Law Commons^™

The Data Protection Credibility Crisis, Fred H. Cate, Christopher Kuner, Christopher Millard, Dan Jerker B. Svantesson, Orla Lynskey

Articles by Maurer Faculty

No abstract provided.

The 2014 Farm Bill And Snap: Improving The Diets Of Low-Income Americans?, Mathew Swinburne

University of Maryland Law Journal of Race, Religion, Gender and Class

No abstract provided.

The Harm Principle At Play: How The Animal Welfare Act Fails To Protect Animals Adequately, Proshanti Banerjee

University of Maryland Law Journal of Race, Religion, Gender and Class

No abstract provided.

Clearing The Path: The Perils Of Positing Civil Society In Conflict And Transition, Timothy W. Waters

Articles by Maurer Faculty

Can there be a general theoretical perspective on civil society's involvement in transitional justice? This article considers this question in its application to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Within the study of transitional justice and conflict resolution, civil society - a notoriously plastic concept - can be understood narrowly as rights-oriented groups working “for” peace, but the term is equally available to describe a broader array of communities that can either promote or prevent peace and justice.

It is, in fact, quite difficult to sustain a theoretical distinction between them, because transitional justice does not escape the dictates of politics - of …

Brookshire Brothers V. Aldridge: Making The Spoliation Instruction A Litigation Unicorn, Shawn A. Johnson

Texas A&M Law Review

In July 2014, the Texas Supreme Court issued a new framework for analyzing and remedying the destruction of evidence, holding that spoliation jury instructions are warranted only when a trial court finds that a party acted with the specific intent to conceal discoverable evidence or that a party’s negligent destruction wholly prevented another from presenting a claim or defense. The Court addressed whether the trial court abused its discretion in submitting a spoliation instruction in a slip-and-fall case in which the defendant premises owner retained only eight minutes of video of the plaintiff’s fall and allowed the remaining footage to …

2014–2015 Texas A&M Law Review Masthead

Texas A&M Law Review

2014–2015 Texas A&M Law Review Masthead

Efficacy In Emergency Legal Preparedness Underlying The 2014 Ebola Outbreak, James G. Hodge Jr., Leila Barraza, Kim Weidenaar, Alicia Corbett, Gregory Measer, Asha M. Agrawal

Texas A&M Law Review

From its relative obscurity over the past three decades, Ebola viral disease (“EVD”) emerged as a substantial global biothreat in 2014 and 2015. The current outbreak of varied strains of Ebola, beginning in March 2014 in Guinea, is projected to impact hundreds of thousands of people over months, years, or even indefinitely. As of October 31, 2014, the spread of EVD was concentrated in several Af- rican countries (e.g., Sierra Leone, Liberia, Guinea, and an unrelated outbreak in Democratic Republic of Congo), with limited additional cases in Nigeria, Senegal, and Mali. Over 2,700 people are known to have died from …

A Problem Lurking Just Below The Surface: The Need In Texas For Dormant Mineral Legislation, Terrell Fenner

Texas A&M Law Review

A long history of oil and gas development in Texas has made the state the number one energy producer in the United States, and the bulk of that energy is produced from fuels acquired by drilling into the vast natural resources that sit below the state. As a side effect of this long history, it is common for the surface and mineral estates in Texas to be severed, and many severances happened several generations ago. This history has spread mineral interests between dozens of owners in some cases, many who are unknown and cannot be found. Absentee ownership has diluted …

Marketing Interstate Harmony: Interstate Water Markets As An Alternative To Resolving Water Conflicts, Brian Singleterry

Texas A&M Law Review

As the population of the American West continues to rise, increasing conflicts over water are inevitable. Complicating matters, the existing supplies are often far from demands and are often shared between states. To satisfy future demands, states must learn to transfer and share water. There are currently three methods for resolving water disputes between states: litigation in the Supreme Court, congressional allocation, and Interstate Compacts. All three are costly and take many years to reach a conclusion.

However, most resources, like oil or timber, do not require special allocation methods. Instead, the market efficiently and equitably allocates these resources. While …

Introduction To The Symposium Edition: New Technology And Old Law: Rethinking National Security, Lisa A. Rich

Texas A&M Law Review

Introduction to the Symposium Edition: New Technology and Old Law: Rethinking National Security

Game Of Drones: Defending Against Drone Terrorism, Tung Yin

Texas A&M Law Review

This Article considers the threat posed by drone terrorism and the technological and legal issues involved in setting up defensive responses. First, the Article provides an overview of current drone technology, legal views on weaponized military drones, and a discussion of the potential appeal of drones as vehicles for terrorism. Next, it discusses the current laws and regulations pertaining to private drones. The Article then lays out the three challenges to defending against drone terrorism: detecting potentially hostile drones, identifying them, and destroying or neutralizing them. Finally, it closes with some proposals to begin to develop the legal and technological …

Security And Technology: Rethinking National Security, Sahar F. Aziz

Texas A&M Law Review

The expansive scope of national security makes it a topic of utmost importance to all Americans. National security law and policy affect nearly every aspect of our lives, our health, our safety, and our dignity. In fact, the topic is so far-reaching that the term “national security” is often exploited for ulterior commercial or political purposes to increase profits, obtain more government funding, and expand government authorities in areas that historically were not related to national security. Indeed, one could reasonably make the claim that we are now in the midst of a national security industrial complex that is self-perpetuating.

Table Of Contents

Texas A&M Law Review

Table of Contents

Pennoyer Strikes Back: Personal Jurisdiction In A Global Age, William V. Dorsaneo Iii

Texas A&M Law Review

The primary purpose of this Article is to evaluate the four most recent Supreme Court decisions on personal jurisdiction and situate those decisions within the history of Supreme Court personal jurisdiction jurisprudence. Starting with the seminal case of Pennoyer v. Neff, personal jurisdiction jurisprudence has been remarkably kaleidoscopic, with the Supreme Court intervening at various intervals to redefine the law in broad strokes, while zigzagging from one doctrinal position to another and thereby leaving lower courts to hash out the application of an evolving personal jurisdiction doctrine to varying fact patterns. I will divide this jurisprudential history into two main …

Citations, Justifications, And The Troubled State Of Legal Scholarship: An Empirical Study, Jeffrey L. Harrison, Amy R. Mashburn

Texas A&M Law Review

Recent pedagogical, economic, and technological changes require law schools to reevaluate their resource allocations. Although typically viewed in terms of curricular changes, it is important also to focus on the very significant investment in legal scholarship and its impact. Typically, this has been determined by some version of citation counting with little regard for what it means to be cited. This Article discusses why this is a deeply flawed measure of impact. Much of that discussion is based on an empirical study the Authors conducted. The investigation found that citation by other authors is highly influenced by the rank of …

The Relational Economics Of Commercial Contract, Chapin F. Cimino

Texas A&M Law Review

Modern contract law scholarship embraces a particularly strange contradiction. On one hand, most legal scholars accept the core insight of what is called relational contract theory: most commercial contracts involve repeat players who seek to maximize wealth while still maintaining cooperative relationships. On the other hand, many of these same contract scholars believe that there is nothing contract law could or should do about it. They contend that contract law and legal theory are better off ignoring this insight, rather than trying to respond to it.

. . . .

This Article brings these disparate lines of contract scholarship together …

Table Of Contents

Texas A&M Law Review

Table of Contents

Contemporary Perspectives On Wrongful Conviction: An Introduction To The 2015 Innocence Network Conference, Orlando, Florida, Robert Schehr, Aliza B. Kaplan, Valena Beety

Texas A&M Law Review

The Innocence Network is “an affiliation of organizations from all over the world dedicated to providing pro bono legal and investigative services to individuals seeking to prove innocence of crimes for which they have been convicted, and working to redress the causes of wrongful convictions.” Beginning in 1999 and 2000 in Chicago, Illinois, a small group of interested legal and social science scholars and clinic directors met at the Northwestern University School of Law to discuss ways to investigate and litigate claims of actual innocence. The first recognized National Innocence Conference took place at the California Western School of Law …

“What Happened To Me Can Happen To Anybody”—Women Exonerees Speak Out, Zieva Dauber Konvisser

Texas A&M Law Review

Only a few studies have investigated the psychological consequences of wrongful conviction; several others have examined the psychological consequences of incarceration and its impact on reentry and reintegration, primarily for men. For women who have been wrongfully convicted and subsequently released from prison into the free world, there are further indignities and unique issues: having to deal with the deep personal loss of murdered loved ones along with criminal charges; the absence of DNA evidence, making convictions harder to fight; stigmatization by prosecutors and the media; and unique emotional and medical needs.

This Article presents findings from in-depth interviews with …

Wrongful Convictions And Upstream Reform In The Criminal Justice System, Katherine R. Kruse

Texas A&M Law Review

The DNA exonerations of the late twentieth century spawned a reform movement arguably as influential in the American criminal justice system as the Warren Court criminal procedure revolution. The goal of innocence reform is to prevent wrongful convictions by increasing the reliability of criminal justice system operations. A basic tenet of the adversary system of justice is that an adversary trial will expose and correct factual errors with procedural tools, such as the exclusion of unreliable evidence, vigorous cross-examination of witnesses, and the introduction of expert testimony. However, DNA exonerations have undermined faith in the capacity of the adversary trial …

A Religious Right To Discriminate: Hobby Lobby And “Religious Freedom” As A Threat To The Lgbt Community, Travis Gasper

Texas A&M Law Review

The Supreme Court in its 2014 decision in Burwell v. Hobby Lobby broadly expanded so-called religious freedom protections in the Religious Freedom Restoration Act (“RFRA”) by striking down a provision of the Affordable Care Act requiring employers to provide health insurance coverage for certain methods of contraception. In doing so, the Court opened the floodgates for employers to claim an exemption based upon any “sincerely held” religious belief. Without inquiry into the sincerity of that belief, businesses and corporations are free to adopt or assert beliefs that could lead to increased discrimination against employees. This is especially troublesome for marginalized …

The Voiceless Citizens: Surrogacy Contracts And The Rights Of The Child, Lorena Solis

Texas A&M Law Review

As reproduction by surrogacy increases, the problems arising from surrogacy contracts also increase. Countries around the world are being asked to solve never-before-seen legal problems arising from surrogacy agreements. When trying to solve the newly arisen problems, the rights of the child born from the surrogacy contract tend to be overlooked. Enacted laws try to solve the enforceability of the contract and protect the rights of the parties involved— such as, who are the legal parents of the child if both sides of the agreement wish to keep the child.

However, few of these laws address a situation where the …

Laws Of Image: Privacy And Publicity In America, Samantha Barbas

Books

Americans have long been obsessed with their images—their looks, public personas, and the impressions they make. This preoccupation has left its mark on the law. The twentieth century saw the creation of laws that protect your right to control your public image, to defend your image, and to feel good about your image and public presentation of self. These include the legal actions against invasion of privacy, libel, and intentional infliction of emotional distress. With these laws came the phenomenon of "personal image litigation"—individuals suing to vindicate their image rights. Laws of Image tells the story of how Americans came …

Lessons Learned From Ferguson: Ending Abusive Collection Of Criminal Justice Debt, Neil L. Sobol

University of Maryland Law Journal of Race, Religion, Gender and Class

No abstract provided.

Round Up The Usual Suspexts: Advocating For Leniency On Consensual, Teenage Sext Offenders, Jaclyn A. Machometa

University of Maryland Law Journal of Race, Religion, Gender and Class

No abstract provided.

On Law-Breaking And Law’S Legitimacy, Aliza Plener Cover

University of Maryland Law Journal of Race, Religion, Gender and Class

No abstract provided.

Land Use Priorities And The Law Of Nuisance, Dan Priel

Articles & Book Chapters

Rights-based approaches to tort law have been prominent in recent years in theoretical discussions of tort law. Much of this work has been either highly abstract or focused on a small number of torts like negligence or trespass. Allan Beever’s The Law of Private Nuisance attempts to extend this approach to the tort of private nuisance. Central to his account is the view that the law of nuisance is concerned with prioritising land uses, and that what the law calls ‘nuisance’ is really a case of one land use conflicting with another, higher-ranked one. This essay argues that despite claims …

Public Perceptions Of The Perth Drug Court As A Mechanism For Dealing With Drug Related Crime, Dominic Jordan

Theses : Honours

In the last two decades, drug courts have been introduced throughout Australia, to address the issue of drug related crime. Drug courts aim to reduce criminal recidivism by placing drug dependent offenders into intensive supervision and treatment programs. Research has revealed that drug courts, including the Perth Drug Court, can reduce criminal recidivism in offenders for whom drug use is a dynamic risk factor for their criminal behaviour. Currently however, little is known about the public’s knowledge and perceptions of drug courts. The aim of the current study was to determine the perceptions of a sample of the Western Australian …

Ties That Bind? The Questionable Consent Justification For Hosanna-Tabor, Jessie Hill

Northwestern University Law Review

Arguments in favor of religious sovereignty often emphasize the benefits of autonomy for religious institutions while ignoring the civil rights of individuals who belong to or work for those institutions. To justify intrusions on individual civil rights, proponents of strong religious autonomy generally rely on the concept of implied consent. According to this rationale, individuals willingly give up the protection of civil rights laws when they voluntarily join religious organizations. This Essay responds to one scholar’s account of the consent rationale as undergirding the Supreme Court’s recognition of the ministerial exception: Christopher Lund’s excellent article, Free Exercise Reconceived: The Logic …

Supplemental Standing For Severability, Erik R. Zimmerman

Northwestern University Law Review

The Supreme Court has recently insisted that plaintiffs must have standing for every claim that they raise. But this claim-specific approach to standing is at odds with established practice in several contexts, including rulings on the severability of statutes. Courts often permit plaintiffs to claim that statutory provisions should be invalidated pursuant to severability doctrine, without requiring that they have standing for those claims. This Article argues that existing practice for severability is a form of “supplemental standing.” Supplemental standing is analogous to supplemental jurisdiction. It allows a plaintiff with standing for one claim to raise related claims, even if …