns. This framework, we argue, has …

Money Moves: Taxing The Wealthy At The State Level, David Gamage, Brian D. Galle, Darien Shanske

Faculty Publications

It's widely understood today that inequality is a major social problem that in turn contributes to other crises. By most accounts, tax systems are supposed to be our engines of equality. Yet in today’s United States, state and local tax systems mostly do the opposite: they take a greater percentage of the resources of the poor and middle class than of the rich.

Perhaps surprisingly, the traditional view among fiscal policy experts has been that this state of affairs is correct. In this standard account, only national governments should impose progressive or redistributive taxes. While acknowledging that there would be …

How Can You Turn Adversarial Attorneys Into Quasi-Mediators?, John Lande

Faculty Publications

This article grows out of an educational program sponsored by the St. Louis chapter of the Association of Attorney-Mediators, which functioned as a focus group. It describes mediators’ experiences with attorneys in mediation who were cooperative and adversarial.

It describes things that mediators can do to make adversarial attorneys behave as “quasi-mediators.” Attorneys acting as quasi-mediators help their clients realistically understand the other side’s perspectives. The attorneys also promote their clients’ interests by enlisting the mediators’ help and encouraging the other side to adjust their positions. Attorneys who sometimes act as quasi-mediators tailor their techniques to their clients’ preferences and …

Choosing To Use Good Language In The "Adr" Field, John Lande

Faculty Publications

On October 30, 2024, Debra Berman posted a message on a listserv encouraging colleagues to drop the word “alternative” from “ADR.” Her post quickly prompted 24 responses. This article summarizes the listserv discussion about the term “ADR,” and demonstrates serious misconceptions embodied in popular concepts of “BATNA” and “facilitative” and “evaluative” mediation as well as other problematic language that we frequently use.

Language is a shared resource that can enable people to understand each other accurately and to improve our ideas and techniques. This article describes the many ways that language has huge effects on people’s thoughts and actions, and …

International Law And The Rise Of Populism, Shruti Rana, Peter G. Danchin, Jeremy Farrall, Jolyon Ford, Imogen Saunders

Faculty Publications

Contemporary legal scholarship seeks to diagnose populist antagonism towards national and international law and warn about the challenges it poses to the cooperation needed to respond to global threats. What this scholarship overlooks, however, is the role that major shifts in international legal normativity and conceptions of global governance have themselves played in incubating the conditions far the rise of populism. Against the prevailing literature, this Article argues that the key to unlocking this puzzle is recognition that populism, rather than constituting an external social pathology, is a mode of politics arising internal to the intellectual history and practice of …

When Is Discrimination Harmful?, Sandra F. Sperino

Faculty Publications

In Muldrow v. City of St. Louis, the Supreme Court held that Title VII does not require a plaintiff to establish material harm to prove employment discrimination. Instead, any action that is negative and affects a term, condition or privilege of employment is sufficient, if the employer took the action because of a protected trait.

At first glance, Muldrow appears to be a middling case focused on a technical aspect of discrimination law. This Article argues that Muldrow has the potential to be one of the most important modern discrimination cases. If taken to its natural conclusion it will …

Legal And Policy Responses To Sexual Harassment In Housing, Rigel C. Oliveri

Faculty Publications

The sexual harassment of low-income women by their housing providers is a clear national problem that has only recently become the focus of coordinated nationwide enforcement efforts by federal agencies, including the Department of Justice. While these developments are welcome, the problem requires proactive responses as well. This Essay examines data from a study of all of DOJ's sexual harassment in housing cases and uses this information to identify the most problematic types of housing providers and the most common forms of harassment. Specifically, harassment appears to occur most frequently in private rental housing and is perpetuated by managers (usually …

Historical Practice At The Founding, Ryan Snyder

Faculty Publications

In recent years, the Supreme Court has increasingly relied on historical practice—actions other than judicial decisions that implement the law after its adoption. That creates tension with the Court’s professed adherence to originalism—the view that a law’s meaning is fixed at the time of its adoption. To resolve this tension, the Court and many scholars have embraced theories such as “liquidation,” which argue that the Founders themselves used practice to update or change the law’s meaning over time. But until now, no one has systematically examined whether the Founders accepted those theories.

This Article provides the first comprehensive analysis of …

Moore Questions, Some Answers: Fixing The Personal Tax System Despite Constitutional Constraints, David Gamage, John R. Brooks, Edward J. Mccaffery

Faculty Publications

Moore v United States was expected to rule on the constitutional necessity of the tax-law realization requirement originating from Eisner v Macomber, a potential impediment to progressive tax reform efforts aimed at shutting down the planning techniques of Buy Borrow Die. The various opinions in Moore, however, provided no definitive answer to this core question, instead leaving many more questions. Amid the lingering uncertainty, we argue that various responses to the problem of wealthy Americans’ not needing to pay any taxes remain possible after Moore. An incremental, “mix-and-match” approach to progressive tax reform may best suit the …

Church Autonomy, Textualism, And Originalism: Scotus's Use Of History To Give Definition To Church Autonomy Doctrine, Carl H. Esbeck

Faculty Publications

Church autonomy is a First Amendment doctrine altogether distinct from the more familiar causes of action brought under the Establishment Clause and the Free Exercise Clause. The principle of church autonomy was first recognized by the Supreme Court of the United States in the post-Civil War case Watson v. Jones, holding that civil courts must not be drawn into resolving religious questions or settling disputes over church polity. And early this century, in the unanimous decision Hosanna-Tabor Evangelical Lutheran Church & School v. EEOC, the theory of church autonomy took on its most fully developed form as a constitutional immunity …

Unconstitutional “Detours”, Zachary R. Cormier

Missouri Law Review

There is no more important context to have clear Fourth Amendment search and seizure limitations than the traffic stop. “Police pull over more than 50,000 drivers on a typical day,” resulting in seizures of “more than 20 million motorists every year.” The frequency of traffic stops is compounded by the malleability of their potential legal justifications. In Whren v. United States, the Supreme Court held that a pretextual traffic stop motivated by a desire to investigate a vehicle’s occupants for unrelated criminal activity (for which the officer does not yet have probable cause) does not violate the Fourth Amendment so …

My Pillow Or Yours?: Balancing Personal Property Rights And Government Interests, Griffin Roster

Missouri Law Review

When an individual is involved in a criminal investigation, the government may obtain a valid warrant allowing agents to seize property related to the alleged criminal activity. The government may seize personal property because it is either contraband or evidence of the crime being investigated. The types of property the government can seize are vast, ranging from $65,000 to sixty-five-million-year-old dinosaur bones, to something as personal as an individual’s private cell phone. Ultimately, when the government has a valid warrant to seize property, there is not much an individual can do to prevent the seizure.

More Than A Coin Flip: Bielski V. Coinbase And The Presumption In Favor Of Arbitration, Austin Siener

Missouri Law Review

Arbitration agreements are frequently found in consumer contracts, diverting disputes away from litigation and toward arbitration, in which a third party resolves the dispute and renders a binding award. Parties often challenge the enforceability of arbitration agreements and seek to bring the issue to court, where they believe litigation of a dispute would be advantageous under the circumstances. This can be viewed as a game, with arbitration on one side and litigation on the other. It seems obvious that, as with most games, both teams would begin on equal footing, each with the same chance of winning—think of the jump …

How Attorneys Can Be Quasi-Mediators, John Lande

Faculty Publications

This distills insights from a forthcoming article, How Can You Turn Adversarial Attorneys into Quasi-Mediators? The article is a Theory Meets Practice column in CPR’s Alternatives magazine that summarizes a discussion with members of the Association of Attorney-Mediators.

Attorneys acting as quasi-mediators prefer to be cooperative and use mediation techniques but they aren’t neutral. They tailor their actions based on their clients’ preferences and the other side’s approach. Another term for quasi-mediators is “good lawyers.”

Based on the forthcoming article and the Real Practice Systems Project Menu of Mediation Checklists, this two-page article lists things that mediators can do to …

Truth In Advertising For Environmental Sustainability, Robin M. Rotman, Aidan David-Pennington

Faculty Publications

“Sustainability” is in—but what does that term mean, when applied to products, services or brands? This article explores existing Federal Trade Commission (“FTC”) oversight of “sustainable” claims in marketing, centering on the FTC’s Guidelines for the Use of Environmental Marketing Claims (often referred to as the “Green Guides”). It analyzes thousands of public comments filed in a recent FTC quasi-rulemaking docket to inform proposed revisions to the Green Guides. The article suggests that the FTC include guidance on “sustainable” claims in its next revision to the Green Guides, and further recommends that the FTC formally extend the Green Guides to …

Creating Educational Value By Teaching Law Students To Be Quasi-Mediators, John Lande

Faculty Publications

Most mediation courses currently focus primarily on mediators’ perspectives and interventions during mediation sessions. Under the traditional view, mediators are the intervenors, and the parties, attorneys, and other participants in mediation sessions are the intervenees.

This article argues that mediation courses should provide balanced instruction of the roles of both mediators and attorneys by teaching students how to function as “quasi-mediators” when representing clients in mediation. As quasi-mediators, attorneys look for opportunities to reach reasonable agreements whenever appropriate, and they use mediation techniques to move the process in that direction. But they do not surrender their loyalty to their clients …

Bostock And The Forgotten Eeoc, Sandra F. Sperino

Faculty Publications

In Bostock v. Clayton County, Georgia, the Supreme Court formally recognized that federal discrimination law prohibits discrimination based on sexual orientation and gender identity. The opinion barely mentioned the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC), the federal agency charged with enforcing federal discrimination law. Reading Bostock, it would be easy to get the impression that the EEOC played little to no role in the outcome. This Essay reclaims and restores the EEOC's role.

In restoring the EEOC's role in this story, two themes emerge. First, Bostock's methodology erases the administrative agency tasked with enforcing Title VII in ways that are inconsistent …