Law Commons^™

Enhancing Rural Representation Through Electoral System Diversity, Henry L. Chambers Jr.

University of Richmond Law Review

Rural Virginians face disparities in outcomes regarding healthcare, access to important infrastructure, and other services. Some disparities may be related to rurality. The sparseness of population in rural areas may limit the sites where people may access services, triggering the need to travel significant distances to obtain goods and services in such areas. Limited access may lead to disparities even when the quality of goods and services in rural areas is high. The disparities affect all rural Virginians, but disproportionately affect rural Virginians of color. The causes of the disparities are complex and myriad, and may be based on race, …

Duped By Dope: The Sackler Family’S Attempt To Escape Opioid Liability And The Need To Close The Non-Debtor Release Loophole, Bryson T. Strachan

University of Richmond Law Review

The opioid epidemic continues to rage on in the United States, ravaging its rural populations. One of its main causes? OxyContin. Purdue Pharma (“Purdue”), the maker of OxyContin, aggressively marketed opioids to the American public while racking up a fortune of over $13 billion dollars for its owners,3 the Sackler family. As a result, roughly 3,000 lawsuits were filed against Purdue and members of the Sackler family. Generally, the lawsuits alleged that Purdue and members of the Sackler family knew OxyContin was highly addictive yet aggressively marketed high dosages of the drug and misrepresented the drug as nonaddictive and without …

Opioid Litigation Panel, Rick Mountcastle, Paul Farrell, Eric Eyre, Patrick C. Mcginley

University of Richmond Law Review

On February 17, 2023, the University of Richmond Law Review hosted a symposium entitled Overlooked America: Addressing Legal Issues in Rural America. A portion of the event focused on the ongoing opioid epidemic in the United States, including the causes and effects of certain actions taken by players in the pharmaceutical industry. The Opioid Litigation Panel, transcribed below, brought together four of the most prominent leaders in the fight for justice in the opioid epidemic: Mr. Rick Mountcastle, Mr. Paul Farrell, Mr. Eric Eyre, and Professor Patrick McGinley. The University of Richmond Law Review was so honored to have …

E-Museletter: April 2023, William Taylor Muse Law Library

Museletter

This Issue:

Director's Message

Library News

Featured Resources

Materials Update

Things to Consider

Student Services Corner

Table Of Contents

University of Richmond Law Review

No abstract provided.

Acknowledgments, Kelly M. Boppe

University of Richmond Law Review

The University of Richmond Law Review is honored to present its 2023 Symposium Issue: Overlooked America: Addressing Legal Issues Facing Rural United States. Each year, the University of Richmond Law Review hosts a Symposium for scholars and practitioners to engage with a specific area of law. In a time when our country seems more divided than ever, discussions surrounding law and policy frequently diverge not just on political lines, but on regional lines as well. Rural regions of the United States are routinely evoked in the political sphere, but rarely are the problems and disparities that exist in rural …

Rural Bashing, Kaceylee Klein, Lisa R. Pruitt

University of Richmond Law Review

Anti-rural sentiment is expressed in the United States in three major threads. The first is a narrative about the political structure of our representative democracy—an assertion that rural people are over-represented thanks to the structural features of the U.S. Senate and the Electoral College. Because rural residents are less than a fifth of the U.S. population, complaints about this situation are often framed as “minority rule.”

The second thread is related to the first: rural people and their communities get more than their fair share from federal government coffers. The argument, often expressed in terms of “subsidies,” is that rural …

With A Wink And A Nod: How Politicians, Regulators, And Corrupt Coal Companies Exploited Appalachia, Patrick C. Mcginley

University of Richmond Law Review

Environmental regulators treated America’s leading coal companies like Wall Street’s mismanaged banks leading to the “Great Recession”—big coal companies that produced millions of tons of coal were simply too big to fail. With a wink and a nod, federal and state regulators ignored a core provision of federal law that was intended to prevent coal companies from continuing their past practices of plundering Appalachia’s mineral wealth while ravaging her environment.

This Article examines how the coal industry successfully evaded compliance with that law. The consequences of this evasion include mass bankruptcies, thousands of acres of mined land laying unclaimed, …

Rural America As A Commons, Ann M. Eisenberg

University of Richmond Law Review

With many ready to dismiss non-urban life as a relic of history, rural America’s place in the future is in question. The rural role in the American past is understandably more apparent. As the story of urbanization goes in the United States and elsewhere, the majority of the population used to live in rural places, including small towns and sparsely populated counties. A substantial proportion of those people worked in agriculture, manufacturing, or extractive industries. But trends associated with modernity—mechanization, automation, globalization, and environmental conservation, for instance—have reduced the perceived need for a rural workforce. Roughly since the industrial revolution …

Those Who Need The Most, Get The Least: The Challenge Of, And Opportunity For Helping Rural Virginia, Andrew Block, Antonella Nicholas

University of Richmond Law Review

Rural America, as has been well documented, faces many challenges. Businesses and people are migrating to more urban and suburban regions. The extraction and agricultural economies that once helped them thrive—mining, tobacco, textiles—are dying. And, as we discuss below, residents of rural communities tend to be older, poorer, less credentialed in terms of their education, less healthy, and declining in population.

On a regular basis, political leaders on both sides of the aisle, and on national and state levels, make commitments to rural areas to help improve the quality of life for residents, to listen, and to help. Even with …

Richmond Law Magazine: Spring 2023, University Of Richmond

Richmond Law Magazine

Rules of (Civic) Engagement

The More You Give

100 Years of Women at Richmond Law

Eviction Crisis Not Averted: Challenging Disparate Impact In The Search For Housing Stability During The Virginia Rent Relief Program's Epilogue, Olivia Seksinsky, Madelyn Bellew

Richmond Public Interest Law Review

Historically, the Commonwealth of Virginia has experienced some of the highest eviction rates in the county, containing five of the top ten U.S. cities with the highest eviction rates. After experiencing scrutiny in the national news due to these rates, the Commonwealth enacted legislation which provided increased tenant protections and distributed the highest percentage of rental assistance funds in the country. It was once thought that the Virginia Rent Relief Program (“RRP”) could be the solution to the eviction crisis, but now that the Program has ended, Virginia is once again experiencing an eviction crisis. Though thousands of households received …

Prefatory Matter

Richmond Public Interest Law Review

No abstract provided.

Letter From The Editor, Carley Ruival

Richmond Public Interest Law Review

No abstract provided.

Redefining Youth: The Case For Applying The Principles Of Miller V. Alabama To Criminal Cases Involving Adults In Late Adolescence, Salua Kamerow

Richmond Public Interest Law Review

In 2012, in Miller v. Alabama, the United States Supreme Court held it unconstitutional to impose a mandatory sentence of life without parole on children because such a sentence fails to adequately account for a child’s developmental stage or ability to weigh long-term consequences. Children are fundamentally different from adults, making them more susceptible to lack of self-regulation, poor decision making, and peer pressure. In Miller, the Court found that these aspects of children’s behavior made children less culpable than adults.

Psychological studies have demonstrated that adolescence is more protracted than previously recognized. Profound malleability of the brain characterizes the …

The Proper Role Of Judicial Opportunism In Constitutional Rights Scrutiny, R. George Wright

Richmond Public Interest Law Review

To one degree or another, judges in constitutional rights cases may exploit their available range of discretion in a narrowly political, ideologically rigid, or partisan way. But there are also important contexts in which a court’s ample discretion under tiered scrutiny and related tests can be turned toward some more nearly consensual or reasonably well-established basic public good. These opportunities to judicially promote the public good remain available even in our age of political polarization, hostility, fragmentation, and distrust.

Where such important opportunities exist, and where it is otherwise constitutionally permissible and generally prudent to do so, courts should feel …

State-Sanctioned Displacement: An Interstate Examination Of Felon Disenfranchisement, Claudia Leonor

Richmond Public Interest Law Review

In his dissent of New State Ice Co. v. Liebmann, Justice Louis Brandeis referred to the constituent states of the country as “laboratories for democracy.” He noted that, as sovereign entities within the United States, states are empowered to “try novel social and economic experiments without risk to the rest of the country.” In postbellum American society, states have grappled with Reconstruction and the concomitant dismantlement of a caste system hinging on racism. In convening constitutional assemblies, the states experimented with racism and succeeded. In Southern jurisdictions, racial animus enabled the creation of constitutional frameworks and legislation that would have …

Python Patrol: Combatting The Problem Of Evasive Non-Native Snakes In Florida, Jessica Rooke

Richmond Public Interest Law Review

The Florida hotspot of non-native invasive species has long been recognized as a fascinating, yet perplexing environmental issue since the late 1900s. After decades of patchwork efforts by the federal and state government, it has become clear that a more holistic approach must be taken to help eradicate the Burmese Pythons that have overtaken Southern Florida. This article highlights the prior efforts taken federally and state-wide to combat this issue and assesses the current gaps in these efforts and what must be done to achieve a more holistic approach. Other states are used as points of comparison in regard to …

How California's Racial Justice Act Of 2020 Protects Criminal Defendants From Racial Discrimination And Why The Equal Protection Clause Is Not Enough, Hannah Laub

Richmond Public Interest Law Review

The Equal Protection Clause should prevent racial discrimination in the criminal legal system, yet Black people and people of color are disproportionately arrested, prosecuted, and incarcerated in the United States. This is partially due to the heavy evidentiary burden required to demonstrate an Equal Protection violation and the failure of the Supreme Court to ease that burden in McCleskey v. Kemp. With federal law largely ineffective, states such as California have passed legislation to provide more robust civil rights protections. This article explores how the Equal Protection Clause fails to provide a remedy for criminal defendants who experience racial discrimination …

Access To Justice In The Southeast, Roger V. Skalbeck

Law Conference Materials

“Access to Justice in the Southeast” provides an overview of all Access to Justice Commission organizations in the Southeastern region of the United States. This guide also includes links to statewide legal information platforms, together with descriptions and links to additional region-specific efforts. The guide is supplemented with additional resources, including links to each region’s ABA Free Legal Answers site, when available. The guide was created in conjunction with the 2023 Southeastern Association of Law Libraries conference, held in Richmond, Virginia.

Elevating Justice Institute Program Guide, Roger V. Skalbeck

Law Conference Materials

On March 9, 2023, the University of Richmond Law Library hosted the Elevating Justice Institute in our Moot Courtroom. The day-long event provided collaborative sessions for participants to work in conjunction with presenters to explore topics and techniques in delivering legal services. Speakers included two state judges as well as several leaders in the Access to Justice movement. More than 30 people participated in the event, including librarians, law students, judges, attorneys and a variety of advocates active in Access to Justice.

The program guide provides biographical information about Institute speakers and planners, together with visual inspiration for a creative …

E-Museletter: March 2023, William Taylor Muse Law Library

Museletter

This Issue:

Director's Message

Library News

Featured Resources

Materials Update

Things to Consider

Student Services Corner

Table Of Contents

University of Richmond Law Review

No abstract provided.

Conditional Purging Of Wills, Mark Glover

University of Richmond Law Review

The laws of most states unconditionally purge a testamentary gift to an individual who serves as an attesting witness to the will. Under this approach, the will is valid despite the presence of an interested witness, but the witness forfeits all, some, or none of her gift, depending on the particularities of state law. While the outcome of the interested witness’s gift varies amongst the states that adhere to this majority approach, the determination of what the interested witnesses can retain is the same. The only consideration is whether the beneficiary is also a witness; whether her gift is purged …

Grandma Got Arrested: Police, Excessive Force, And People With Dementia, Rashmi Goel

University of Richmond Law Review

Recent events have shone a light on the particular vulnerability of people with dementia to police violence. Police are arresting people with dementia and using excessive force to do it—drawing their firearms, deploying tasers, and breaking bones.

To date, little attention has been paid to the burgeoning number of people with dementia, one of society’s most vulnerable populations, and their experiences with the criminal justice system. This Article examines how dementia leads people to engage in activity that appears criminal (shoplifting (forgetting to pay), and trespass (wandering), for instance) and the disproportionate response of police. In several cases where people …

Resolving Regulatory Threats To Tenure, Joseph W. Yockey

University of Richmond Law Review

Many lawmakers and public university governing boards are looking to curb faculty tenure. Driven by both ideological and economic motives, recent efforts range from eliminating tenure systems altogether to interfering when schools seek to tenure individual, often controversial scholars. These actions raise serious questions about higher education law and policy and have important implications for the future of academic freedom. Indeed, if they gain further traction, current regulatory threats to tenure will jeopardize the ability of American universities to remain at the forefront of global research and intellectual progress.

This Article examines the growing anti-tenure sentiment among state officials and …

“Fundamental Fairness”: Finding A Civil Right To Counsel In International Human Rights Law, Meredith Elliott Hollman

University of Richmond Law Review

Every other Western democracy now recognizes a right to counsel in at least some kinds of civil cases, typically those involving basic human rights. The World Justice Project’s 2021 Rule of Law Index ranked the United States 126th of 139 countries for “People Can Access and Afford Civil Justice.” Within its regional and income categories, the United States was dead last. The United Nations and other international treaty bodies have urged the United States to improve access to justice by providing civil legal aid. How did we fall behind, and what can we learn from the rest of the world? …

Cftc & Sec: The Wild West Of Cryptocurrency Regulation, Taylor Anne Moffett

University of Richmond Law Review

Over the past few years, a turf war has been brewing between the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (“CFTC”) and the Securities and Exchange Commission (“SEC”) over which agency should regulate cryptocurrencies. Both agencies have pursued numerous enforcement actions over the cryptocurrencies they believe to be within their jurisdiction. This turf war has many moving components, but the focus always comes back to one question: which cryptocurrencies are commodities, and which cryptocurrencies are securities? The distinction is important because the CFTC has statutory authority to regulate commodities, whereas the SEC has statutory authority to regulate securities. This Comment rejects the pursuit …

Zombies Attack Inadvertent Partnerships!—How Undead Precedents Killed By Uniform Statutes Still Roam The Reporters, Joseph K. Leahy

University of Richmond Law Review

Recently, the Texas Supreme Court breathed new life into some ancient zombies—zombie precedents, that is!—which have long lurked in the shadows of the nation’s partnership formation caselaw. This Article tells the story of those undead cases—describing them, debunking them, and plotting their demise.

This zombie tale begins with the supposed black-letter law of partnership formation. In nearly every state, formation of a general partnership is governed by one of two uniform partnership acts. Under both acts, a business relationship ripens into a partnership whenever the statutory definition of partnership is satisfied. The parties’ intent to become “partners” (or not) is …

The Legal Ethics Of Family Separation, Milan Markovic

University of Richmond Law Review

On April 6, 2018, the Trump administration announced a “zero tolerance” policy for individuals who crossed the U.S. border illegally. As part of this policy, the administration prosecuted parents with minor children for unlawful entry; previous administrations generally placed families in civil removal proceedings. Since U.S. law does not allow children to be held in immigration detention facilities pending their parents’ prosecution, the new policy caused thousands of children to be separated from their parents. Hundreds of families have yet to be reunited.

Despite a consensus that the family separation policy was cruel and ineffective, there has been minimal focus …