Law Commons^™

In Honor Of Professor Joseph Norton, Marc I. Steinberg

SMU Law Review

No abstract provided.

At Least Make It Adequate: The Constitution Should Better Protect Public Education, Cristina J. Mauldin

SMU Law Review

Public education lacks adequate constitutional protection. The COVID-19 pandemic highlighted pre-existing issues in the public education system, such as poor literacy rates, chronic absenteeism, and disparities in students’ post-secondary college and career readiness. Additionally, recent changes in educational policies have often been part of legislative schemes passed by lawmakers who, on average, are at least two generations removed from American students—these policy changes have not been driven by data in response to students’ needs. As a result, there is a serious lack of consistency in the quality of an American education that has contributed to disparities in students’ learning and …

Make America Healthy: Reducing High Pharmaceutical Prices Without Reducing Innovation, Srividhya Ragavan

SMU Law Review

Cost of medication in the United States has historically remained one of the highest in the world. The conundrum that the United States has faced in balancing innovation with affordability of life-saving medications is palpable, especially when faced with the reality of patent monopolies conflicting with healthcare obligations. The result is an overflow of issues, which emphasize the need to delineate limits on innovation to balance pharmaceutical novelty with robust public health within the United States. This has increasingly shifted the focus of patent law into the realm of healthcare issues. Naturally, it leads to an inquiry about how best …

Raising The Bar In Child Welfare Law, Diane M. Sumoski

SMU Law Review

This article explores the unique opportunities arising from child welfare law practice in clinical legal education. While training law students for lawyering in all practice areas, the clinic can also inspire experienced child welfare practitioners to raise the level of their practice. The article provides an overview of the child welfare practice in Texas, the various roles of lawyers in the system, the special training required for these lawyers, and how the lawyers are employed and paid. The article proposes that the clear impact of child welfare legal practice on clients, combined with its interdisciplinary complexity, creates an ideal combination …

Tribute To Professor Lackland H. Bloom, Jr., Jason Bloom

SMU Law Review

No abstract provided.

Individual Dignity As The Foundation Of An Inclusive Society, Cory R. Liu, Anthony Pericolo

SMU Law Review

In Students for Fair Admissions, Inc. v. President & Fellows of Harvard College, the Supreme Court considered voluminous evidence that Harvard discriminated against Asian Americans to keep the racial composition of its student body similar year after year. The Court held that Harvard engaged in unlawful discrimination, providing clarity to an area of the law that was filled with ambiguities and self-contradictions. The Court’s decision made clear that discrimination in favor of some racial groups necessarily inflicts discriminatory, race-based harms on others.

This Article explores how Fair Admissions sheds light on the failure of identity politics to create a genuinely …

Social Media And Social Reform: Why States Should Consider Protecting The Rising Kidfluencers, Rina Wong

SMU Law Review

The rise of social media in the twenty-first century has led to multi-million-dollar careers for influencers, adults, and children alike. Similarly, the rise of child influencers, often colloquially coined as “kidfluencers,” have raised legal issues because kidfluencers are currently unprotected by child labor laws. The Coogan Law, enacted in 1939 to protect child performers in California and similar laws across the United States do not currently apply to kidfluencers. This places kidfluencers at a severe risk of having their financial earnings squandered by their parents or guardians managing their funds.

Fortunately for kidfluencers, legislators both domestically and internationally have started …

A Tribute To Lackland H. Bloom, Jr., Jeffrey D. Kahn

SMU Law Review

No abstract provided.

Choosing Your Judge, Alexander Gouzoules

SMU Law Review

Accounts of American litigation pose a contradiction: forum shopping is acceptable, but judge shopping is not. Formal disfavor toward judge shopping is pervasive, and attempts by parties to manipulate the assignment of their case are deemed abusive and even sanctionable. Nevertheless, sophisticated judge-shopping tactics have proliferated in specific areas of the law—particularly in challenges to executive-branch policies and in the reorganization of large companies under Chapter 11. In these disparate areas of law, judge-shopping strategies have been deployed in high-profile cases, ranging from a challenge to the FDA’s authorization of an abortion drug to the opioid-driven bankruptcy of Purdue Pharma. …

Reversing Grutter, Lackland H. Bloom Jr.

SMU Law Review

In 2023, the Supreme Court modified its 2003 decision in Grutter v. Bollinger. That decision had allowed colleges, graduate schools, and professional schools to explicitly consider race in the admissions process. In two cases decided together, Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard University and University of North Carolina, a 6–3 majority of the Court held that colleges could not employ a general racial preference but could take account of how race affected the specific applicant. The decision was based on the Court’s understanding of the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment and Title VI of the Civil Rights Act …

Front Matter

SMU Law Review

No abstract provided.

Professor John S. Lowe: A Master Teacher Who Never Doubted The Confidence Of His Convictions Even When He Was Wrong!, Owen L. Anderson

SMU Law Review

No abstract provided.

A Tribute To Professor John S. Lowe, Eric C. Camp

SMU Law Review

No abstract provided.

Ode To John Lowe, Norman Nadorff

SMU Law Review

No abstract provided.

Tribute To John Lowe On His Retirement, David Pierce

SMU Law Review

No abstract provided.

Fracture: Abortion Law And Politics After Dobbs, Rachel Rebouché, Mary Ziegler

SMU Law Review

Before Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization—the case that overturned Roe v. Wade—almost everyone assumed that polarization would continue to define the abortion debate: once states could ban abortion before viability, half the country would criminalize it and half the country would not. The assumption has been that states would prohibit or permit abortion in ways that correspond to political beliefs. This Article demonstrates the limitations of that narrative both as a matter of history and in the current political moment. The future of abortion law and politics is one of fracture. Particularly for the anti-abortion movement, once-foundational priorities will …

The Ripple Effects Of Dobbs On Health Care Beyond Wanted Abortion, Maya Manian

SMU Law Review

The Supreme Court’s momentous decision in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization to overturn fifty years of precedent on the constitutional right to abortion represents a sea of change, not only in constitutional law, but also in the public health landscape. Although state laws on abortion are still evolving after Dobbs, the decision almost immediately wreaked havoc on the delivery of medical care for both patients seeking abortion care and those not actively seeking to terminate a pregnancy. This Article also argues that focusing the public’s attention on the deleterious consequences of abortion bans for health care beyond wanted abortion …

The Promise Of Abortion Pills: Evidence On The Safety And Effectiveness Of Self-Managed Medication Abortion And Opportunities To Expand Access, Dana M. Johnson

SMU Law Review

Since the Dobbs v. Jackson Whole Women’s Health Organization ruling, medication abortion pills have received an enormous amount of attention. The two medication abortion pill regimens, mifepristone used with misoprostol, or misoprostol used by itself, have been the subject of extensive public health research. Less discussed in the legal scholarship are the differences between the two regimens and their uses for self-managed medication abortion. In the United States, when people refer to medication abortion pills, they are often referencing mifepristone used with misoprostol. But in other parts of the world, when people refer to medication abortion pills, they often mean …

Front Matter

SMU Law Review

No abstract provided.

Innovation Funding And The Valley Of Death, Lital Helman

SMU Law Review

Innovation is a public good. As with other public goods, it is expected to be underproduced if only private incentives are present. Therefore, the law strives to encourage innovation via an array of stimulus mechanisms. The law offers three main mechanisms: intellectual property (IP), cash transfers—mainly prizes and grants—and tax incentives. Vast literature analyzes and compares these innovation stimuli in search of the optimal mix to boost innovation. Yet a key problem is largely overlooked: together, the existing stimuli do not cover the lion’s share of the innovation lifecycle. At the beginning of the innovation process, companies can win grants …

Warranted Exclusion: A Case For A Fourth Amendment Built On The Right To Exclude, Mailyn Fidler

SMU Law Review

Searches intrude; fundamentally, they infringe on a right to exclude. So that right should form the basis of Fourth Amendment protections. Current Fourth Amendment doctrine—the reasonable expectation of privacy test—struggles with conceptual clarity and predictability. The Supreme Court’s recent decision to overturn Roe v. Wade casts further doubt on the reception of other privacy-based approaches with this Court. But the replacement approach that several Justices on the Court favor, what I call the “maximalist” property approach, risks troublingly narrow results. This Article provides a new alternative: Fourth Amendment protection should be anchored in a flexible concept derived from property law—what …

Front Matter

SMU Law Review

No abstract provided.

The Future Of Substantive Due Process: What Are The Stakes?, Erwin Chemerinsky

SMU Law Review

No abstract provided.

Right To Counsel In Civil Cases: Protector (And Source?) Of Substantive Due Process Rights, John Pollock

SMU Law Review

No abstract provided.

Challenges In Substantive Due Process Litigation, Nancy Leong

SMU Law Review

This Article presents the results of an empirical examination of litigation involving substantive due process claims. I have compiled a dataset consisting of every case in which a federal appellate court adjudicated a substantive due process claim during the year 2019—a total of 98 cases. This census yields important information about the context in which substantive due process rights are litigated and articulated within our civil rights enforcement scheme. As a threshold matter, I show that 92% of substantive due process cases come to the federal appellate courts as actions brought under 42 U.S.C. § 1983. This information underscores that, …

Secrecy And Transparency In Substantive Due Process Litigation, Dustin B. Benham

SMU Law Review

A few years before the recomposed Court rejected abortion rights in Dobbs, it sustained several healthcare providers’ challenge to Louisiana abortion restrictions in June Medical. History will remember that 5–4 decision mostly as one of the last major cases to interpret and apply the Casey framework.

But in the little-noticed background of the June Medical litigation, a significant dispute over sealed court records boiled over. On one side, plaintiff physicians sought anonymity and confidentiality in light of potential threats to their physical safety and patient privacy. On the other side, Louisiana asserted the public’s longstanding right to access court records …

State Constitutional Rights, State Courts, And The Future Of Substantive Due Process Protections, Jonathan L. Marshfield

SMU Law Review

By most accounts, the Supreme Court’s ruling in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization signaled a broader stagnation (and perhaps retrenchment) of federal substantive due process protections. As a result, there is now great interest in the role that state constitutions and courts might play in protecting and expanding reproductive and privacy rights. This Article aims to place this moment in state constitutional development in broader context. It makes two core claims in this regard. First, although state courts are free to interpret state constitutions as providing broader individual rights protections than those contained in the Federal Constitution, state constitutions …

From Liberation To (Re)Criminalization: Dobbs V. Jackson Women’S Health Organization, Bodily Autonomy, And The Expansion Of State Rights, Robin S. Maril

SMU Law Review

For more than a generation, the U.S. Supreme Court recognized the constitutionally protected right to an abortion, and, in turn, the dignity-affirming power of reproductive autonomy and its role in designing one’s own destiny. The Court’s endorsement of the liberatory value of bodily autonomy in Roe v. Wade, as later affirmed in Planned Parenthood of Southeastern Pennsylvania v. Casey, rejected attempts to justify restrictive prohibitions on abortion as valid exercises of state police powers. However, the Court’s 2022 decision in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization threatens to fundamentally redefine the boundaries between the rights of individuals and those of …

Death After Dobbs, Kathy L. Cerminara

SMU Law Review

Courts have recognized that decisions about medical care near the end of life enjoy both common law and constitutional protections since the 1970s, when patients, their families, and the medical establishment invited legal input into those intensely private discussions. In Cruzan v. Director, Missouri Department of Health, the U.S. Supreme Court famously “strongly assumed” that substantive due process protected decisions to withhold or withdraw such treatment as arising from a fundamental liberty interest. Beginning on June 24, 2022, however, the Supreme Court’s decision in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization prompted concern over whether substantive due process protection for end-of-life …

Renewing Educational Autonomy, Johanna Kalb

SMU Law Review

American colleges and universities are facing an unprecedented wave of state legislative actions calling into question the freedom that these institutions have long enjoyed, as well as their ability to serve increasingly diverse student populations. Current constitutional protections for academic freedom under the First Amendment are proving an inadequate defense from these types of incursions. This Article argues for a reexamination and reinvigoration of a constitutional theory of educational autonomy protected by substantive due process, drawing on both the pre-colonial models that informed the creation of American colleges, as well as the earliest cases involving state efforts to control them. …