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Table Of Contents, Georgia State University Law Review

Georgia State University Law Review

No abstract provided.

Public Health State Of Emergency: Executive Order By The Governor Declaring A Public Health State Of Emergency, Rebecca Hu, Ellen Y. Min

Georgia State University Law Review

The Executive Order primarily functions to enumerate the Governor’s emergency powers during a Public Health State of Emergency. The Executive Order allows for the Governor to assist health and emergency management officials by deploying available resources for the mitigation and treatment of COVID-19 within Georgia.

Torts: Covid-19 Pandemic Business Safety Act & Executive Order By The Governor Designating Auxiliary Management Workers And Emergency Management Activities, Angelena Velaj, Troy Viger

Georgia State University Law Review

The Executive Order expanded immunity from liability for volunteer health care workers as emergency management workers performing emergency management activities. The Order was not limited to only COVID-19-related activities. When the legislature reconvened, legislators passed the Georgia COVID-19 Pandemic Business Safety Act, which provided liability limitation to businesses against tort claims arising from the pandemic.

Elections: Elections And Primaries Through The Pandemic, Joseph M. Brickman, Logan D. Kirkes

Georgia State University Law Review

The 2020 election cycle was all but normal. Due to certain health concerns associated with the COVID-19 pandemic, Georgia delayed its primary election three months from March to June and summarily mailed absentee ballot request forms to all active, registered voters. From presidential social media postings to a federal lawsuit, debate ensued over the widespread usage of absentee ballots, their overall effectiveness and security, who would receive request forms, and whether postage requirements qualified as an impermissible poll tax. To further compound these uncertainties, Georgia legislators, who are not permitted to fundraise or campaign during the forty-day legislative session, had …

Preemption: Executive Order By The Governor To Ensure A Safe & Healthy Georgia, Marisa P. Ahlzadeh, Fanny Chac

Georgia State University Law Review

The doctrine of preemption expresses the idea that “a higher authority of law will displace a lower authority of law when the two authorities come into conflict.” Preemption exists on both the federal and state level. According to the Georgia Constitution, local laws are permissible if they do not conflict with the state law on the subject. During a Public Health State of Emergency, the Governor of Georgia maintains certain expanded powers to take necessary action for the health and safety of the public. On April 2, 2020, Governor Brian Kemp (R) used these expanded powers to enact an Executive …

Taxing Book Profits: New Proposals And 40 Years Of Critiques, Mindy Herzfeld

UF Law Faculty Publications

This paper considers recent domestic and international proposals to use financial statement earnings as the basis for imposing additional or minimum taxes on corporate income and to reallocate corporate profits among jurisdictions. It reviews prior research undertaken in the context of previous proposals to partially substitute financial accounts for taxable income and considers how valid critiques of prior proposals are with respect to current initiatives. It concludes by noting that the concerns raised about earlier proposals have neither been fully considered nor addressed in the recent initiatives.

Super-Statutory Contracting, Kristelia A. García

Washington Law Review

The conventional wisdom is that property rules induce more—and more efficient—contracting, and that when faced with rigid property rules, intellectual property owners will contract into more flexible liability rules. A series of recent, private copyright deals show some intellectual property owners doing just the opposite: faced with statutory liability rules, they are contracting for more protection than that dictated by law, something this Article calls “super-statutory contracting”—either by opting for a stronger, more tailored liability rule, or by contracting into property rule protection. Through a series of deal analyses, this Article explores this counterintuitive phenomenon, and updates seminal thinking on …

Trading Privacy For Promotion? Fourth Amendment Implications Of Employers Using Wearable Sensors To Assess Worker Performance, George M. Dery Iii

Northwestern Journal of Law & Social Policy

This Article considers the Fourth Amendment implications of a study on a passive monitoring system where employees shared data from wearables, phone applications, and position beacons that provided private information such as weekend phone use, sleep patterns in the bedroom, and emotional states. The study’s authors hope to use the data collected to create a new system for objectively assessing employee performance that will replace the current system which is plagued by the inherent bias of self-reporting and peer-review and which is labor intensive and inefficient. The researchers were able to successfully link the data collected with the quality of …

Legal Clinics And The Better Trained Lawyer, Part Ii: A Case Study Of Accomplishments, Challenges And The Future Of Clinical Legal Education, Thomas Geraghty

Northwestern Journal of Law & Social Policy

No abstract provided.

Global Apathy And The Need For A New, Cooperative International Refugee Response, Emily Gleichert

Northwestern Journal of Law & Social Policy

While an increasing number of nations move toward isolationist, nationalist policies, the number of refugees worldwide is climbing to its highest levels since World War II. The United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) is the international body tasked with protecting this population. However, the office’s traditional solutions for refugees – local integration, resettlement in a third country, and voluntary repatriation – have mostly eluded refugees who spend an average of twenty years in exile. The limitations UNHCR’s structure imposes on the office, specifically in its ability to fund its operations and compel nations to act, have contributed to its …

Predictive Facts, Brent Ferguson

Washington Law Review

A substantial portion of constitutional law rests on untested factual predictions made by the Supreme Court. Such forecasts have played a large role in a wide range of case outcomes, helping the Court decide questions such as whether corporations have the right to spend money on elections and what evidence may be used in criminal cases despite Fourth Amendment violations.

Scholars have not yet studied the frequency of such predictions, the problems they create, or the functions they serve. The literature has looked more closely at court decisions that depend on conclusions of legislative fact—facts not specific to a certain …

Protecting Protected Activity, Daiquiri J. Steele

Washington Law Review

The United States Supreme Court recently rolled back protections in employment retaliation cases by requiring plaintiffs to prove that their protected activity was the but-for cause of adverse actions by their employers. As a result, employers may escape liability even though the employee-plaintiffs have proven that employers had an impermissible motive in taking adverse actions. In doing so, the Court undermined the underlying statutes’ retaliation provisions created to help enforce the underlying statute, leading to a court-instituted failure to protect activity that Congress sought to protect.

While legal scholars have paid much attention to the establishment of a but-for causation …

Restoring Reasonableness To Workplace Religious Accommodations, Dallan F. Flake

Washington Law Review

When Congress amended Title VII of the Civil Rights Act in 1972 to require employers to reasonably accommodate employees’ religious practices absent undue hardship to their business, it intended to protect employees from being forced to choose between their jobs and their religious beliefs. Yet in the decades since, courts have cut away at this right to the point it is practically nonexistent. Particularly concerning is the growing tendency of courts to read reasonableness out of the accommodation requirement, either by conflating reasonableness and undue hardship so that an accommodation’s reasonableness depends solely on whether it would cause the employer …

Ring, Amazon Calling: The State Action Doctrine & The Fourth Amendment, Grace Egger

Washington Law Review Online

Video doorbells have proliferated across the United States and Amazon owns one of the most popular video doorbell companies on the market—Ring. While many view the Ring video doorbell as useful technology that protects the home and promotes safer neighborhoods, the product reduces consumer privacy without much recourse. For example, Ring partners with cities and law enforcement agencies across the United States thereby creating a mass surveillance network in which law enforcement agencies can watch neighborhoods and access Ring data without the user’s knowledge or consent. Because Amazon is not a state actor, it is able to circumvent the due …

Prenatal Care For Undocumented Women In The United States, Cristina Mendoza

Nursing | Senior Theses

Background: While prenatal care is an essential preventive service, access is not equal. Undocumented immigrants in the United States face many barriers that prevent them from accessing primary health care needs, including adequate prenatal care. Throughout the United States, standard Medicaid provides coverage for all pregnancy-related care, encompassing the antenatal period, childbirth, and postpartum. However, undocumented women do not qualify to receive these services. Many studies showed that lack of prenatal care for undocumented pregnant women jeopardizes their health and their neonates’ health by increasing their risk of complications related to pregnancy and birth. Objective: To bring awareness of the …

Commentary On Emerson V. Magendantz, Lucinda M. Finley

Contributions to Books

Published as Chapter 13 of Feminist Judgments: Rewritten Tort Opinions, Martha Chamallas & Lucinda M. Finley, eds. (Cambridge University Press 2020). Emerson v. Magendantz assesses how to measure harm when people get pregnant after a negligently performed sterilization, or have disabled children after genetic counseling or prenatal testing misdiagnosed the risk. The court permitted parents to recover child-rearing costs only for disabled children, reasoning that the emotional benefits of a healthy child invariably outweigh its economic burdens. Critiquing this reasoning as a double insult to the disabled and to the importance of reproductive autonomy, the feminist rewritten opinion uses the …

Balancing Services And Safety During The Pandemic: One Law Library’S Story, Virginia C. Thomas

Library Scholarly Publications

Michigan’s academic law libraries, which have provided access to their extensive collections to legal professionals and pro per patrons alike, have had to rethink how to do so in effective, but contactless, ways. In the middle of this pandemic, how can we continue to get legal information to those who need it— and safely?

Business Associations, Stuart E. Walker

Mercer Law Review

This Article surveys noteworthy decisions involving corporations and limited liability companies issued by the Georgia Court of Appeals between June 1, 2019, and May 31, 2020, summarizes an amendment to the Georgia Business Corporation Code and an amendment to the Georgia Nonprofit Corporation Code passed during the 2020 session of the General Assembly, and says a brief word about the status of the new State-wide Business Court.

As far as appellate decisions are concerned, this was a somewhat thin survey period in the area of business associations. But the handful of cases treated here have some lessons to teach the …

Evidence, John E. Hall Jr., W. Scott Henwood, Leesa Guarnotta

Mercer Law Review

Even after the seventh year since the implementation of Georgia’s new Evidence Code, Georgia’s evidence rules continue to evolve as appellate courts face new issues and delve into more nuanced areas of the rules. This Article details some of this evolution of the new Georgia Evidence Code, Official Code of Georgia Annotated (O.C.G.A.) Title 24, by addressing developments of Georgia's evidence rules from the period of June 1, 2019, through May 31, 2020. Specifically, this Article addresses (1) limitations on the attorney‑client privilege; (2) admissibility of witness testimony as it relates to late‑identified witnesses, witness competency, and co‑conspirator statements; (3) …

Wills, Trusts, Guardianships, And Fiduciary Administration, Mary F. Radford

Mercer Law Review

This Article describes significant cases decided by the Georgia Court of Appeals during the period of June 1, 2020, through May 31, 2019, that pertain to Georgia fiduciary law and estate planning. Due to the COVID-19 pandemic, the Georgia General Assembly suspended its 2020 session and thus no significant legislation was enacted during the reporting period. This report does however discuss relevant legislation that was pending during the reporting period and describes the Governor’s Order issued in April 2020 that permitted remote notarization and witnessing of estate planning documents during the pandemic.

Workers' Compensation, H. Michael Bagley, J. Benson Ward

Mercer Law Review

The 2019–2020 survey period again featured decisions from the Georgia Court of Appeals over an interesting array of workers’ compensation topics including: robberies, misrepresentations, calculation disputes, and various potential employment situations. There was no legislation of significance during the period.

History Uprooted: Georgia Applies Apportionment To Strict Liability Claims, Carey Sartain

Mercer Law Review

Adrienne Johns had experience riding motorcycles for over 20 years when in 2013, total failure of the front brake on his 2006 Suzuki GSX-R1000 caused him to hit a curb, throwing him from his bike and knocking him unconscious. The accident resulted in Johns being hospitalized for over two months following spinal fusion surgery and surgery to repair his hand. Subsequent to the accident, he discovered that there had been a recall notice from Suzuki related to his bike model’s front brake. At trial, Johns proved that a design defect in the front brake had ultimately caused the brake to …

A Bleak House: The Story Behind The Oldest Legal Controversy In The State Of Georgia, Clayton T. Kendrick

Mercer Law Review

Bleak Houseis a novel written by Charles Dickens, which centers around the fictional English Court of Chancery case Jarndyce and Jarndyce.The fictional case concerns a dispute surrounding a large inheritance that drags on for several generations.As Dickens put it,

Jarndyce and Jarndyce drones on . . . . Innumerable children have been born into the cause; innumerable young people have married into it; innumerable old people have died out of it . . . . The little plaintiff or defendant, who was promised a new rocking-horse when Jarndyce and Jarndyce should be settled, has grown up, possessed himself …

Pattern Recognition In Tyus V Urban Search Management, Lee Anne Fennell

University of Chicago Law Review

Making judgments requires recognizing patterns—paying attention and picking out recurrent features in a noisy environment. Judge Diane Wood’s opinion in Tyus v Urban Search Management¹ is a masterwork in pattern recognition at several levels. It speaks to the need for legal doctrines capable of reaching subtle and cumulative acts of discrimination that continue to limit opportunities and stand in the way of the “truly integrated and balanced living patterns”² that were part of the original vision of the federal Fair Housing Act³ (FHA).

Tyus involved advertising campaigns used to market The New York, an upscale Chicago apartment …

Substitutes, Complements, And Irritants: Garza V Lappin And The Role Of International Law In Us Courts, Tom Ginsburg

University of Chicago Law Review

What is the relationship between US law and international law? This is the core question of the academic field of foreign relations law, but it is also a life-or-death issue for some people. In recent years, a series of cases involving death-row defendants has made its way to the federal courts, presenting a novel set of claims. This Essay discusses one such case, Garza v Lappin,¹ decided in 2001. The opinion by Judge Diane Wood is characteristically scrupulous, but is not among her best known, and was hardly controversial at the time.² Still, it is a useful case …

Swanson V Citibank And The 1l Canon, William H.J. Hubbard

University of Chicago Law Review

Part of what’s special about teaching 1Ls is that 1L year initiates law students into the community of lawyers. This community not only shares a common set of professional commitments and qualifications. Thanks to their 1L courses, lawyers share familiarity with a pantheon of famous cases that have been taught for decades. These canonical cases connect the law school experiences of generations of lawyers.

Civil procedure has its share of these classics. Virtually every first-year law student learns the Strawbridge rule for federal diversity jurisdiction.¹ International Shoe is part of every 1L’s vocabulary.² And no law student who …

The Double Movement Of National Origin Discrimination, Aziz Huq

University of Chicago Law Review

Jose Figueroa’s case presented “little out of the ordinary” for the federal courts¹. His was a “multimillion-dollar” drug operation run out of Wisconsin that fell apart when a dealer and a partner flipped and gave testimony for the government.² Only in the closing moments of sentencing ³ did Figueroa’s case take an unusual turn, one that would in due course elicit an unusual opinion from Judge Diane Wood of the Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals. In the process of assigning Figueroa to the “low end of Figueroa’s advisory guidelines range,” ⁴ District Court Judge Rudolph T. Randa …

Harassment And Capabilities: Discrimination And Liability In Wetzel V Glen St. Andrew Living Community, Llc, Martha Craven Nussbaum

University of Chicago Law Review

No abstract provided.

Data Security’S Unjust Enrichment Theory, Lior Jacob Strahilevitz

University of Chicago Law Review

Remijas v Neiman Marcus Group, LLC,¹ is Judge Diane Wood’s most famous data security opinion, and for good reason. The opinion is elegantly written and refreshingly pragmatic with respect to an issue that has prompted other courts to fall into the trap of empty formalism. Yet the opinion is not perfect, and this Essay celebrating Wood’s silver anniversary on the bench will argue that it missed an opportunity to solve a vexing and important problem that arises when data breach suits are brought in federal court.

Contents, North Carolina Law Review

North Carolina Law Review

No abstract provided.