Law Commons^™

Teaching Relational Lawyering, Susan L. Brooks

Richmond Journal of Law and the Public Interest

This article discusses how to incorporate “relationship-centered lawyering” into the law school curriculum through communication practices and how strong relational skills are helpful to lawyering and their professional lives.

Mindfulness, Self-Care And The Law, Victor Narro

Richmond Journal of Law and the Public Interest

Victor Narro offers his advice for law school graduates on living in the present moment, engaging in active listening, and “heart to heart” communication through mindfulness. He explores his own career and provides a framework for self-care in professional life using the teaching of Thich Nhat Hanh and St. Francis of Assisi.

A Lawyer Sits (The Practice), Christopher Corts

Richmond Journal of Law and the Public Interest

A poem that shares the power of sitting in silence with other lawyers.

Morality Now: Healing The Heart Of Darkness Of The First Year Law Student, M.C.

Richmond Journal of Law and the Public Interest

This paper argues the current law school structure, championing analytical reasoning over morality, does not adequately prepare law students for effective advocacy. The first section explores the tradition- al law school structure and the methods used to teach students. The second section argues that these methods encourage students to separate law from morality, which in turn affects their ability. Lastly, the third section argues that by requiring mandatory first year clinical practice and injecting compassion through mindfulness practice, students will have a proper moral foundation to use law as a tool in con- junction with their own belief system.

Finding Peace In Law School, Dominique Simon

Richmond Journal of Law and the Public Interest

This article discusses the author's law school experience and the struggle to understand the motivations behind legal education process and the shortcomings of the legal justice system. The articles explores how mindfulness and the author's own spiritual awakening improved his legal education.

Pro Bono Scholastici: Getting Out Of The Building While Remaining In The Classroom, B. Allen Wall

Richmond Journal of Law and the Public Interest

The author discusses his experience in developing his personal identity in law school and cultivating purpose while helping one illegal immigrant faced with deportation.

The Unintended Pregnancy Crisis: A No-Fault Fix, Eric Lindenfeld

Marquette Benefits and Social Welfare Law Review

There is an ongoing and concerning public health problem in the United States relating to unintended pregnancies. Despite the fact that women consistently express dissatisfaction with existing contraception methods, the availability of cutting edge technologies remains stagnant. This paper argues that the threat of liability in the form on product liability lawsuits dissuades contraceptive manufacturers from innovating. This paper proposes a no-fault fix to the problem modeled around the National Childhood Vaccine Act of 1986.

Allowing States To Help Workers Safe For Retirement: Department Of Labor's Proposed Rulemaking That Provides A Safe Harbor For State Savings Programs Under Erisa, William A. Nelson

Marquette Benefits and Social Welfare Law Review

There is a “retirement crisis” in America. Contributing to

this crisis is the fact that millions of Americans do not have

access to a retirement savings plan through their employers.

States, concerned with the economic stability of their citizens,

have created laws that require private sector employers to

implement state-administered payroll deduction IRA programs

in their workplaces. Even though many states are currently

debating whether to adopt state payroll deduction programs,

this Article will focus on Oregon, Illinois, and California, which

have enacted laws along those lines.

One obstruction to wider adoption of such state measures

has been uncertainty about …

Essay: Understanding Employment Discrimination Litigation In China Through The Notion Of "Rights Apathy", Sheera Chan, Mimi Zou

Marquette Benefits and Social Welfare Law Review

The psycho-legal concept of “rights apathy” is developed in

this Essay as an underlying factor of the very low rate of

incidence of workplace discrimination lawsuits filed in China,

despite an increasingly elaborate legal framework “on paper”

and workers’ rising awareness of their legal rights under

anti-discrimination laws. “Rights apathy” is underpinned by the

notions of “frustration” and “learned helplessness,” depicting the

indifference of workers in exercising their legal rights before a

tribunal or court. A number of institutional problems, namely

defects in existing anti-discrimination provisions, judicial

practices, and contradictions in other laws, policies, and

practices, can contribute to the …

Comment: Transgender Employment Discrimination Equality In Wisconsin: The Demise Of A Former Lgbtiq+ Rights Trailblazer, Alexandra A. Klimko

Marquette Benefits and Social Welfare Law Review

Wisconsin, once known as “The Gay Rights State” and a

pioneer of the LGBTIQ+ civil rights movement, has

disappointingly failed to create transgender-inclusive

employment discrimination legislation, much like the majority of

American states. As a result, Wisconsin transgender employees

face shocking workplace discrimination with saddening

repercussions felt by transgender individuals who call Wisconsin

home. This Comment identifies the federal, state, and city

approaches that have extended equal employment

discrimination legal protections to transgender workers in the

United States. Further, this Comment urges the Wisconsin

legislature to incorporate “gender identity or expression” to

Wisconsin’s Fair Employment Act as a non-discrimination

category, …

Healthy Mothers, Healthy Babies: A Reproductive Justice Response To The "Womb-To-Foster-Care Pipeline", Emma S. Ketteringham, Sarah Cremer, Caitlin Becker

City University of New York Law Review

No abstract provided.

Law And Lgbq-Parent Families, Emily Kazyak, Brandi Woodell

Department of Sociology: Faculty Publications

This paper addresses how the law affects LGBQ-parent families. We first outline the legal landscape that LGBQ parents face in the US, underscoring that it varies drastically by state and creates inequity for families. Reviewing existing social science research, we then address how the law affects three processes for LGBQ people: desiring parenthood, becoming a parent, and experiencing parent- hood. Our review indicates that the law affects if and how LGBQ people become parents. LGBQ people consider the law as they make decisions about whether to pursue adoption, donor insemination, or surrogacy and often view the latter two pathways as …

Defending Dependent Disclaimers, Katheleen Guzman

Faculty Articles

No abstract provided.

Teaching Criminal Procedure: Why Socrates Would Use Youtube, Stephen E. Henderson, Joseph Thai

Faculty Articles

In this invited contribution to the Law Journal's annual Teaching Issue, we pay some homage to the great philosopher whose spirit allegedly guides our classrooms, in service of two concrete goals. One, we employ dialogue to describe the “nuts and bolts” of teaching Criminal Procedure, most of which are equally relevant to any doctrinal law school course (including course description, office hours, seating charts and attendance, class decorum and recording, student participation, laptops, textbooks, class preparation and presentation, and exams). Two, we explain the benefits of using multimedia in the classroom, including a few of the many modules found on …

Far From The Madding Crowd: A Statutory Response To Crowd Crush, Tracy Hresko Pearl

Faculty Articles

Crowd-related injuries and deaths occur with surprising frequency in the United States. In recent years, crowd members in the United States have sustained significant injuries and even fatalities at concerts, sporting events, “doorbuster” sales, nightclubs, and large festivals. While some of these incidents have prompted victims to file negligence suits against event organizers and venue owners, common law has proven to be ineffective at addressing “crowd crush.” Indeed, courts have repeatedly held for defendants in these cases, making a series of scientific and legal errors in the process, and providing little incentive for organizers and owners to improve their crowd …

The House Edge: On Gambling And Professional Discipline, Stacey A. Tovino

Faculty Articles

On March 26, 2014, the Iowa Supreme Court revoked the license to practice law of Cedar Rapids attorney Susan Hense. Admitted to the Iowa Bar in 1996, Hense subsequently misappropriated $837,000 in client trust funds to feed her addiction to casino gambling. This Article assesses how attorneys like Hense who are addicted to gambling are treated in professional disciplinary actions, including license suspension, revocation, and reinstatement proceedings. Themes that emerge include public misunderstanding of gambling disorder, stigma against individuals with gambling disorder, statutory recognition of substance addictions but not behavioral addictions, and mandatory attendance at religion based fellowship meetings as …

Restituting Justice: Applying The Holocaust Restitution Process To Subsequent Genocides And Human Rights Violations, Zahava Moerdler

Fordham International Law Journal

No abstract provided.

Thick Marks, Thin Marks, Michael Grynberg

College of Law Faculty

Not all trademarks are created equal. Strong marks like APPLE computer receive more protection than lesser known, weaker marks like JOE’S diner. The difference is reflected by the amount of attention judges pay to surrounding context in resolving infringement claims. When a mark receives “thick” protection, facts that might make confusion less likely (e.g., clarifying marketplace realities or perceptible differences between the parties’ marks) matter less than when protection is thin. This conception of thick or thin protection is part of routine trademark disputes, but it has more interesting implications for trademark law. Trademarks do more than identify a product’s …

Intent In Disability Discrimination Law: Social Science Insights And Comparisons To Race And Sex Discrimination, Mark Weber

College of Law Faculty

This Essay is part of an extensive research project concerning the intent that must be shown in order to obtain judicial relief under the American disability discrimination laws. This Essay focuses on social science research about intent and its relation to the law, comparing disability to race and sex discrimination. It describes research about race and sex and notes that evidence of pervasive but unacknowledged discriminatory thinking is significant. Although the law could bar race and sex discrimination that is not intentional, it has not been interpreted to do so, particularly in contexts other than  employment. Social science research indicates …

Knowing The Ropes, Craig Mousin

Mission and Ministry Publications

No abstract provided.

Black-Box Immigration Federalism, David S. Rubenstein

Michigan Law Review

In Immigration Outside the Law, Hiroshi Motomura confronts the three hardest questions in immigration today: what to do about our undocumented population, who should decide, and by what legal process. Motomura’s treatment is characteristically visionary, analytically rich, and eminently fair to competing views. The book’s intellectual arc begins with its title: “Immigration Outside the Law.” As the narrative unfolds, however, Motomura explains that undocumented immigrants are “Americans in waiting,” with moral and legal claims to societal integration.

Front Matter

Michigan Law Review

No abstract provided.

When Scalia Wasn't Such An Originalist, Michael Lewyn

Touro Law Review

No abstract provided.

Roger Blair And Intellectual Property, Keith N. Hylton

Faculty Scholarship

Although intellectual property is just a sidelight of Roger Blair's work, he has published at least seven articles and coauthored a book on this subject. Blair's work sets out robust economic models that address nearly all of the significant economic issues in intellectual property. Moreover, by using the property rules framework, he has offered a useful counterweight to the reward-to-loss theory that dominates the literature.

Inefficiently Automated Law Enforcement, Woodrow Hartzog, Gregory Conti, John Nelson, Lisa A. Shay

Faculty Scholarship

For some crimes the entire law enforcement process can now be automated. No humans are needed to detect the crime, identify the perpetrator, or impose punishment. While automated systems are cheap and efficient, governments and citizens must look beyond these obvious savings as manual labor is replaced by robots and computers. Inefficiency and indeterminacy have significant value in automated law enforcement systems and should be preserved. Humans are inefficient, yet more capable of ethical and contextualized decision-making than automated systems. Inefficiency is also an effective safeguard against perfectly enforcing laws that were created with implicit assumptions of leniency and discretion. …

The Promise Of The Rule Of (Environmental) Law: A Reply To Pardy's Unbearable Licence, Jocelyn Stacey

All Faculty Publications

This short reply clarifies and defends the argument presented in "The Environmental Emergency and the Legality of Discretion in Environmental Law." It responds to the arguments that were made, and that could have been made, in Pardy's critique "An Unbearable Licence".

Women In Prison: Liberty, Equality, And Thinking Outside The Bars, Debra Parkes

All Faculty Publications

This article considers the potential of rights-based advocacy to respond to the troubling reality of a growing women's prison population, and it makes an attempt to sketch out an approach to advocacy and scholarship that seeks both liberty and substantive equality for criminalized and imprisoned women. It proceeds in four parts. First, it documents some of the legislative and policy changes made to sentencing and penal law in the last decade. Next, it identifies some of the ways that these changes have an impact on women and on particular groups of women. It then suggests some ways that academics, lawyers, …

Unpacking The Compensatory Principle: Causation, Mitigation, Certainty Of Loss And Remoteness: The Mtm Hong Kong, Yihan Goh, Man Yip

Research Collection Yong Pung How School Of Law

The High Court decision of Louis Dreyfus Commodities Suisse SA v MT Maritime Management BV (The MTM Hong Kong) affirms that the compensatory principle mandates the assessment of actual loss resulting from the breach of a charterparty. Owing to the unexpected delay in obtaining a substitute charter after the original charterers had repudiated the charterparty. The MTM Hong Kong raised a previously unconsidered issue: is the court allowed to take into account the vessel owners’ losses occurring after the date that the charter voyage would have been completed? Under the Smith v McGuire measure of compensation, an owner is conventionally …

Ps V Ontario: Rethinking The Role Of The Charter In Civil Commitment, Isabel Grant, Peter J. Carver

All Faculty Publications

In PS v Ontario, the Ontario Court of Appeal held that section 7 of the Charter requires that persons who are civilly committed for six months or more must have access to a meaningful review process that has jurisdiction over the conditions of their detention. In this paper, the authors argue that this decision has broad implications for provincial civil commitment regimes across the country. In particular, the fact that the court analogized to the Criminal Code Review Board jurisprudence opens the door to a fuller recognition of the profound deprivation of liberty that is involved in all civil commitments. …

A Study On Immigrant Activism, Secure Communities, And Rawlsian Civil Disobedience, Karen Pita Loor

Faculty Scholarship

This Article explores the immigrant acts of protest during the Obama presidency in opposition to the Secure Communities (SCOMM) immigration enforcement program through the lens of philosopher John Rawls’ theory of civil disobedience and posits that this immigrant resistance contributed to that administration’s dismantling the federal program by progressively moving localities, and eventually whole states, to cease cooperation with SCOMM. The controversial SCOMM program is one of the most powerful tools of immigration enforcement in the new millennium because it transforms any contact with state and local law enforcement into a potential immigration investigation. SCOMM has now been revived through …