Law Commons^™

Litigating Socio-Economic And Women’S Rights In Benin’S Constitutional Court, Alice J. Kang, Susanna D. Wing

Department of Political Science: Faculty Publications

Scholars debate the role of legal institutions in promoting human rights in Africa. Much of the discussion focuses on Anglophone countries and does not examine the gender of litigants. We propose a constitutionalism constrained perspective that argues that which and whose rights are adjudicated are shaped by the context of constitutional reform. Where reformists are primarily concerned with safeguarding civil and political rights, high courts may protect civil and political rights claims more often than socio-economic ones. Examining hundreds of human rights decisions issued by Benin’s Constitutional Court, we ask, which and whose rights does the court protect? We find …

Armed Conflicts In Outer Space: Which Law Applies?, Frans G. Von Der Dunk

Space, Cyber, and Telecommunications Law Program: Faculty Publications

I. Introduction

II. Space Law versus the Law of Armed Conflict ... A. The Essentials of Space Law … B. Space Law and the Threat or Use of Force in Outer Space … C. The Essentials of the Law of Armed Conflict ... D. The Law of Armed Conflict and the Threat or Use of Force in Outer Space

III. Conflicts of Application: A Few Key Examples ... A. Unraveling the Prioritization Issue: The Lex Specialis and Lex Posterior Principles ... B. Unraveling the Prioritization Issue: The U.N. Charter and Treaty Interpretation ... C. Unraveling the Prioritization Issue: Pacta Sunt …

Changing The Culture Of Nurse Practitioners: Incorporating Medical Billing And Coding To Prevent Fraud, Waste And Abuse, Tralissa Morrow

DNP Research Projects

Medical coding and billing errors are avoidable problems that have afflicted practitioners for decades. Correct coding and billing are required for reimbursement of healthcare services. Fraud, waste and abuse increase healthcare costs, reduce the quality of care provided and directly impact costs to patients. This pilot study was intended to evaluate the impact of an educational webinar on medical billing and coding, fraud, waste and abuse on nurse practitioner (NP) knowledge using a pretest posttest design. Mean scores increased from 58.4% to 76.4%. Test reliability was low at 0.477 (pretest) and 0.142 (posttest) with two questions that were unable to …

J Mich Dent Assoc January 2021

The Journal of the Michigan Dental Association

Every month, The Journal of the Michigan Dental Association brings news, information, and features about Michigan dentistry to our state's oral health community and the MDA's 6,200+ members. No publication reaches more Michigan dentists!

In this issue, the reader will find the following original content:

• A cover story on “The Dentist’s Role in Recognizing Sleep-Disordered Breathing in Children”.
• A feature article, “Dental Sleep Medicine Education: Do You Want a Nap or a Full Night’s Sleep?”.
• The feature article, “In-office Plans: Where Are We Now? What Have We Learned?”
• News you need, Editorial and regular department articles on MDA Foundation activities, …

Turbulence Ahead: Why The First Domestic Aircraft Carbon Emissions Regulations Are A Danger To Climate Protection, Taylor Williams

Journal of Air Law and Commerce

Reducing emission levels from transportation is one of the most vital steps in combating climate change, but domestic aircraft were not subject to this kind of regulation until recently. In July 2020, the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) proposed the first carbon emission standards for airplanes. While this regulatory move appears to be progress for protecting the environment, it locked in current emissions levels for years to come. The overwhelming majority of aircraft models are already 6% more efficient than the new standard requires them to be. The rule highlights the tension between industry considerations and environmental justice.

This Comment seeks …

“A Defendant’S Paradise”: Failings Of The Brooke Group Test In The Airline And E-Commerce Industries, Kaitlyn Thorson

Journal of Air Law and Commerce

No abstract provided.

Keeping Watch From Liftoff To Landing: A Call For Increased Public Education On The Intersection Of Human Trafficking And Commercial Air Travel, Gretchen Mahoney

Journal of Air Law and Commerce

Over the past two decades, multilateral organizations and the U.S. government have fought tirelessly to eradicate human trafficking. Drafting and passing protocols, resolutions, and statutes, these entities attempted to gain the upper hand by collecting and sharing data, bolstering victim services, and training agency officials, law enforcement officers, prosecutors, and judges on the hallmarks of trafficking circumstances. While these efforts delivered results and are cause for celebration, data shows that human trafficking remains deeply established and operative across the world even with these thorough steps.

A crucial venue for exposing and disrupting trafficking operations is the transportation industry. Traffickers exploit …

Using The Artemis Accords To Build Customary International Law: A Vision For A U.S.-Centric Good Governance Regime In Outer Space, Walker A. Smith

Journal of Air Law and Commerce

International space law is a relatively undeveloped field primarily occupied by the 1967 Outer Space Treaty (Treaty). This Treaty, while long on general principles, is short on details. With the United States’ recent push to return to the Moon by 2024 and send humans to Mars as soon as practicable after that, the time has come to fill in the gaps of the Outer Space Treaty out of necessity. The U.S. seeks to do this through the Artemis Accords (the Accords).

This Comment argues that the U.S. should use the Accords to develop a U.S.-centric legal and good governance regime …

Immunity Doesn’T Fly: The Case For Federal Responsibility For Torts Committed By Transportation Security Officers, Courtney Rimann

Journal of Air Law and Commerce

Transportation Security Officers (TSOs) are the Transportation Security Administration’s first line of defense against terrorism in U.S. airways. The American flying public puts their safety, and their luggage, in the hands of these officers, who execute searches that range from metal detectors to physical pat-downs. Since the federal government has mandated searches and screening for airport security, passengers should be able to seek recovery from the federal government where a TSO commits certain intentional torts in the course of duty. Currently, only the Courts of Appeals for the Third Circuit and Eighth Circuit have cleared the runway for such recovery …

Delivery Drones: Inapt For Application Of Current Negligence Theory, Hyewon Hannah Choi

Journal of Air Law and Commerce

No abstract provided.

Taxing Employers For Imposing Mandatory Arbitration, Class Action Waiver, And Nondisclosure Of Dispute Provisions, Rebecca N. Morrow

SMU Law Review

Employers impose coercive dispute resolution terms on their employees more frequently, more broadly, and with greater legal success than ever before. Recent survey data indicates that mandatory employment arbitration provisions bind more than 60 million American workers—over half of the U.S. private-sector nonunion workforce. Employment class action waivers bind nearly 25 million American workers. In 2018, the Supreme Court held 5–4 that mandatory arbitration provisions and class action waivers imposed by employers on their employees do not violate the National Labor Relations Act. These terms prohibit employees from exposing employer wrongdoing in open court, bar employees with valid wage and …

Using Extrinsic Evidence To Excuse A Liability Insurer’S Duty To Defend, Douglas R. Richmond

SMU Law Review

Most Americans and American businesses purchase liability insurance to protect against financial loss should they ever be sued. In furnishing this protection, liability insurers contractually promise policyholders that they will defend them against lawsuits seeking covered damages and indemnify them for such damages up to the policy limits. As important as the insurer’s promise of indemnification is to an insured, the insurer’s agreement to defend the insured in litigation is an equally essential aspect of the liability insurance bargain. An insurer must decide whether it has a duty to defend its insured at the outset of a case. There are …

Barring Immoral Speech In Patent And Copyright, Ned Snow

SMU Law Review

In the past three years, the Supreme Court has twice ruled that Congress’s moral bars to trademark protection violate the First Amendment. Those rulings raise a simple question in other areas of intellectual property. Does the First Amendment preclude Congress from denying patent or copyright protection based on a moral reason? Congress, for instance, might deny patent protection for inventions directed toward the consumption of marijuana. Inventors would accordingly choose not to disclose knowledge about those inventions to the public, and the denial would chill their speech. Similarly, Congress would chill speech if it denied copyright protection for moral reasons. …

Front Matter

SMU Law Review

No abstract provided.

Tribute To Professor Roy Anderson, Timothy Davis

SMU Law Review

No abstract provided.

Thoroughly Modern Motherhood, Joanna Grossman

SMU Law Review

No abstract provided.

From Protecting Water Quality To Protecting States’ Rights: Fifty Years Of Supreme Court Clean Water Act Statutory Interpretation, Stephen Johnson

SMU Law Review

In 1972, a bipartisan Congress enacted the Clean Water Act “to restore and maintain the chemical, physical, and biological integrity of the Nation’s waters.” Almost fifty years have passed since Congress enacted the law, and during that time, the Supreme Court has played a significant role in the administration and evolution of the law. Since the dawn of the environmental era in the 1970s, the Supreme Court has heard more cases involving the Clean Water Act than any other environmental law. However, the manner in which the Court has analyzed the law has changed substantially over the last half century. …

The Racial Architecture Of Criminal Justice, Bennett Capers

SMU Law Review

One of the pleasures of contributing to symposia—especially symposia where each contribution is brief—is the ability to engage in new explorations, test new ideas, and offer new provocations. I do that now in this essay about race, architecture, and criminal justice. I begin by discussing how race is imbricated in the architecture of courthouses, the quintessential place of supposed justice. I then take race and architecture a step further. If we think of architecture expansively—Lawrence Lessig’s definition of architecture as “the physical world as we find it” comes to mind—then it becomes clear that race is also imbricated in the …

Beyond Transparency: Police Union Collective Bargaining And Participatory Democracy, Walter Katz

SMU Law Review

Police unions rose in power partially in response to the civil unrest in urban neighborhoods in the 1960s. As unions gained political power, critics argue that they have frequently stood as obstacles to accountability-related reforms. One vehicle of the exercise of such power is through

collective bargaining agreements negotiated between unions and public bodies representing cities and counties. Contracts that civilian policymakers negotiate with police unions shield officers from accountability for misconduct and excessive force. Through a lack of political will, expediency, and a lack of public transparency during negotiations, civilian leaders agree to contracts that, for example, erect obstacles …

Victims’ Rights In The Diversion Landscape, Kay L. Levine

SMU Law Review

In this Article, I explore the practical and theoretical conflicts that might surface when the diversion movement and the Victims’ Rights Movement intersect. I focus on two possible sites of tension: victim input into the diversion offer and the victim’s right to receive restitution as a term of diversion. Protocols to give victims greater voice in the justice process have been a mainstay of the burgeoning Victims’ Rights Movement for the past several decades, but I argue that those protocols must be understood within (and thus limited by) the contexts of fiscal responsibility, compassion for the offender, and proportionality in …

“Victims’ Rights” And Diversion: Furthering The Interests Of Crime Survivors And The Community, Miriam Krinsky, Liz Komar

SMU Law Review

Against the backdrop of the prosecutorial reform movement, this Article explores the origins of the tensions between victims’ rights and criminal justice reform efforts and argues that while victims’ rights may be in tension with diversion in some individual cases, the broader needs and interests of crime survivors do not conflict with decarceral diversion and deflection strategies. The Article describes the growing movement toward diversion among reform prosecutors and briefly recounts the history of the victims’ rights movement and “tough-on-crime” politics. The Article then discusses the demographics of crime survivors, who are disproportionately from the communities most harmed by “tough …

Tribute To Professor Jeff Gaba, Jennifer M. Collins

SMU Law Review

No abstract provided.

A Heartfelt Tribute To Jeff Gaba, Julia Patterson Forrester Rogers

SMU Law Review

No abstract provided.

Achieving Privacy, Anupam Chander, Meaza Abraham, Sandeep Chandy, Yuan Fang, Dayoung Park, Isabel Yu

SMU Law Review

Is privacy a luxury for the rich? Remarkably, there is a dearth of literature evaluating whether data privacy is too costly for companies to implement or too expensive for governments to enforce. This paper is the first to offer a review of the costs of compliance and to summarize national budgets for enforcement. Our study suggests that, while privacy may indeed prove costly for companies to implement and may present a special burden for small and medium-sized businesses, it is not too costly for governments to enforce. Indeed, the European Union, seen as a global champion of privacy, expends less …

Slavery And The Postbellum University: The Case Of Smu, Lolita Buckner Inniss, Skyler Arbuckle

SMU Law Review

People who practiced slavery across the United States, or engaged in slavery-related practices, were often the same civically-minded social, legal, and economic leaders who founded the nation’s first colleges and universities. There was, thus, from our earliest times, an unacknowledged but firm tie between the values and high ideals of the academy that existed in stark contraposition to the horrors of human bondage that fueled those institutions. Many North American colleges founded before the Civil War relied on money derived from the elite members of society with direct involvements in slavery. While a growing body of scholarly work discusses early …

How Analogizing Socio-Legal Responses To Organ Transplantation Can Further The Legalization Of Reproductive Genetic Innovation, Myrisha S. Lewis

SMU Law Review

The Nobel Foundation emphasized the significance of genetic innovation to society, science, and medicine by awarding the 2020 Nobel Prize in Chemistry to “the CRISPR/Cas9 genetic scissors.” This Article focuses on “reproductive genetic innovation,” a term that includes cytoplasmic transfer, mitochondrial transfer, and germline or heritable gene editing techniques that are all categorized as “experimental” in the United States. These techniques all use in vitro fertilization, a legal and widely available practice. Yet reproductive genetic innovation has resulted in controversy and numerous barriers including a recurring federal budget rider, threats of federal enforcement action, and the unavailability of federal funding. …

The Constitutional Basis For Inmate Gender Confirmation Surgery, Bryce Couch

SMU Law Review

Transgender refers to “people whose gender identity, gender expression, or behavior does not conform to what is socioculturally accepted as, and typically associated with, the legal and medical sex to which they were assigned at birth.” Despite representing a small percentage of the U.S. population (0.58%), the transgender community is disproportionately represented in the prison system. Studies suggest that one-in-six transgender people (16%) have been incarcerated in their lifetime, compared to 2.8%–6.6% of the general U.S. population. In total, transgender individuals comprise 0.24% of the U.S. prison and jail population.

Unfortunately, research indicates that the prison system is “ill-prepared to …

Hold My Beer, Hold My Price: State Post-And-Hold Regulatory Schemes Constitute Price Fixing Preempted By Federal Antitrust Law, Kathrine Maldonado

SMU Law Review

The Supreme Court has created various tests in cases involving antitrust preemption of state regulations—such as Midcal’s state immunity two-pronged analysis and Fisher’s hybrid versus unilateral restraint test—without clarifying how the various tests fit together. This has led to circuit splits not only in regard to how courts approach antitrust preemption cases but also in regard to the preemption findings of nearly identical laws in different circuits. In a departure from the Ninth and Fourth Circuits, the Second Circuit recently upheld the validity of Connecticut’s post-and-hold alcohol pricing regulation. State post-and-hold regulations effectuate illegal price fixing between competitors …

National, Military, And College Reports On Prosecution Of Sexual Assaults And Victims’ Rights: Is The Military Actually Safer Than Civilian Society?, David A. Schlueter, Lisa M. Schenck

Faculty Articles

No abstract provided.

Blockchain Emergencies & Open-Source Software Governance: Is "Rough Consensus" A Suicide Pact?, Blockchain Emergencies & Open-Source Software Governance: Is "Rough Consensus" A Suicide Pact?, Angela Walch

Faculty Articles

I am concerned with, "How is Bitcoin run? Who gets to make decisions about Bitcoin? How is Ethereum run? Who gets to make decisions about Ethereum?" I am concerned with the governance of these protocols at the base level. Why does this matter? It matters because these protocols at the base are supporting the whole DeFi structure. All the complexities and different complex financial products that are being built there, they sit on top of these infrastructural base level protocols. I think we need to be aware of how these things work and the systemic risks that they can pose …