Law Commons^™

Hurricane Training, Jerry Howard

Mighty Pen Project Anthology & Archive

A young university cadet faces a grueling training day and learns what he’s made of.

Articles, stories, and other compositions in this archive were written by participants in the Mighty Pen Project. The program, developed by author David L. Robbins, and in partnership with Virginia Commonwealth University and the Virginia War Memorial in Richmond, Virginia, offers veterans and their family members a customized twelve-week writing class, free of charge. The program encourages, supports, and assists participants in sharing their stories and experiences of military experience so both writer and audience may benefit.

Boilerplate And The Impact Of Disclosure In Securities Dealmaking, Jeremy Mcclane

Vanderbilt Law Review

Capital markets dealmaking, like many kinds of business transactions, is built on a foundation of copied and recycled language what many call boilerplate. Regulators and the bar periodically call for less reliance on boilerplate, but despite these pressures, boilerplate remains a fixture of ever-growing securities disclosures. This Article explores why boilerplate persists and how it affects investors, showing that boilerplate may have a more complex role than commonly recognized. This Article does so by developing a theory on the effect of boilerplate in securities disclosure-a context that is little studied despite a wealth of literature on boilerplate in other settings--and …

California Indian Tribes And The Marine Life Protection Act: The Seeds Of A Partnership To Preserve Natural Resources, Curtis G. Berkey, Scott W. Williams

American Indian Law Review

No abstract provided.

Keeping Cultural Bias Out Of The Courtroom: How Icwa “Qualified Expert Witnesses” Make A Difference, Elizabeth Low

American Indian Law Review

No abstract provided.

Being Uighur . . . With “Chinese Characteristics”: Analyzing China’S Legal Crusade Against Uighur Identity, Brennan Davis

American Indian Law Review

No abstract provided.

United States V. Bryant: The Results Of Upholding Women’S Rights And Tribal Sovereignty, Madalynn Martin

American Indian Law Review

No abstract provided.

An Act Respecting First Nations, Inuit And Métis Children, Youth And Families: Does Bill C-92 Make The Grade?, Naiomi Metallic, Hadley Friedland, Aimée Craft, Jeffery Hewitt, Sarah Morales

Reports & Public Policy Documents

On Thursday, February 28, 2019, the federal government introduced Bill C-92, An Act respecting First Nations, Métis and Inuit children, youth and families for first reading. After many years of well documented discrimination against Indigenous children, there is much hope in this legislative process to reverse this trend, empower Indigenous peoples to reclaim jurisdiction in this area, and ensure the rights of children are affirmed. To realize those hopes, we have drafted this analysis with the aim to improve the current legislation as it moves through committee and the Senate.

From Paris To Projects: Clarifying The Implications Of Canada’S Climate Change Mitigation Commitments For The Planning And Assessment Of Projects And Strategic Undertakings (Full Report), Robert B. Gibson, Karine Peloffy, Daniel Horen Greenford, Meinhard Doelle, H Damon Matthews, Christian Holz, Kiri Staples, Bradley Wiseman, Frédérique Grenier

Reports & Public Policy Documents

Canada has signed the Paris Agreement and made other international commitments to doing our fair share of what is needed to keep overall global warming to the Paris Agreement limit of well below 2ºC, and to aim for 1.5ºC, to avoid devastating climate change. However, we have not yet progressed far in translating these commitments into implications for decision making on proposed undertakings with significant implications for meeting those commitments.

Clarifying those implications and determining how best to incorporate them in deliberations and decision making is overdue and now imperative. The federal government’s new Impact Assessment Act, which is now …

The States Have Spoken: Allow Expanded Media Coverage Of The Federal Courts, Mitchell T. Galloway

Vanderbilt Journal of Entertainment & Technology Law

Since the advent of film and video recording, society has enjoyed the ability to capture the lights and sounds of moments in history. This innovation left courts to determine what place, if any, such technology should have inside the courtroom. Refusing to constrain the future capacity of this technology, the Supreme Court "punted" on this issue until a time when this technology evolved past its initial disruptive nature. Throughout the past forty-five years, the vast majority of state courts have embraced the potential of cameras in the courtroom and have created policies governing such use. In contrast, the federal judiciary …

Confidences Worth Keeping: Rebalancing Legitimate Interests In Litigants' Private Information In An Era Of Open-Access Courts, Jeffrey W. Sheehan

Vanderbilt Journal of Entertainment & Technology Law

The ideal of the public trial in open court continues to guide decisions about public access to courts and their records, even as cases are increasingly decided "on the papers." This is still the case when those "papers" take the form of electronic documents that can be uploaded, downloaded, copied, and distributed by anyone with an internet connection. A series of opinions from the US Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit reinforcing this ideal of public access to court records and unsealing district court filings offers an opening to reconsider core values that must inform our treatment of private …

Neuroscience, Artificial Intelligence, And The Case Against Solitary Confinement, Francis X. Shen

Vanderbilt Journal of Entertainment & Technology Law

Prolonged solitary confinement remains in widespread use in the United States despite many legal challenges. A difficulty when making the legal case against solitary confinement is proffering sufficiently systematic and precise evidence of the detrimental effects of the practice on inmates' mental health. Given this need for further evidence, this Article explores how neuroscience and artificial intelligence (AI) might provide new evidence of the effects of solitary confinement on the human brain.

This Article argues that both neuroscience and AI are promising in their potential ability to present courts with new types of evidence on the effects of solitary confinement …

The Ncaa On Notice: How Utilizing Principles Of Federalism Could Relieve Antitrust Pressure, Grant Newton

Vanderbilt Journal of Entertainment & Technology Law

The National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA) was founded to protect athletes from injury and to provide an avenue for the pursuit of sport alongside the pursuit of education. The NCAA maintains that accomplishing each of those goals requires the preservation of amateurism through a cap on the amount of funds universities may disburse to athletes. Historically, value judgments saved the NCAA from antitrust challenges because courts found that the NCAA's rules furthered the organization's purpose. As antitrust law has developed over the past fifty years, however, courts have become increasingly determined to avoid value judgments in antitrust challenges. Thus, it …

Sharing The Costs Of Artificial Intelligence: Universal No-Fault Social Insurance For Personal Injuries, Jin Yoshikawa

Vanderbilt Journal of Entertainment & Technology Law

The twenty-first century is the artificial intelligence (AI) century. In the past few years, AI has become a familiar fixture of everyday life thanks to services like YouTube, Spotify, Netflix, and Alexa. Stocktraders, doctors, insurance brokers, real estate agents, recruiters, artists,and even lawyers now rely on predictive tools powered by AI to perform their highly skilled--even creative--tasks. In the following decades, AI will continue to transform more fields and deliver astonishing advancements in convenience, comfort, safety, and security. At the same time, however, AI will bring about new challenges. AI will offend, disrupt, crash, breach, incite, injure, and even kill …

Please Don't Stop The Music: Using The Takings Clause To Protect Inmates' Digital Music, Amber M. Banks

Vanderbilt Journal of Entertainment & Technology Law

In prisons across the country, inmates are encouraged to participate in digital media programs. One in ten correctional facilities in the US has digital media programs in which inmates purchase both a device-such as an MP3 player or tablet-and content or services for the device-such as digital music-from a third-party vendor. Although fee structures vary, the facility or the state corrections department usually receives a commission on the revenue generated from inmates' purchases, thereby profiting off of each purchase that an inmate makes. As their contracts with third-party vendors end, state correctional departments may change vendors, either in search of …

Video Games In The Twenty-First Century: Parallels Between Loot Boxes And Gambling Create An Urgent Need For Regulatory Action, Alexandra M. Prati

Vanderbilt Journal of Entertainment & Technology Law

A loot box is a purchasable in-game digital container holding randomized virtual rewards. In recent years, loot boxes have become increasingly common in video games. A large number of major video game titles now incorporate loot boxes, and loot box sales now eclipse traditional game sales as the primary source of revenue for much of the video game industry. Given that more than half of teenagers play video games for several hours each day, the growth of loot boxes has sparked a contentious debate over whether loot boxes constitute a form of unregulated gambling targeted at children. This Note contributes …

Keeping It Off The Record: Student Social Media Monitoring And The Need For Updated Student Records Laws, Alice Haston

Vanderbilt Journal of Entertainment & Technology Law

An increasing number of school districts work with private companies to monitor public social media and to notify administrators of alarming student information. Although these services help address challenging school safety issues, the Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act (FERPA) and state law offer little guidance on how districts should store student social media data. This Note encourages states to pass student records laws similar to recent California legislation and urges the Department of Education to clarify the relationship between student social media and education records under FERPA. New state and federal initiatives would help ensure that third parties may …

The Torture Machine (Book Review), Dennis Cunningham, Jeffrey J. Haas

Other Publications

No abstract provided.

Small Crimes, Big Injustices, Stephanos Bibas

Michigan Law Review

Review of Alexandra Natapoff's Punishment Without Crime: How Our Massive Misdemeanor System Traps the Innocent and Makes America More Unequal.

Arrests As Guilt, Anna Roberts

Faculty Articles

An arrest puts a halt to one’s free life and may act as prelude to a new process. That new process—prosecution—may culminate in a finding of guilt. But arrest and guilt—concepts that are factually and legally distinct—frequently seem to be fused together. This fusion appears in many of the consequences of arrest, including the use of arrest in assessing “risk,” in calculating “recidivism,” and in identifying “offenders.” An examination of this fusion elucidates obstacles to key aspects of criminal justice reform. Efforts at reform, whether focused on prosecution or defense, police or bail, require a robust understanding of the differences …

Rebellious Reflection: Supporting Community Lawyering Practice, Monika Batra Kashyap

Faculty Articles

This Article contends that lawyers who are trained in the skill of reflection are better equipped to engage in a social change-oriented approach to law practice called community lawyering. By conceptualizing reflection as a contemplative pedagogy, this Article will reveal a profound connection between community lawyering, reflection, and the contemplative law movement. The Article offers specific “rebellious” reflection-based pedagogies that can help practitioners and future lawyers: strengthen their capacity for deep self-awareness; interrogate the traditional lawyer-client relationship; sharpen their analysis of race, class, and power; and cultivate an understanding of how social change occurs. By presenting testimonials from new lawyers …

Kondo-Ing Steele V. Bulova: The Lanham Act’S Extraterritorial Reach Via The Effects Test, Margaret Chon

Faculty Articles

An update of the 1952 decision by the U.S. Supreme Court, Steele v. Bulova, is arguably overdue in an era of intense globalization of commerce, especially considered in light of the changes to jurisdictional and extraterritoriality doctrines. It has been almost seventy years since the Supreme Court has taken a hard look at the issue of the extraterritorial reach of the Lanham Act. During that period, the Court has shifted the procedural basis for extraterritorial analysis; the development of the so-called “effects test” for extraterritoriality has resulted in some doctrinal unruliness among the circuit courts; and Congress has amended the …

Recasting Intellectual Property In Light Of The U.N. Sustainable Development Goals: Toward Knowledge Governance, Margaret Chon

Faculty Articles

No abstract provided.

A New Vision For Cura Apostolica, John Topel

Faculty Articles

No abstract provided.

2019-20 Executive, Managing And Editorial Boards, Georgia Journal Of International And Comparative Law

GJICL Editorial Boards

No abstract provided.

Epstein’S Insights About Private Law And History For Intellectual Property And Trade Of Today And Tomorrow, F. Scott Kieff

GW Law Faculty Publications & Other Works

Richard Epstein’s work on private law emphasizes themes that have survived since Ancient Roman Law. This paper highlights two practical benefits that those themes can offer some flashpoints in modern debates about the interface between intellectual property (IP) and trade. Arguments grounded in private law may avoid the open-textured public policy debates between concern over too much or too little protection for both IP and trade law while largely addressing the major stated concerns raised by both sides. They also can avoid many arcane doctrines within both IP and trade law. Private law’s attention to business norms helped the Grokster …

Law And Norms In The Market Response To Discrimination In The Sharing Economy, Naomi Schoenbaum

GW Law Faculty Publications & Other Works

Published by De Gruyter May 11, 2019, https://www.degruyter.com/document/doi/10.1515/lehr-2019-0001/html

Sharing-economy firms have opposed the application of antidiscrimination law to their transactions. At the same time, these firms have heralded their ability to achieve antidiscrimination aims without the force of law, and have adopted various measures to address discrimination. This Article documents and assesses these measures, focusing on the relationship between law and norms. Relying on the sharing economy as a case study, this Article shows how law can play a crucial role in spurring antidiscrimination efforts by firms that it does not regulate, but also how antidiscrimination law might nonetheless be …

Emerging Policy And Practice Issues (2018), Steven L. Schooner, David Berteau

GW Law Faculty Publications & Other Works

This paper/chapter, presented at the Thomson Reuters Government Contracts Year in Review Conference (covering 2018), attempts to identify the key evolving trends and issues in U.S. federal procurement for 2018 and beyond. Consistent with prior practice, this chapter offers extensive coverage of the federal procurement, grant, and defense spending trends and attempts to predict what lies ahead, particularly with regard to legislative and executive activity. This year's paper discusses, among other things, the high degree of uncertainty currently being experienced in the public procurement sphere, dramatic increases to the micro-purchase and simplified acquisition thresholds, the work of the Congressionally-mandated Section …

Restorative Justice And Responsive Regulation In Higher Education: The Complex Web Of Campus Sexual Assault Policy In The United States And A Restorative Alternative, David R. Karp Phd

School of Leadership and Education Sciences: Faculty Scholarship

Sexual assault policy on college campuses in the United States is a complex system guided by federal policy, state policy, and local mandates. When students violate sexual misconduct policies, campuses primarily rely on suspensions and expulsions, paralleling the criminal justice system’s reliance on incarceration as a solution based on stigmatization and separation. Since the 1990s, restorative justice has made inroads as an alternative response to student misconduct, but application to sexual misconduct is rare. The Campus PRISM Project (Promoting Restorative Initiatives on Sexual Misconduct) is a network of academics and practitioners exploring a restorative approach within a responsive regulatory framework. …

The Structural Dimensions Of Race: Lock Ups, Systemic Chokeholds, And Binary Disruptions, Cedric Merlin Powell

Faculty and Staff Scholarship

Disrupting traditional conceptions of structural inequality, state decision making power, and the presumption of Black criminality, this Essay explores the doctrinal and policy implications of James Forman, Jr.’s Pulitzer Prize winning book, Locking Up Our Own, and Paul Butler’s evocative and transformative book, Chokehold. While both books grapple with how to dismantle the structural components of mass incarceration, state legitimized police violence against Black bodies, and how policy functions to reify oppressive state power, the approaches espoused by Forman and Butler are analytically distinct. Forman locates his analysis in the dynamics of decision-making power when African American officials wield power …

Dismantling Structural Inequality: Lock Ups, Systemic Chokeholds, And Race-Based Policing - A Symposium Summary, Cedric Merlin Powell, Laura R. Mcneal

Faculty and Staff Scholarship

The prominence of the carceral state in American society serves to undermine basic principles of democracy and justice, disproportionately displacing people of color and excluding them from all viable avenues of citizenship.