Law Commons^™

Guide To The Working Papers, Correspondence, Committee Minutes, And Other Notes Of The Business Corporation Code Revision Study Committee, Columbia, Sc, 1986-1987, Michael R. Mounter

South Carolina Business Code Revision Study Committee

No abstract provided.

University Of South Carolina Joseph F. Rice School Of Law 2025 Student Recogntion Awards Ceremony Program, May 9, 2025, University Of South Carolina Joseph F. Rice School Of Law

Commencement and Hooding Programs

No abstract provided.

Univerity Of South Carolina Joseph F. Rice School Of Law Commencement Program, December 13, 2025, University Of South Carolina Joseph F. Rice School Of Law

Commencement and Hooding Programs

No abstract provided.

Wills & Trusts, Gerry W. Beyer

SMU Annual Texas Survey

This Article discusses developments relating to the Texas law of intestacy, wills, estate administration, trusts, and other estate planning matters during the Survey period of December 1, 2023, through November 30, 2024. The reader is warned that not all cases decided during the Survey period are presented, and not all aspects of each case is analyzed. You must read and study each case’s full text before relying on it or using it as precedent. The discussion of most cases includes a moral, that is, the important lesson to be learned from the case. By recognizing situations that resulted in time- …

Roaring Skies: The Law Of Supersonic Commercial Flight And Arguments For Its Return, Caleb S. Dorris

Journal of Air Law and Commerce

The prospect of supersonic commercial flight is no longer confined to history; it is reemerging as a viable transportation model in the 21st century. With major airlines placing orders for next-generation supersonic aircraft and regulatory agencies, including the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) and the International Civil Aviation Organization (ICAO), reconsidering longstanding restrictions, the return of supersonic flight is imminent. This article examines the legal, regulatory, and policy considerations that have shaped supersonic aviation’s trajectory and explores the challenges that remain for its full reintroduction into global airspace.

First, this article surveys the historical rise and fall of supersonic passenger aviation, …

Airplane!: Does The Federal Aviation Act Preempt State Law Design Defect Claims?, Max Birmingham

Journal of Air Law and Commerce

Which level of government—state or federal—has jurisdiction to set safety standards for aviation defect design is a nuanced issue. Generally speaking, federal law preempts state law in this context by occupying the field through a regulatory scheme that permeates aviation safety. The Federal Aviation Act of 1958 (FAAct) confers its namesake agency—the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA)—the powers to prescribe the “minimum standards required in the interest of safety.” The word “minimum” has been seized upon by those on the state side of the debate to advocate that it means the floor. And they contend that those in the Union have …

Grading Legal Research, Julie Tedjeske Crane

Faculty Scholarship

Law school grading practices often conflict with legal research instruction goals. Small class sizes render norm-referenced (curved) grading unreliable, and the emphasis on ranking students detracts from learning essential skills. Drawing on scholarship on legal education and other disciplines, this article examines several grading approaches that may better serve students and instructors, including criteria-referenced, specification-based, and equitable grading systems. It offers practical suggestions for improving grading practices, such as working with colleagues on assessment design, being intentional about grading formative work, and using anonymous grading. The article concludes with a call for more discussion about grading in legal research courses.

The Complexities Of Consent To Personal Jurisdiction, Scott Dodson

Faculty Scholarship

Mallory v. Norfolk Southern Railway Co., decided in June 2023, held that consent remains a method of establishing personal jurisdiction independent of the “minimum contacts” test established by International Shoe Co. v. Washington. To many, the decision resolved ambiguity in personal jurisdiction doctrine and represented a straightforward way of establishing personal jurisdiction. But Mallory failed to consider the many complexities underlying consent. In this Article, I showcase those complexities and demonstrate that Mallory is just the tip of the iceberg: A host of questions, some fundamental to both consent theory and personal-jurisdiction doctrine, lurk beneath the surface. I argue that …

Impact Of Expert Witness Gendered Appearance And Emotion On Perceptions Of Credibility And Verdicts, Audrey Molter

Honors College Theses

Past research has highlighted biases in how individuals are perceived based on their gender and expressed emotions. The current study assessed how the perceived femininity or masculinity of expert witnesses impact credibility and verdicts in a jury decision making task. Additionally, it investigated how the presence or absence of emotional expression, specifically, anger versus neutral presentations, affects the perception of expert credibility and verdict outcomes. One hundred and eighteen undergraduate participants assumed the role of jurors in a criminal trial involving ambiguous evidence, with the expert witness serving as the primary source of testimony for the defense. Four versions of …

Incremental Innovation, George Horvath

Faculty Scholarship

Transformative innovations—the ones that use new technologies to disrupt the world—command our attention. But most new products are the result of a more mundane process of incremental iterative innovation, evolving through a long series of small modifications of existing technologies. Although both kinds of innovation can result in improved safety and utility, both can also create new dangers. We tend to be more aware of this in transformative innovations (as current worries over artificial intelligence show); by contrast, dangers created by incremental iterative innovation often go unrecognized, because the process itself is easy to overlook. Policymakers and regulators need to …

The Ninth Circuit’S Nod To Anti-Vaccine Advocates, Richard H. Hughes Iv, Dorit R. Reiss

Faculty Scholarship

On June 7, 2024, a three-judge panel of the Ninth Circuit issued a decision that, while it did not go as far as anti-vaccine activists claimed, clearly drew on anti-vaccine tropes, and suggested a retreat from important public health precedents.

This Article explains the decision and the way in which it can undermine public health law. In short, the decision is problematic in two ways. First, it accepts claims that are untrue on their face. By ignoring the evidence and facts provided by public health authorities and experts, the opinion demonstrates further erosion of the high deference to expertise embodied …

Cdc As A Debunker: The Limits Of Government In Countering Misinformation, Dorit R. Reiss

Faculty Scholarship

This Article argues that even in the best of times, government agencies are not well suited to debunking misinformation and suggests as alternatives a role for government in providing accurate information, a potential role for government in providing grants for debunking, and a more central role for private institutions in supporting debunking. It uses, as a case study, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC)’s response to vaccine misinformation, focusing on issues the CDC has been addressing since before the COVID-19 pandemic, to highlight that the problem goes beyond the challenges of responding fast and accurately to the uncertainties …

Taking The Name Brown In Vain: Separate But Equal, Brown And The Harvard Case, Matthew Coles

Faculty Scholarship

Bad history in legal opinions is understandable, if most of the time not excusable. Bad legal analysis in Supreme Court opinions is not. Judges are not trained historians. They are trained lawyers. They should know how to do law. This essay is about bad lawyering at the Court. Specifically, this essay is about the shoddy misuse of Brown v. Board of Education, the canonical case in which the Supreme Court finally began to use the 14th Amendment to protect Black people, in Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard.

Automatic Reaction - What Happens To Workers At Firms That Automate?, James Bessen, Maarten Goos, Anna Salomons, Wiljan Van Den Berge

Faculty Scholarship

We provide the first estimate of the impacts of automation on individual workers by combining Dutch micro-data with a direct measure of automation expenditures covering firms in all private non-financial industries over 2000-2016. Using an event study differences-indifferences design, we find that automation at the firm increases the probability of workers separating from their employers and decreases days worked, leading to a 5-year cumulative wage income loss of about 8% of one year’s earnings for incumbent workers. We find little change in wage rates. Further, lost wage earnings are only partially offset by various benefits systems and are disproportionately borne …

Caste-Ing And Recasting Race In Equal Protection Jurisprudence, Vinay Harpalani, Magdalene Bernier

Faculty Scholarship

In this Essay, we analyze how the concept of "caste" has influenced the U.S. Supreme Court's race-based equal protection jurisprudence. Even before the ratification of the Fourteenth Amendment, advocates such as Charles Sumner appealed to caste analogies to argue for rights for Black Americans. The "stigma of caste" a prominent harm of Jim Crow laws was rejected by the majority in Plessy v. Ferguson but articulated in Justice Harlan's Plessy dissent. The notion of caste also undergirded the origin of strict scrutiny and the ruling in Brown v. Board of Education. However, Brown defined the harm ofschool segregation not …

Missing The Trees For The Forest: How Progressives Neglect Anti-Asian Animus In Magnet School Admissions Controversies, Vinay Harpalani

Faculty Scholarship

In this Essay, I illustrate how Asian Americans' positioning intersected with litigation strategy and constitutional issues in Coalition for TJ v. Fairfax County School Board-an important recent ruling from the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit that deals with race-neutral public magnet school admissions policies. Since the U.S. Supreme Court struck down race-conscious university admissions in 2023, magnet school admissions have become the next constitutional battleground for diversity in education. The Supreme Court has thus far denied certiorari in two cases involving magnet school admissions, over dissents by Justice Samuel Alito. Nevertheless, these cases present significant disputed …

The Abuse Of Neutrality, Rebecca Ingber

Articles

Neutrality law is a musty and obsolete body of international law that nevertheless rears its creaky head now and again in dangerous ways, most recently in the Russia-Ukraine conflict. The law of neutrality is a study in contradictions. It is obsolete yet remains on the books in treaties and military manuals. It purports to keep the peace and protect non-warring states yet today is invoked to expand conflict and protect aggressors. The legal benefits of neutrality have been entirely overtaken by other regimes. And yet neutrality law has not lost its luster despite losing its value. Instead of letting it …

Undo Process: Examining Agency Procedural Levers To Access To Counsel, Haiyun Damon-Feng

Articles

Every day, through internal adjudicative proceedings, agencies make thousands of rights determinations that affect critical matters such as financial security, family unity, personal safety, and individual liberty. Scholars and policymakers have recognized the significant impact that representation can have on adjudicative outcomes across the administrative state. Many agencies have implemented policies affirmatively seeking to boost an individual's ability to bring an advocate to assist with the adjudication process. In the immigration context, however, agencies have enacted procedural hurdles that have made it more difficult for individuals to reap the benefits of this assistance.

This Essay uses recent developments in the …

The Immigration Subpoena Power, Lindsay Nash

Articles

For over a century, the federal government has wielded the immigration subpoena power in darkness, forcing private individuals, subfederal governments, and others to help it detain and deport. This vast administrative power has remained opaque even to those who receive these subpoenas and invisible to those it affects most. Indeed, the very people targeted by these subpoenas often don’t know they exist, much less how they facilitate arrest and deportation. For these reasons—and more—this power has escaped the legal battles raging over other immigration enforcement tactics and the scrutiny of journalists, scholars, and courts. Thus, as state- and locality-held information …

Coopting Disruption, Mark A. Lemley, Matthew Wansley

Articles

Our economy is dominated by five aging tech giants – Alphabet, Amazon, Apple, Meta, and Microsoft. In the last twenty years, no company has commercialized a new technology in a way that threatens them. Why?

We argue that the tech giants have learned how to coopt disruption. They identify potentially disruptive technologies, use their money to influence the startups developing them, strategically dole out access to the resources the startups need to grow, and seek regulation that makes it harder for the startups to compete. When a threat emerges, they buy it off. And after they acquire a startup, they …

Rectifying The Rome Statute And Draft Articles On Prevention And Punishment Of Crimes Against Humanity To Include The Slave Trade, Jocelyn Getgen Kestenbaum

Articles

The slave trade is commonly misperceived as a historical crime. Yet, the scourge of the slave trade is present throughout the world today. Combatting these ongoing atrocity crimes is essential to ensure that human rights are upheld by the international community. The crime of the slave trade fills an impunity gap, especially in light of recentharms perpetuated by the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS) against the Yazidi in Iraq. Revitalization of the conceptualization of the slave trade as a crime under international law might ensure greater enforcement of one of the oldest core international crimes. Critical proposed amendments …

Towards The Faa's Next Century: Clarifying Disclosure Requirements In Arbitration, Andrea K. Schneider, Brian Farkas

Articles

This essay provides a roadmap to the current landscape of neutrality and disclosure. It then suggests three possible reforms to the FAA that would provide better guidance to arbitrators, parties, and courts. Moreover, this essay argues that if the FAA cannot be sufficiently amended, states should take the lead. States can continue to more clearly outline disclosure requirements and enforce clearer standards than the current version of the FAA.

Intuitions In Tort Law And Theory, James A. Macleod

Articles

This Essay highlights the many ways that ordinary conceptual and moral intuitions shape the development of tort law. It further argues that, for a range of doctrinal and institutional reasons, such intuitions deserve a central place in tort theorists’ efforts to explain, predict, justify, and reform the law of torts. Finally, given the stakes for both positive and normative tort theory, the Essay emphasizes the need for more systematic empirical research into the content and operation of people’s tort-relevant intuitions.

The Impossibility Of Religious Equality, Zalman Rothschild

Articles

The Supreme Court has recently adopted a new rule of religious equality: Laws unconstitutionally discriminate against religion when they deny religious exemptions but provide secular exemptions that undermine the law’s interests to the same degree as would a religious exemption. All the Justices and a cadre of scholars have agreed in principle with this approach to religious equality. This Essay argues that this new rule of religious equality is inherently unworkable, in part because it turns on treating that which is religious the same as its secular “comparators.” But religion is not comparable to anything neither in terms of its …

The Violence Of Bright Lines, Terrell Woolfolk, Kathryn E. Miller

Articles

The U.S. Supreme Court interprets the Eighth Amendment to prohibit members of certain groups from serving extreme punishments, such as the death penalty and life without parole. For example, the Court has long banned death sentences for people with intellectual disability and for those who were under eighteen years old at the time of their crime. More recently, in Graham v. Florida and Miller v. Alabama, the Court extended this reasoning to sentences of life without parole for those under eighteen—prohibiting the sentence altogether for nonhomicide crimes and barring its mandatory imposition for homicides.

Many scholars and advocates have applauded …

Response: Diagonal Representation, Alma Magaña

Articles

A lot has been written about the crisis of indigent defense and the plethora of factors that have led to the crisis, like the lack of guidance on how indigent defense providers can most efficiently distribute their insufficient resources. This lack of guidance has left jurisdictions across the country to their own devices, resulting in a national landscape of very different models, each with its own variations of the same problems plaguing indigent defense.

Decision-Making Supports And Cognitive Decline, Rebekah Diller

Articles

For persons with a range of cognitive disabilities, supported decision-making, rooted in a human rights approach to disability, has emerged as a tool that permits them to make legally binding decisions and avoid guardianship. As supported decision-making policy has evolved in the United States, state statutes have primarily focused on formal agreements through which individuals can designate trusted supporters to assist in obtaining information, processing that information, and communicating a decision. This Article argues that supported decision-making has promise for preserving the autonomy of persons living with dementia, but that the model of a supported decisionmaking agreement embodied in the …

Decentering Property In Fourth Amendment Law, Michael C. Pollack, Matthew Tokson

Articles

For the past several decades, privacy has been the primary conceptual foundation for Fourth Amendment search law. The canonical test for Fourth Amendment searches accordingly looks to whether the government has violated a person’s reasonable expectation of privacy. Yet privacy is no longer the sole determinant of Fourth Amendment protection, as the Supreme Court has recently added a property-based test to address cases involving physical intrusions on land or chattel. Further, given the ambiguity of the reasonable expectation of privacy test, a variety of influential judges and scholars have proposed relying primarily, or even exclusively, on property in determining the …

Doubting Thomas And Questioning Stare Decisis Under The Roberts Court, Wilfred U. Codrington Iii

Articles

The article critically examines the erosion of stare decisis under the Roberts Court, highlighting concerns about the Supreme Court's increasing willingness to overturn established precedents. While acknowledging the importance of stare decisis in maintaining stability and equality, the author argues that its practical value is being undermined by ideological polarization and a departure from traditional legal reasoning. The article questions the Court's recent approach to precedent, particularly in cases like Dobbs v. Jackson Women's Health Organization and Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard, and critiques the conservative majority's aggressive use of judicial power.

An Alternate History Of Chevron, With A Lesson For Today, Michael E. Herz

Articles

It is a banal truism that judicial deference to agency decisionmaking enables the executive branch to pursue its agenda, whatever that agenda may be. That was obvious to all in the early years of the Chevron decision, which was greeted enthusiastically on the right and skeptically on the left. In Chevron itself, and for a while thereafter, deference advanced the Reagan deregulatory program. Over the years, a subtler conclusion gained consensus: overall and in the long haul, judicial deference is likely to have a net pro-regulatory impact. Hence the right’s hardened opposition to Chevron leading up to its demise. But …