Law Commons^™

Changing The Game Plan: Using Section 504 To Protect Transgender Athletes From Title Ix’S Shortcomings, Christina Charikofsky

University of Baltimore Law Review

No abstract provided.

Ip @ The U - September 2025, Jorge L. Contreras

Law School Historical Documents

Welcome to IP @ the U, a periodic newsletter for students, alumni, faculty and friends of the University of Utah College of Law's Program on Intellectual Property and Technology Law. This issue covers highlights from Summer and Early Fall 2025.

Compassionate Causation In The Domestic Violence Survivors Justice Act, Zoë Lewis Ewing

University of Chicago Law Review

This Comment evaluates the implementation of the Domestic Violence Survivors Justice Act (DVSJA), a New York law passed in 2019 to provide shortened sentencing ranges for domestic violence survivors convicted of crimes. It identifies an inconsistency in sentencing courts’ application of the law’s causation standard, which requires that a petitioner’s experience of domestic violence be a “significant contributing factor” to their criminal conduct. Some courts interpret the prong narrowly, while others apply a broad causation standard. This Comment argues that courts should opt for the latter approach and consider causation in the DVSJA satisfied if domestic violence was “sufficiently significant …

Disclosure Puzzles In Patent Law, Jonathan S. Masur, Lisa Larrimore Ouellette

University of Chicago Law Review

Since its inception, patent law has required that inventors publicly disclose information about their inventions in exchange for receiving patent rights. This foundational requirement is policed through multiple doctrines: patents fail “enablement” if “undue experimentation” is needed to practice the invention, and they lack adequate “written description” when they fail to establish the inventor’s “possession” of the invention.

Despite disclosure doctrines’ centrality, fundamental puzzles about their application remain unresolved. What are the boundaries between enablement and written description? Do equivalents claimed via the doctrine of equivalents have to be enabled or described? Are the rules different for after-arising technologies? Federal …

Necessary Developments: Calibrating The Fair Housing Act’S Reasonable Accommodation Provision, Ben Griswold

University of Chicago Law Review

The Fair Housing Act prohibits denying people with disabilities “reasonable accommodations.” But courts have long split over how to interpret this provision. At the center of the divide is the statutory requirement that an accommodation be “necessary to afford . . . equal opportunity to use and enjoy a dwelling.” Courts diverge over whether the statute imposes a strict-necessity standard, requiring that an accommodation be truly indispensable, or a lenient-necessity standard, requiring only that the requested accommodation ameliorate the plaintiff’s disability.

Rather than pick one interpretation, this Comment suggests that courts should tailor the necessity standard they employ to the …

Law School Record, Vol. 72, No. 1 (Fall 2025), Law School Record Editors

Law School Record

• Message from the Dean
• How the Law School is Incorporating AI into the Curriculum
• Café D'Angelo Builds Community One Cold Brew at a Time
• Adam Chilton Becomes Dean
• The Corporate Speech Dilemma
• Theory in Practice
• Counselors of Crypto
• Asked & Answered - Richard Robbins, '91 Director of Applied AI
• Seven Alumni Begin Clerkships for Supreme Court Justices
• Professor John Rappaport Discusses his New Criminal Law Casebook
• Two New Faculty Members Join the Law School
• Other Faculty News and Recognition's
• The Law School Launches the Dean's Fellow Program
• Meet the Class of 2028 (by the numbers)
• Development News
• In Memoriam
• Giving …

Last Chance Lawyers: Mercer's Habeas Project And Lessons Learned From A New Generation Of Service Learners, Meagan R. Hurley

Articles

Late on a Sunday night, the conference table in Mercer Law’s Habeas Project classroom was buried under transcripts, cases and drafts of a soon-to-be finished appellate brief. Third-year law students Chyna Carter and Valerie Pallos sat shoulder-to-shoulder, tightening arguments, double-checking citations and calculating word counts yet again. They’d spent weeks working with classmates, meticulously researching their client’s case and poring over a voluminous record, in preparation of filing a habeas appeal with the Supreme Court of Georgia.

“We thought we had a convincing argument and just needed to get it reflected on paper,” Carter, now an associate at McLain & …

The Racialized Retaliatory State: Weaponizing Immigration Law To Criminalize Dissent, Karla Mckanders

William & Mary Journal of Race, Gender, and Social Justice

This Essay examines how systemic racism impacts the ways immigration laws operate to retaliate and criminalize immigrants who dissent. Criminalizing dissent—which recently has become more widespread—is one tool within the immigration system that reinforces America’s racialized caste system. This Essay frames immigration exceptionalism as a continual state that excludes nonconforming bodies and ideologies to instill fear as a means of authoritarian governance. This Essay challenges the history of immigration exceptionalism as an objectively neutral system of governance, arguing that it has historically criminalized racialized migrants to suppress dissent and ideological viewpoints that are not aligned with America’s racialized project. Immigration …

Drive-By Mediation And Other Opportunistic Distortions Of Process, Nancy A. Welsh

Faculty Scholarship

Many states in the United States, along with many nations, have implemented special benefits and privileges to encourage parties’ use of mediation to assist their communication, negotiation, and ultimate resolution of disputes. This is despite how loosely mediation is defined. This Article discusses how vague definitions, paired with special benefits and privileges, are incentivizing both the opportunistic distortion of mediation and the use of mediation for improper purposes. In Texas, for example, judges are extraordinarily limited in their ability to disapprove parents’ mediated child custody agreements—even if there is reason to worry that an agreement is contrary to the best …

The Gamification Of Banking, Colleen Baker, Christopher K. Odinet

Faculty Scholarship

Gamification is coming to banking. This phenomenon is already gain-ing ground in advertising, healthcare, manufacturing, and, more recently, with the GameStop and AMC meme stock saga in securities trading. The idea behind gamification is to make transactions seem fun, playful, and even casino-like in order to elicit habit-forming, addictive-like effects with consumers. This Article argues that the rise of financial technology (“fintech”) firms and their ever-growing business relationships with incumbent financial institutions has created the necessary conditions for gamification to take hold in the banking sector. In order to explore this observation, we undertake a study of current examples of …

Judicial Enforcement Of Evidence Law, G. Alexander Nunn

Faculty Scholarship

The truth matters. At least it should. In the courtroom, truth can serve as the cornerstone of justice, liberating the innocent, vindicating victims, and holding the guilty to account. Indeed, truth is such a normative imperative that an entire legal discipline now focuses on fostering its discovery at trial—evidence law. By regulating both the reliability of proof and the rationality of cognitive inferences, evidence law seeks to help factfinders discern truth and reach an accurate verdict. And given the importance of that role, one might naturally assume that the strict enforcement of evidence law would be a legal mandate of …

The Sec Proposed Cybersecurity Infrastructure Rules And New Disclosure Requirements, Neal F. Newman, Lawrence J. Trautman, Brian Elzweig

Faculty Scholarship

In addition to regulation of securities market issuers, the Securities & Exchange Commission (SEC) is also responsible for regulation of those entities that provide the networks, either electronic or physical, that enable the functioning of our securities markets. On February 9, 2022, the Commission published a Release for Cybersecurity Risk Management for Investment Advisers, Registered Investment Companies, and Business Development Companies containing proposals that, if adopted, would establish a new cybersecurity incident reporting and disclosure regime and require registered investment advisers (“advisers”) and investment companies (“funds”) to implement policies and procedures designed to address cyber risks. The comment period for …

Traditional And Computational Canons, Eric H. Martinez

Faculty Scholarship

As part of the rise of modern textualism, dictionaries and linguistic canons have become a ubiquitous part of legal interpretation. One longstanding question is whether judges citing these tools sincerely attempt to follow the meaning of a text, or if their invocation is merely window-dressing for a preferred outcome. The practical significance of this question extends across all major doctrinal areas, and with the Supreme Court’s overturning of Chevron deference, its importance is only to grow, as courts are now instructed to use every tool at their disposal to resolve ambiguity when interpreting a law. This Article is the first …

The Uniform Commercial Code Survey: Introduction, Jennifer S. Martin, Colin P. Marks, Wayne Barnes

Faculty Scholarship

The survey that follows highlights the most important developments of 2024 dealing with domestic and international sales of goods, personal property leases, payments, letters of credit, documents of title, investment securities, and secured transactions. Along with the usual descriptions of interesting judicial decisions highlighted in the survey, there has also been legislative progress. The 2022 Amendments to the Uniform Commercial Code ("U.C.C.") (the "2022 Amendments")' have been adopted in thirty-one states plus the District of Colombia and introduced in six states.

The Crime Of Being Immoral, Randy D. Gordon

Faculty Scholarship

Despite a general abhorrence of retrospective laws as a matter of legal theory and Constitutional dictate, US. courts continue-in es sence-to create new crimes by injecting fazzy moral considerations into determinations under the federal fraud statutes. They do so by deeming a failure to act with "moral uprightness" sufficient to consti tute criminal fraud. Under such an amorphous standard, the unwitting find themselves in a legal bind, even though their conduct may not in volve any of the traditional elements of common-law fraud. This Article traces the roots of novel fraud theories with tools drawn from legal theory, linguistics, and …

“Contains: Gluten” And “Gluten Free”; Fda, It’S A No-Grainer!, Elizabeth Bulat

Cardozo Law Review

Reading food, drug, and cosmetic labels is a frequent practice for all individuals with allergies. However, unlike those who are allergic to peanuts, dairy, or another major food allergen, individuals with celiac disease (“celiac consumers”) are not offered a bold, capitalized statement clearly identifying the allergen they seek to avoid. Instead, celiac consumers are tasked with studying a list of ingredients and relying on their own ability to catch any sources of gluten. This Note considers the authority provided by Congress to the Federal Food and Drug Administration (FDA) to remedy this rash regime. Then, this Note proposes that the …

Innovation Interrupted: Legal And Institutional Risks Of Undermining Public-Private Partnerships, Jennifer S. Fan, Xuan-Thao Nguyen

Articles

Part I traces the development of the Bayh–Dole Act and discusses public–private partnership collaboration. Part II focuses on intellectual property generation by universities, illustrating the benefits of public– private partnership. Then Part III highlights the Trump administration’s federal funding cuts to universities that jeopardize the established public–private partnerships. Finally, Part IV details the consequences of how federal funding cuts impact the venture capital sector and the legal architecture of innovation, eroding the United States’ standing in the innovation race.

“That’S Not My Name”: The Linguistic Violence Of Misnaming Parties In Court Proceedings, Robert S. Chang, Cecily C. Hazelrigg, Linda Cj Lee

Washington Law Review

This Article calls attention to the harms done when parties are misnamed in legal proceedings. Misnaming, which many might initially consider trivial, is properly understood as a form of linguistic violence that can inflict dignitary harms as well as have material consequences. Misnaming takes on a different valence when it is done by the state. This Article focuses on the misnaming of Indigenous, Asian, and Latine people, beginning first with the way misnaming is done by the administrative state. The authors then discuss misnaming as it has operated in legal proceedings, providing both historical and contemporary examples from federal and …

A State Constitutional Challenge To Washington’S Denial Of Minimum Wage To Incarcerated Workers, Cailin Dahlin

Washington Law Review

This Comment challenges as unconstitutional Washington’s exemption of incarcerated individuals from the state Minimum Wage Act. Incarcerated people in Washington, unprotected by minimum wage guarantees, earn low wages in state-run inmate work programs. This statutory carveout is contrary to the rehabilitative purpose of Washington’s prisons because it impedes incarcerated people’s ability to afford necessities, participate in rehabilitative programs, and reintegrate into society. This exemption is unconstitutional under the state’s cruel punishment clause, because it is disproportionately cruel punishment and an excessive fine that incarcerated workers cannot afford. The exemption is also unconstitutional under the state’s privileges and immunities clause, because …

Res Gestate 2025 Fall Issue, Lindsay Wilcox, Angela Turnbow, Austen Diamond, Lexie Kite, Violet Maw, Henry Randolph, Robert Rice, Dave Titensor, Elizabeth Kronk Warner

Law School Historical Documents

The Alumni Magazine for the S.J. Quinney College of Law, University of Utah

Teaching Students To Write Well With Ai (Even If You're Still Learning It): A Guide For Faculty Who Want To Teach - Not Play Detective, John Lande

Faculty Publications

As generative artificial intelligence (AI) tools rapidly enter legal education, faculty need practical ways to guide student writing and promote academic integrity.  This one-page guide offers concrete strategies to help faculty teach students to think and write more effectively with AI tools.  As students increasingly use AI on their own, faculty face two related challenges:  preventing misuse and promoting deeper learning.

This guide frames the instructor’s role not as a detective, but as a coach who helps students use AI responsibly.  It outlines techniques to clarify expectations, promote good writing, and foster critical engagement with AI.  Adapted from the short …

Did Your Student Or A Bot Write This Paper?: Teaching And Grading In The Age Of Ai, John Lande

Faculty Publications

Generative artificial intelligence (AI) is disrupting traditional assumptions about law students’ authorship of their written assignments.  Faculty are concerned about their ability to tell whether students are writing their own papers or simply using AI tools like ChatGPT.  This article offers practical strategies for addressing this problem, focusing on teaching and grading practices that promote transparency, accountability, and learning.

It recommends that faculty require students to include AI use certification cover sheets with their papers, disclosing whether and how they used AI tools during the writing process.  The article also explains how faculty can shift from purely summative to use …

Faculty Use Of Artificial Intelligence In Teaching, John Lande

Faculty Publications

This report presents findings from a 2025 survey of U.S. law faculty about their own use of generative artificial intelligence (AI) tools such as ChatGPT and how their students use them as well.  Most respondents reported using AI at least occasionally for teaching-related purposes, and many estimated that a majority of their students used it in their courses.

Faculty identified benefits such as time savings, idea generation, and improved clarity. They also reported significant concerns about students’ over-reliance on AI, as well as the unreliability of its outputs.

Most faculty had revised assignments and assessment practices and provided guidance to …

The Art Of Ai Prompting In Law And Dispute Resolution Practice, John Lande

Faculty Publications

This short article offers a practical guide for using AI tools to improve the judgment and efficiency of lawyers, mediators, and arbitrators.  It cites ABA Ethics Opinion 512, which describes lawyers’ ethical duty of technological competence under the ABA Model Rules.

The article encourages practitioners to begin by selecting AI tools appropriate to their tasks such as general-purpose platforms or specialized tools listed in the article.  It explains how to write effective prompts, use follow-up questions to refine outputs, and apply professional judgment when reviewing results.  It includes a list of suggested follow-up prompts.

Getting useful results from AI tools …

Improving Regulatory Notice, Joshua Ulan Galperin, E. Donald Elliott

Elisabeth Haub School of Law Faculty Publications

Effective notice of law is the cornerstone of any legal system, and yet many federal administrative agencies do not give small businesses, NGOs, and interested citizens notice of the vast amount of new or modified law they produce. They merely publish the text in the Federal Register, which works tolerably well for larger enterprises but not their smaller competitors and citizens' groups. Despite these facts, few scholars have explored how agencies provide notice of the law. Even fewer have proposed ways that agencies could improve the methods they use for giving more effective notice of significant regulatory changes and thereby …

Citizen Led Initiatives - Constitutional Amendments & Statutes, Priya Baskaran

Research Reports & White Papers

50-state survey of provisions for amending state constitutions.

The Loyalty Trap: How Loyalty Programs Hook Us With Deals, Hack Our Brains, And Hike Our Prices, Samuel A.A. Levine, Stephanie T. Nguyen

Center for Law and the Economy

This paper examines the devolution of loyalty programs — from simple coupon programs to major lines of business transforming the retail experience. This devolution is happening in three stages. In the first stage — the hook — companies entice consumers by promising generous upfront benefits if consumers enroll. In the second stage — the hack — companies use loyalty programs to extract deep insights into our spending habits and willingness to pay, effectively hacking our brains. And in the third stage — the hike — companies make these programs worse for consumers — raising fees, devaluing points, limiting redemption options, …

The Future Of Virtual Proceedings In The Federal Courts, Jeremy Fogel, Mary S. Hoopes

Indiana Law Journal

The federal courts are notoriously hesitant to modify their procedures and policies. Much of this “small c” conservatism is driven by a concern that their rules be “trans-substantive” and suited to a wide range of circumstances. For years, they stubbornly resisted allowing remote proceedings and similar uses of technology in the courtroom because of concerns that permitting them could affect the quality of lawyering and decision-making, compromise the safety of jurors and witnesses, and diminish the public’s perception of the courts. The COVID-19 pandemic abruptly changed this, forcing judges to alter radically the way they conducted proceedings.

Nearly five years …

The Siren Song Of Territoriality, Robin J. Effron, Alan M. Trammell

Indiana Law Journal

Territoriality—the theory that a state’s physical borders determine its power and sovereignty—boasts a long, venerable history. For centuries, it served as the dominant political theory for myriad ideas. It defined a wide range of doctrines, including personal jurisdiction, choice of law, and prescriptive jurisdiction. By the middle of the twentieth century, though, this rigid territoriality no longer described or responded to the challenges of a society that had grown increasingly mobile and interconnected. Courts replaced inflexible territorial theories with more functional theories rooted in fairness and state regulatory interests.

In recent years, territoriality has seen a curious resurgence. The Supreme …

A Municipal Finance Theory Of Local Government, Michael A. Francus

Indiana Law Journal

The United States is awash in local governments. Not only does every state create local governments, but every state relies on those local governments to carry out the day-to-day functions of government. These local governments, though, are not the state. They are distinct legal entities vested with their own legal personhood. That is, they sue and are sued, they own property, and they enter into contracts—all in their own names.

Many rich accounts detail the historical reasons why local governments arose. But a different, theoretical question remains: What can a state achieve with local governments that it cannot achieve without …