Law Commons^™

Neuropsychological Malingering Determination: The Illusion Of Scientific Lie Detection, Chunlin Leonhard, Christoph Leonhard

Georgia Law Review

Humans believe that other humans lie, especially when stakes are high. Stakes can be very high in a courtroom, from substantial amounts of monetary damages in civil litigation to liberty or life in criminal cases. One of the most frequently disputed issues in U.S. courts is whether litigants are malingering when they allege physical or mental conditions for which they are seeking damages or which would allow them to avoid criminal punishment. Understandably, creating a scientific method to detect lies is very appealing to all persons engaged in lie detection. Neuropsychologists claim that they can use neuropsychological assessment tests (Malingering …

Testing The Limits Of Virtual Compliance: Website Accessibility, "Tester" Plaintiffs, And Article Iii Standing Under The Ada, Ashlyn Dewberry

Georgia Law Review

Federal courts have split in determining whether “tester” plaintiffs bringing suit under the ADA assert the requisite injury in fact necessary for Article III standing. These “website accessibility testers” allege that defendants’ websites do not make certain information available to disabled persons in violation of Title III of the ADA and one of its implementing regulations. This split presents an excellent opportunity to clarify which informational and stigmatic harms qualify as injuries in fact for Article III standing purposes. This Note argues that ADA website accessibility testers cannot obtain standing under current law. Neither the text of the ADA nor …

Table Of Contents

Georgia Law Review

No abstract provided.

Remediation For Pfas Contamination: The Role Of Cercla Enforcement In Environmental Justice, Amanda F. Watson

Georgia Law Review

PFAS are a family of manufactured chemicals that are highly persistent in the environment. Most people in the U.S. have been exposed to PFAS, but different groups of people may have higher exposure due to their environments. In recent years, peer-reviewed scientific studies have shown that PFAS are linked to numerous adverse human health effects. As a result, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) has taken a variety of actions to address PFAS, including proposing to designate PFOS and PFOA, two chemicals in the PFAS family, as hazardous substances under CERCLA, or Superfund. CERCLA is the primary legal mechanism in …

Compelling Evidence In International Commercial Arbitration After The Section 1782 Shutdown: Faa Section 7 As An Alternative Approach, Caroline Bailey

Georgia Law Review

The United States Supreme Court’s unanimous decision in the 2022 case ZF Automotive US, Inc. v. Luxshare, Ltd. resolved the long-disputed circuit split regarding the application of Section 1782 of Title 28 of the U.S. Code to international arbitrations. The Court’s ruling that the term “foreign or international tribunal” under Section 1782 includes only governmental or intergovernmental adjudicative bodies ended the use of Section 1782 to compel evidence located in the United States in private adjudicative bodies such as international commercial arbitrations. The Section 1782 shutdown has required arbitrators and parties to international commercial arbitrations to seek alternative legal mechanisms …

The Problem Of Extravagant Inferences, Cass Sunstein

Georgia Law Review

Judges and lawyers sometimes act as if a constitutional or statutory term must, as a matter of semantics, be understood to have a particular meaning, when it could easily be understood to have another meaning, or several other meanings. When judges and lawyers act as if a legal term has a unique semantic meaning, even though it does not, they should be seen to be drawing extravagant inferences. Some constitutional provisions are treated this way; consider the idea that the vesting of executive power in a President of the United States necessarily includes the power to remove, at will, a …

Antisocial Innovation, Christopher Buccafusco, Samuel N. Weinstein

Georgia Law Review

Innovation is a form of civic religion in the United States. In the popular imagination, innovators are heroic figures. Thomas Edison, Steve Jobs, and (for a while) Elizabeth Holmes were lauded for their vision and drive and seen to embody the American spirit of invention and improvement. For their part, politicians rarely miss a chance to trumpet their vision for boosting innovative activity. Popular and political culture alike treat innovation as an unalloyed good. And the law is deeply committed to fostering innovation, spending billions of dollars a year to make sure society has enough of it. But this sunny …

The Role Of Human Rights Indicators In Assessing Compliance With The Un Convention On The Rights Of People With Disabilities, Arlene S. Kanter

Georgia Law Review

In recent years, international human rights treaties have come under attack for failing to fulfill their promise. While it may be true that human rights treaties have not realized their full potential in every case, there is little discussion about how to measure the impact of treaties. This Article explores the ways in which we measure compliance with human rights treaties, focusing on the Convention on the Rights of People with Disabilities (CRPD). The CRPD entered into force in 2008. Since then, 188 States Parties have ratified it. In addition, the Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights recently …

Systemic Failures In Health Care Oversight, Julie L. Campbell

Georgia Law Review

Hospitals are intentionally shirking their duty to identify and report incompetent medical practitioners, and it is causing catastrophic injuries to patients. Why are hospitals doing this? Two decades of health care reforms have changed the way physicians and hospitals interact in the U.S. health care system, and as a result, the traditional health care oversight tools no longer work to ensure physician competence. With three out of four physicians now employees of hospitals or health care systems, hospitals have become the guardians of both the internal and external warning systems designed to flag incompetent practitioners. As the guardians, hospitals are …

Redefining The Injury-In-Fact: Treating Personally Identifying Information As Bailed Property, Austin Headrick

Georgia Law Review

There is a long-existing circuit split among federal courts of appeals as to whether an individual has standing under Article III of the United States Constitution when their personally identifying information (PII) is stolen from an entity to which they entrusted it such as a hospital or bank. Federal courts disagree as to whether an individual whose PII has been stolen—without more—has suffered an injury-in-fact, a necessary element of standing. The disagreement between the courts centers on whether the injury-in-fact has already occurred at the time the PII is stolen or whether the injury occurs once the PII has been …

Long History Of Leniency? A Call For A Georgia Statutory Mitigation Factor For Veterans With Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder, Jonathan Fagundes

Georgia Law Review

In Georgia, criminal sentencing marks a critical period for convicted defendants. As the final moment before the superior court fashions a punishment, the defendant faces a pivotal opportunity to introduce mitigating evidence, including evidence of mental health challenges, life circumstances, and other facts. Where such evidence is offered, the superior court can properly issue a sentence that aligns with the purposes of punishment or other state policies. But some populations, especially veterans convicted of nonviolent offenses, are exposed to unique stressors that likely affect their culpability. The existing sentencing regime, however, does not guarantee that this mitigating evidence will even …

Table Of Contents, Jake Shatzer

Georgia Law Review

No abstract provided.

The Applications Docket, Greg Goelzhauser

Georgia Law Review

The Supreme Court’s applications docket, often misleadingly called the “shadow docket” or “emergency docket,” is controversial, complex, and poorly understood. Using original data spanning nearly two decades, I unravel the docket’s empirical foundations. Applications practice changed fundamentally in recent years. Contrary to conventional wisdom, dispositions declined on average, but this conceals divergent trends: among applications involving stays and injunctions, capital dispositions decreased while noncapital dispositions increased. Moreover, noncapital applications now comprise a larger share of the docket than capital applications. This shift enhances docket salience because, as I show, most capital applications are denied simultaneous to denying plenary review, while …

Silent Sentences: The Procedural Tragedy Of The Bureau Of Prisons' Sentence Computation Policy, Max Abramson

Georgia Law Review

The Bureau of Prisons has systematically lengthened sentences—at times doubling them—for prisoners subject to federal and state sentences for the same conduct. This phenomenon does not stem from any expressed intent on the part of federal or state judges, defense attorneys, the prosecution, or a plea deal. Instead, it arises through silence at a prisoner’s federal sentencing on a key issue: whether the federal sentence is consecutive to or concurrent with a yet-to-beimposed state sentence.

For those facing both a federal sentence and a yet-to-beimposed state sentence for the same conduct, perhaps no other aspect of sentencing has a greater …

What Do We Know About Shareholders' Potential To Solve Environmental And Social Problems?, Bryce C. Tingle

Georgia Law Review

Securities regulators around the world are attempting to assist socially conscious shareholders in driving changes in the way corporate America operates. At a time when legislative solutions to some of our most pressing social and environmental problems seem far away, many market actors have come to hope that shareholders can succeed in regulating and reforming corporate practices.

This paper summarizes the empirical evidence regarding the behavior of shareholders with explicit ESG mandates, the difficulties outsiders experience in evaluating ESG performance, and the outcomes generated by the limited tools available to shareholders under corporate law. It concludes there is little evidence …

All The Internet's A Stage: Reform Of The Digital Millennium Copyright Act And Broadway's Bootleg Problem, Emma K. Wimberly

Georgia Law Review

Broadway is the cultural epicenter of theatre arts. While Broadway performances are internationally known and hugely profitable, they remain inaccessible to a significant number of fans. The inability to bear the increasing costs of travel, lodging, and tickets leads many fans to turn to bootlegs. Bootlegs are illegal recordings of live performances. They are widely viewed and shared online, and uploaders purposefully work to obscure the illegality of these recordings, allowing them to evade tools designed to combat copyright infringement.

The Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA), enacted in 1998, amended U.S. copyright law to attempt to prevent digital copyright infringement. …

121st Sibley Lecture: American Democracy In Peril, J. Michael Luttig

Georgia Law Review

No abstract provided.

Confusing Cy Près, Christopher J. Ryan Jr.

Georgia Law Review

American courts have increasingly considered the possibility of prolonging the life of charitable trusts through cy près and the closely related doctrine of equitable deviation. This requires courts to interpret the material purposes of trusts and even the administrative terms on which settlors of charitable trusts condition gifts in trust made for public benefit. Yet, the implicit reasons why courts might invoke cy près to change a charitable trust’s material purpose have not been explored in significant depth heretofore—and neither has a common but vexing trend of courts conflating cy près with deviation, which negatively impacts charitable trust-making.

I analyze …

Billionaire Taxes And The Constitution, Andy Grewal

Georgia Law Review

The United States now has ten times as many billionaires as it had just a few decades ago. This ever-growing class has sparked congressional interest in “billionaire tax” proposals. These proposals would generally require that billionaires recognize income when their asset values increase, even if they have not sold their assets.

Under existing doctrine, billionaire taxes likely violate the realization requirement embedded in the Sixteenth Amendment of the Constitution. However, this Article argues that existing Sixteenth Amendment doctrine suffers from deep infirmities and theoretical inconsistencies. With the conceptually sound interpretive approach advanced in this Article, a billionaire tax could pass …

Title Ix At Fifty: Reimagining Institutional Liability Under Karasek's Pre-Assault Theory, Delaney R. Davis

Georgia Law Review

Unfortunately, sexual misconduct remains a pervasive problem on college campuses throughout the country. While victims of sexual harassment and assault can report these incidents to their university, these institutions often fail to respond adequately. Investigations into the alleged misconduct are often unnecessarily delayed and school officials neglect to inform victims about the status of their cases. Even more troubling, institutions opt to impose informal sanctions on perpetrators without consulting victims. In such instances, students can hold educational institutions accountable for these deficiencies by suing under Title IX. This is easier said than done. Typically, a plaintiff must prove that their …

The Procedural Tragedy Of Cook V. State: A Call To The General Assembly To Finish What It Started, Paxton Murphy

Georgia Law Review

On March 15, 2022, the Georgia Supreme Court decided Cook v. State. This case was a bombshell in Georgia’s postconviction law because it discarded decades of judicial precedent overnight. For years, Georgia’s criminal defendants relied on motions for out-of-time appeals when defense counsel failed to appeal before a deadline or to advise a defendant of his or her appellate rights. The out-of-time appeal procedure was a quick, easy, and fair way to return the defendant to the exact same place he was before the appeal deadline was missed.

The ramifications of Cook were severe. Overnight, every outof-time appeal case in …

Parting The Red Sea: Prescriptions For The Rluipa Equal Terms Provision's Expanding Circuit Split, Braden T. Meadows

Georgia Law Review

Congress unanimously passed the Religious Land Use and Institutionalized Persons Act (RLUIPA) in 2000. The Act marked the culmination of a decades-long dialogue between Congress and the Supreme Court. RLUIPA’s passage embodied Congress’s resolve to provide religious free exercise protections—particularly as it pertained to religious land use. Since 2000, however, RLUIPA’s Equal Terms Provision has been subject to differing judicial interpretations, resulting in an expanding circuit split. This Note analyzes the circuit split and offers guidance to future interpreters.

First, this Note examines the social, legislative, and judicial history leading to RLUIPA’s enactment. Second, it analyzes the contours of interpretations …

The Chickens Finally Come Home To Roost: Judicial Oversight Of Agricultural Antitrust Settlements, Christian M. Sullivan

Georgia Law Review

The agricultural industry has long enjoyed an exception from antitrust laws under the Capper-Volstead Act of 1922, which exempts agricultural cooperatives from federal antitrust scrutiny. Accordingly, large agricultural associations and cooperatives have formed, leading to the coagulation of many food products’ industries into giant collectives. As these collectives have grown, small farmers have joined together to file private antitrust enforcement actions against these conglomerates. To combat these enforcement actions, agricultural collectives have paid out large settlement sums to quash these private actions and ensure that their operations continue smoothly.

Private enforcement actions are a key tool for ensuring a free …

Privately Policing Dark Patterns, Gregory M. Dickinson

Georgia Law Review

Lawmakers around the country are crafting new laws to target “dark patterns”—user interface designs that trick or coerce users into enabling cell phone location tracking, sharing browsing data, initiating automatic billing, or making whatever other choices their designers prefer. Dark patterns pose a serious problem. In their most aggressive forms, they interfere with human autonomy, undermine customers’ evaluation and selection of products, and distort online markets for goods and services. Yet crafting legislation is a major challenge: Persuasion and deception are difficult to distinguish, and shifting tech trends present an ever-moving target. To address these challenges, this Article proposes leveraging …

Cheap Creativity And What It Will Do, Dan L. Burk

Georgia Law Review

Artificial intelligence (AI), in the form of machine learning systems, is becoming widely deployed across many industries to facilitate the production of new technical or expressive works. Among other applications, these technologies promise rapid product design and creation, often exceeding the capacity of human creators. Commentators and policy makers have responded to these developments with a flood of literature analyzing the ways in which AI systems might challenge our existing regimes of intellectual property. But such discussions have thus far focused on entirely the wrong questions, misunderstanding the nature of the changes that AI brings to creative development.

Intellectual property …

Property, Sovereignty, And Customary Governance In Outer Space Resource Extraction, Monika U. Ehrman

Georgia Law Review

Space technology related to extraterrestrial resource extraction has exploded. The ability to extract frozen water from asteroids or mine the lunar surface for critical minerals and water-ice is nearly viable and the potential wealth is staggering. But herein lies one of the most complicated property ownership problems—who owns these natural resources? Ownership not only includes the right to take, but also the right to exclude. As scholars have often explained, the right to exclude is the centerpiece of property rights. However, who holds these rights? And, in fact, should anyone have these rights? Space is the ultimate Ostromian commons.

This …

Future-Proofing U.S. Laws For War Crimes Investigations In The Digital Era, Rebecca J. Hamilton

Georgia Law Review

Advances in information technology have irrevocably changed the nature of war crimes investigations. The pursuit of accountability for the most serious crimes of concern to the international community now invariably requires access to digital evidence. The global reach of platforms like Facebook, YouTube, and Twitter means that much of that digital evidence is held by U.S. social media companies, and access to it is subject to the U.S. Stored Communications Act.

This is the first Article to look at the legal landscape facing international investigators seeking access to digital evidence regarding genocide, war crimes, crimes against humanity, and aggression. It …

Issue 4 Toc

Georgia Law Review

No abstract provided.

Discovery Culture, Edith Beerdsen

Georgia Law Review

In a litigation environment that features managerial judges, few trials, and increasing volumes of fact evidence, discovery is often what shapes and determines a case. The process is largely invisible to the public and the courts, and the rules of civil procedure do little to guide it. Instead of being a rule-governed process, civil discovery is to a large extent shaped by what this Article terms Discovery Culture: the norms and practices that govern everyday discovery practice and evolve over time within legal communities.

This Article introduces the concept of Discovery Culture, explores its nature as an extralegal practice, and …

American Exceptionalism As/In Constitutional Interpretation, Lucy Williams

Georgia Law Review

American exceptionalism—the idea that America is superior, chosen, and tasked with a unique mission—is a foundational part of America’s political culture. Its themes regularly appear in political speeches, at campaign rallies, and at national celebrations. But exceptionalism also appears frequently in another, less obvious place: Supreme Court opinions. Scholars and pundits routinely scour these opinions to identify the jurisprudential theories and political leanings that drive case outcomes. But as yet, legal scholars have paid little attention to the exceptionalist themes in the Court’s case law. Some legal scholars study the ways American constitutional law is distinctive, or exceptional, when compared …