Law Commons^™

Issue 3 Table Of Contents

Georgia Law Review

No abstract provided.

The Eleventh Circuit Twists Georgia Law To Turn Probationers Into Deportable Aggravated Felons, Jake Shatzer

Georgia Law Review

In 2001, Alfredo Talamantes-Enriquez was convicted in two cases of simple battery under Georgia Law. He was sentenced to twelve months of probation for each conviction. Over fifteen years later, the U.S. government sought to deport Mr. Talamantes, arguing that his Georgia convictions made him an “aggravated felon” for immigration purposes. The aggravated felon statute provides that a non-citizen who commits a crime of violence and is sentenced to imprisonment of at least one year is deportable.

It seems obvious that someone in Talamantes’s position would not be an aggravated felon. Talamantes did not spend a day in jail but …

A More Reasonable Section 230 Of The Cda: Imposing A Pre-Defined Duty Of Care Requirement On Online Platforms, Samuel Won

Georgia Law Review

Heralded by some as the “Magna Carta of Cyberspace,” and by others as the “Law that Ruined the Internet,” Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act provides online platforms civil immunity from a wide variety of unlawful and harmful activity conducted by the platform’s users, including the publishing of harmful and hateful content. From “Zoom bombing” and orchestrated rape to malicious catfishing and image-based sexual abuse, platforms like YouTube, Facebook, and Instagram enjoy the freedom to simultaneously ignore and enable these reprehensible realities. Thus, a reexamination of Section 230’s appropriateness is long overdue, and a working solution must be critically …

A License To Play: Regulating Location-Based Augmented Reality Gameplay On Public Property, Kate Johnson, Evan Ringel, Amanda Reid

Georgia Law Review

This novel research sits at the intersection of augmented reality gameplay and government licenses for use of public property. Governments have long used licensing schema to assure public safety and order. Augmented reality gameplay on public lands presents a new, contested use of public property. Under our proposed licensing scheme, those wishing to engage in location-based augmented reality (LoBAR) gameplay on public lands would need a license. This proposal is akin to how governments—federal, state, and municipal—have authorized permit schema for use of public property, including rock climbing, geocaching, street performing, and film photography. Our Article offers sample legislation for …

Seeing Through Money: Democracy, Data Governance, And The Digital Dollar, Raúl Carrillo

Georgia Law Review

Today, financial institutions, technology companies, and government agencies constantly coordinate to collect data to share, sort, store, score, and sell. Moreover, banks and financial technology (fintech) companies channel nearly all payments between agencies and the public via thousands of different programs, increasingly collecting more data while doing so. Most policymakers, scholars, and industry stakeholders agree the dominant data-intensive public-private partnership model makes the financial system more inclusive, safe, and accountable, thereby “democratizing finance.” However, despite its benefits, standard operating procedure exacerbates identity fraud, civil and criminal punishment of poor people (especially impoverished people of color), and mass surveillance of the …

Absolute Official Immunity In Constitutional Litigation, Michael L. Wells

Georgia Law Review

Absolute official immunity blocks recovery of damages for constitutional violations committed by legislators, judges, prosecutors, and witnesses, no matter how egregious the violation. Under the Supreme Court’s “functional approach,” application of the doctrine does not turn on the officer’s title, but on function. Social workers, parole boards and others enjoy official immunity when they engage in legislative, adjudicative, or prosecutorial functions. The policy underlying absolute immunity is that constitutional litigation will produce unacceptable social costs, mainly by discouraging officials from acting boldly and effectively in the public interest. This Article criticizes the Court’s exclusive focus on function. While it may …

Bankruptcy Overload, Laura N. Coordes

Georgia Law Review

The bankruptcy system is overloaded. Those who use it, whether debtors or non-debtors, frequently seek to extract more out of a bankruptcy than the process can, practically and legally, provide. The goals and boundaries of bankruptcy law have always been subject to debate, making the system particularly susceptible to taking on more than it can bear. This Article defines and explains the concept of bankruptcy overload, illustrating that many of the problems currently plaguing the bankruptcy system derive from overloading it. In addition, although overloading the system may create problems in individual cases, this Article shows that bankruptcy overload is …

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 …

When Software Meets The Road: Responsibility For Defective Smart Cars In The Mvp Era, Sharon Cop, Tal Z. Zarsky

Georgia Law Review

This Article reveals and analyzes the rising dominance of the Minimal Viable Product (MVP) dynamic in the car industry and its legal and policy implications, especially given the growing automation trends in the driving experience. The MVP concept refers to releasing products as soon as possible and gathering feedback from early adopters to improve the product on the fly, based on users’ inputs. Many software-related products we use today were introduced at such an unripe stage and were developed into their current versions, given business trends originating from Silicon Valley. As the use of software in cars has grown, the …

Issue 4 Toc

Georgia Law Review

No abstract provided.

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 …

Unacceptable Risk: The Failure Of Georgia’S “Guilty But Intellectually Disabled” Statute And A Call For Change, Logan Purvis

Georgia Law Review

In 1988, Georgia became the first state in the nation to prohibit the execution of intellectually disabled criminal defendants. At the time, this groundbreaking action played a critical role in shaping the national debate surrounding the criminal justice system’s treatment of this group of individuals, culminating in the United States Supreme Court’s own prohibition in 2002. A drafting error in Georgia’s statute, however, created a highly prejudicial process for determining intellectual disability, all but ensuring that the law’s protections are unattainable for those who seek it. Despite this error, Georgia’s process has remained the same since the statute’s enactment with …

Table Of Contents

Georgia Law Review

No abstract provided.

Constitutional Text, Founding Era History, And The Independent-State-Legislature Theory, Dan T. Coenen

Georgia Law Review

One question raised by proponents of the so-called independent-state-legislature theory concerns the extent to which state courts can apply state constitutional requirements to invalidate state laws that concern federal elections. According to one proposed application of the theory, state courts can never subject such laws to state-constitution-based judicial review. According to another application, federal courts can broadly, though not invariably, foreclose state courts from drawing on state constitutions to invalidate federal-election-related state legislation. This article evaluates whether either of these positions comports with the original meaning of the Constitution. Given the article’s focus on the originalist methodology, it directs attention …

A Fourteenth Century Solution To A Twenty-First Century Problem: Using Qui Tam Legislation To Limit Executive War Power, Nicholas R. Lewis

Georgia Law Review

The United States was founded on the principle that Congress alone has the power to take the nation to war. This founding principle has failed. In its place now stands the modern principle that the Executive holds the power to initiate, wage, and conclude warfare. This modern principle, which is irreconcilable with the intent of America’s Founders, is a problem that must be remedied. And while this problem may be most pronounced in the twenty-first century, a possible solution comes from the most unlikely of places: fourteenth century England. In the 1300s, England developed qui tam legislation, a novel legal …

Privacy Is Not Dead: Expressively Using Law To Push Back Against Corporate Deregulators And Meaningfully Protect Data Privacy Rights, Alexander F. Krupp

Georgia Law Review

When the European Union’s (EU) General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) passed in 2016, it represented the world’s first major comprehensive data privacy law and kicked off a conversation about how we think about the right to privacy in the modern age. The law granted a broad range of rights to EU citizens, including a right to have companies delete data they collect about you, a right not to have your personal information sold, and a range of other rights all geared towards individual autonomy over personal data. All the while, platform companies like Facebook (Meta), Apple, and Amazon have taken …

Stay Schemin’: Tax Court’S Recent Ruling On Credit Card Rewards And The Impact This Ruling Has On Future Rewards Programs, Hunter Davis

Georgia Law Review

Beyond the utility of actual “credit,” the most important perk cardholders seek to capitalize on are the rewards that each cardholder’s particular credit card offers. Cardholders look for the most bang for their buck in terms of rewards and points. Ranging from frequent flyer miles to cash back to everything in between, rewards programs have expanded and diversified rapidly over the past several decades, and consumers cannot get enough. So much so that the question of whether, and when, consumer loyalty rewards should be taxable has arisen and persists today. The Internal Revenue Service (IRS) and the Tax Court have …

You’Re Out!: Three Strikes Against The Plra’S Three Strikes Rule, Kasey Clark

Georgia Law Review

As federal court caseloads increased in the twentieth century, concerned jurists and academics pointed their fingers at many potential culprits. One culprit in particular, however, caught the attention of Congress: suits brought by prisoners. To curtail what it believed was an influx of frivolous prisoner litigation, Congress passed the Prison Litigation Reform Act (PLRA) in 1996. One provision of the PLRA, known as the “three strikes rule,” prohibits a prisoner from proceeding in forma pauperis if three or more of the prisoner’s prior actions or appeals have been dismissed as frivolous or malicious or for failure to state a claim …

Biased But Reasonable: Bias Under The Cover Of Standard Of Care, Maytal Gilboa

Georgia Law Review

Inequities in the distribution of healthcare are widely acknowledged to plague the United States healthcare system. Controversies as to whether anti-discrimination law allows individuals to bring lawsuits with respect to implicit rather than intentional bias render negligence law an important avenue for redressing harms caused by implicit bias in medical care. Yet, as this Article argues, the focus of negligence law on medical standards of care to define the boundaries of healthcare providers’ legal duty of care prevents the law from adequately deterring implicit bias and leaves patients harmed by biased treatment decisions without redress for their losses, so long …

Standing On The Shoulders Of Llcs: Tax Entity Status And Decentralized Autonomous Organizations, Samuel D. Brunson

Georgia Law Review

Since the formation of the first decentralized autonomous organization in 2016, their use has exploded. Thousands of DAOs now try to take advantage of smart contracts to solve a problem that plagues business entities: the gulf between ownership and management. Armed with smart contracts and requiring token-holders to vote on any change in strategy, DAOs dispense with the management layer so necessary in traditional business entities.

DAOs owe their existence to technology. Without blockchain, without cryptocurrency, and without smart contracts, there would be no DAOs. But they owe their explosive to something much more unexpected: Treasury regulations.

In the wake …

Faithful Execution In The Fifty States, Zachary S. Price

Georgia Law Review

Amid heightened political conflict over criminal-justice policy, norms surrounding prosecutorial discretion have shifted rapidly. Under the prior mainstream approach, prosecutors exercised broad charging discretion, but generally did so tacitly and in case-by-case fashion out of deference to statutory law’s primacy. Under an emerging alternative approach, associated for the moment with progressive politics, prosecutors categorically and transparently suspend enforcement of laws they consider unjust or unwise. The federal government under President Obama employed this theory in high-profile policies relating to marijuana crimes, as well as immigration and the Affordable Care Act. More recently, a number of self-described “progressive prosecutors” have employed …

Making Lease Payments A Lessor Problem, Devin C. Berrigan

Georgia Law Review

The frustration of purpose doctrine is a contracts defense that has garnered increased interest since the COVID-19 pandemic’s initial wave. To manage this public health emergency, many governments have issued orders restricting the operation of businesses. These orders, while necessary, put commercial lessees in a bind once it came time to pay rent because these restrictions drastically cut their profits. Other frustrating events, like war and natural disasters, cause the same problems, yet the current frustration of purpose doctrine is too narrow to be practically helpful to these lessees. This Note examines the English and Canadian frustration doctrines and draws …

Does It Sparc Joy? Cleaning Up The Spac Space, G. Max Miseyko

Georgia Law Review

For the last few years, the special purpose acquisition company—SPAC—was one of the hottest investment trends on Wall Street. In a SPAC, an investment vehicle with a limited lifespan (usually two years), a sponsor raises money from investors up front with the goal of finding a target company to take public via a reverse merger with a publicly traded shell company. Once touted as a democratized way to access public markets that avoids the rigors associated with traditional initial public offerings (IPOs), those characterizations came under fire in 2021 as academics and regulators spotlighted the hidden costs and misaligned incentives …

The Crossover Event From Hell: Evidence, Admissibility, And Truth When Reality Television Meets Criminal Prosecution, K. L. Renner

Georgia Law Review

Erika Girardi has played many roles: Real Housewives star, pop singer, Broadway performer. But Girardi’s new role as a party in a host of lawsuits related to her husband’s alleged embezzlement of client settlement funds may be her most difficult yet. For years, Girardi and her spending habits were closely documented by television cameras and broadcasted to millions of viewers. When news of Girardi’s legal troubles broke, a question emerged: if Girardi were to face criminal charges in connection with her husband’s misdeeds, would prosecutors be able to use years of footage of Girardi to help their cases?

While evidence …

Because They Are Lawyers First And Foremost: Ethics Rules And Other Strategies To Protect The Justice Department From A Faithless President, Stephen Gillers

Georgia Law Review

During the Trump presidency, Americans were reminded that the nation relies on norms or custom—not laws alone—to protect the Department of Justice and the rule of law from improper political interference. The Justice Department is an agency within the Executive Branch and the Supreme Court has told us that the executive power—“all of it”—resides in the President alone, implying that the President can use the Department anyway he wishes limited only by the Constitution and by laws that do not violate separation of powers principles. Which laws are those? This Article concludes that Congress can do only a little to …

Is Your Socially Responsible Investment Fund Green Or Greedy? How A Standard Esg Disclosure Framework Can Inform Investors And Prevent Greenwashing, Cara Beth Musciano

Georgia Law Review

As environmental, social, and governance (ESG) investing exponentially increases, so does the level of inconsistent ESG disclosures, adding to investor confusion. Without any mandates for standardization, companies will continue disclosing their sustainability efforts without concrete facts behind their subjective claims in hopes that they will appear “greener” to investors. This practice—known as greenwashing—could become prevalent, resulting in capital intended for sustainable investments flowing toward harmful businesses investors sought to avoid. Regulators should develop a mandatory ESG disclosure framework to create accurate, reliable data and to prevent capital from being misallocated against investors’ genuine sustainable efforts. Some existing rules could hold …

Contracts Without Courts Or Clans: How Business Networks Govern Exchange, Sadie Blanchard

Georgia Law Review

Legal scholars have long recognized the close-knit community as an alternative means of supporting trade when contract law and trusted courts cannot. But recent research suggests that another option may be available: heterogeneous business networks. What is interesting is that these networks lack features traditionally seen as essential to community-supported trade. In particular, they lack preexisting social ties that allow reliable information to spread at low cost, make exiting the trade difficult, and enable the coordinated sanctioning of cheaters. As a result, some leading scholars have come to doubt that these networks are capable of sustaining cooperation.

This Article offers …

Democratic Renewal And The Civil Jury, Richard L. Jolly, Valerie P. Hans, Robert S. Peck

Georgia Law Review

The United States is in a period of democratic decline. Waning commitment to principles of self-governance throughout the polity necessitates urgent action to revitalize the Republic. The civil jury offers an often-overlooked avenue for such democratic renewal. Welcoming laypeople into the courthouse and deputizing them as constitutional actors demonstrates a profound faith in representative governance and results in wide-reaching and pronounced sociopolitical and administrative benefits. The Seventh Amendment of the U.S. Constitution and similar state provisions protect the rights of litigants to jury trials in most circumstances. But these promises have been hollowed over time through legal, political, and practical …

Safeguarding America’S “Unnatural” Guardians: How Georgia’S Legal Guardianship Statute Excludes “Atypical,” Matriarchal Familial Structures Rooted In Black Culture, Destiny B. Barnett

Georgia Law Review

The stereotypical American family is often seen as one man, one woman, and their child. However, this notion of the traditional family is changing. For centuries, familial matriarchs have assumed roles typically reserved for a child’s biological parents. Specifically, African American grandmothers, aunts, and other female figures have served as kinship caregivers for countless generations of children dating back to before the period of American slavery. These forgotten matriarchs, who often serve as the foundation of African American family units, have been historically abandoned by our universalist legal system that idolizes the nuclear concept of family and favors the retention …

A Short Treatise On College-Athlete Name, Image, And Likeness Rights: How America Regulates College Sports’ New Economic Frontier, John T. Holden, Marc Edelman, Michael Mccann

Georgia Law Review

For the past seventy years, intellectual property law’s right of publicity has allowed for celebrities to monetize their names, images and likenesses for commercial gain. Until recently, the National Collegiate Athletic Association’s (NCAA) internal Principle of Amateurism excluded college athletes from the endorsement marketplace, keeping the wealth of college sports in the hands of a select few administrators, athletic directors, and coaches.

Following years of mounting pressure from the college-athletes’ rights movement, a number of states recently announced new laws to ensure college athletes the right to endorse products free from NCAA interference. As such, the NCAA begrudgingly relented on …