Law Commons^™

Trade Law Policing On The Factory Floor: Next Generation Agreements And Their Corporate Accountability Tools, Kathleen Claussen

Articles

Trade policymakers' increased attention to sustainability has prompted the development of trade tools focused on corporate accountability within international trade agreements. As evidenced by the creation and use of the United States-Mexico-Canada Agreement's Rapid Response Labor Mechanism, this institutional shift has potent implications for labour rights and environmental protections. This article, which transcribes a lecture delivered at the Lauterpacht Centre in October 2023, scrutinises the turn toward supply-chain policing within international trade law and its institutional, legal, sociological, rhetorical and disciplinary effects.

Green Gold: The Akkoub’S Settler Ecologies, Irus Braverman

Journal Articles

The akkoub (Gundelia tournefortii) is a thistle-like plant so precious in Palestinian cuisine that it is often referred to as “green gold.” The risks, as well as the mystique, surrounding the akkoub have only intensified since the state of Israel designated this plant as protected under the Nature and Parks Protection Act. The story of the akkoub as depicted in this article illustrates the three tenets of “settler ecologies”: the regime of environmental protections enacted by the settler state that furthers its domination of the natural landscape and its dispossession of local and Indigenous communities. The first and …

Foreword: Symposium On Current Issues In Professional Identity Formation, Patrick Longan

Mercer Law Review

On March 8, 2024, the Mercer Center for Legal Ethics and Professionalism, in partnership with the Mercer Law Review, held the 24th Annual Georgia Symposium on Ethics and Professionalism. These symposia rotate among Mercer University School of Law, Georgia State University College of Law, Emory University School of Law, and the University of Georgia School of Law. Funding for the symposia comes from endowments created by the settlement of claims of litigation misconduct against the DuPont Corporation and its counsel in litigation in the 1990s. The initiative for the structure of the settlement came from the late Judge Hugh Lawson …

Ai And The Legal Puzzle: Filling Gaps, But Missing Pieces, Joseph Anderson

Mercer Law Review

One of the foremost concerns arising from artificial intelligence’s penetration into the legal realm revolves around accountability and transparency. Traditional legal processes entail a human-driven decision-making paradigm, with judges, lawyers, and legal professionals accountable for their judgments and actions. However, as artificial intelligence systems grow more complex, they often operate as ‘black boxes,’ making it challenging to decipher the rationale behind their decisions. This opacity raises questions about how to attribute legal liability when AI-powered systems make errors or biased judgments. Striking a balance between the efficiency of artificial intelligence and the transparency required in legal proceedings is a pressing …

What About Us? How Law Schools Can Help Historically Underrepresented Law Students Develop Their Professional Identities, David A. Grenardo

Mercer Law Review

Talking about race, gender, and sexual orientation can be painful, messy, and difficult. This country’s history of discrimination and violence against historically underrepresented, marginalized, excluded individuals—racial and ethnic minorities, women, LGBTQIA+, those living with disabilities, the socioeconomically disadvantaged/lower class—makes these topics fraught with controversy and risk. We can easily offend someone accidentally when we try to address these topics even with the best of intentions. For example, some people may get nervous trying to figure out whether to use the words African-American, Black, BIPOC, person of color, or all of the above when discussing these topics and referring to someone …

Just Me, Myself, And I: Georgia Trial Courts May Consider Pro Se Motions Filed By Represented Criminal Defendants, Mckayla A. Doss

Mercer Law Review

For decades, Georgia’s trial courts have applied the absolute rule that pro se motions filed by represented (or presumably represented) criminal defendants were a legal nullity. In essence, hybrid representation was not permitted—legal representation precluded criminal defendants from acting as “co-counsel” or filing their own pro se motions.The application of this absolute rule substantially affected the time-sensitive period that follows a criminal conviction, as defendants in Georgia have a limited period of time to file a notice of appeal or a motion for new trial before the window of direct appeal closes. Failure to file these motions results in the …

A (Not-So) “Minor” Application Of The “Spousal Standing” Exception To Georgia’S Wrongful Death Act, Kelly N. Lafleur

Mercer Law Review

The death of a loved one is a tragedy, especially when allegations of wrongdoing exist surrounding the death, and the decision to bring a lawsuit is a deeply personal matter. But who bears the burden of making that decision—the deceased’s spouse, their child, or another loved one? The answer may depend on the court’s application of equitable principles to preserve the claim.

Georgia’s Wrongful Death Act grants a decedent’s surviving spouse the right to pursue a wrongful death claim. In the event there is no surviving spouse, that right is granted to the decedent’s “child or children, either minor or …

Evaluating The Impact Of Sb 684 In San Luis Obispo, Andrew Darrell

City and Regional Planning

This study evaluates the impact of California Senate Bill 684 (SB 684) on housing development in San Luis Obispo. SB 684 aims to streamline the approval process for small-scale residential projects to address the state's housing shortage by promoting affordable housing construction. The aim of this report will be to examine the provisions of SB 684 and evaluate the feasibility of development under it. A general overview of the legislative provisions accompanied by legal context will provide a background to the law. Case studies of small lot development will illustrate design decisions that can be incorporated into new SB 684 …

Internet Drug Prohibition And The Opioid Overdose Crisis, Benjamin A. Barsky

Washington Law Review

The Ryan Haight Online Pharmacy Consumer Protection Act (Ryan Haight Act) prohibits controlled substance tele-prescribing when it occurs without a preliminary in-person medical evaluation. This Article details the Ryan Haight Act’s consequences for the practice of telemedicine in general and opioid addiction treatment in particular. In doing so, it builds on literature exploring the tension between the federal criminal regulation of controlled substance prescribing and the management of large-scale public health crises, particularly the opioid overdose crisis.

By restricting the tele-prescription of certain controlled substances used for opioid addiction treatment, the Ryan Haight Act limits access to care for a …

The President’S Criminal Immunity, Amandeep S. Grewal

SMU Law Review Forum

This Article addresses a monumental question that the Supreme Court will soon decide: does the President enjoy criminal immunity for her official acts? This Article argues that she does.

The potential criminal immunity for official acts has drawn exceptionally sharp critiques. Some scholars believe that the immunity is nonsensical, absurd, or downright offensive. Judge Florence Pan of the D.C. Circuit even posited that criminal immunity would allow the President to murder her political enemies with SEAL Team Six.

This Article shows that the critics are profoundly mistaken. Criminal immunity for a president’s official acts finds a strong foothold in Supreme …

Gateway And Non-Gateway Issues In The Enforcement Of Agreements To Arbitrate, George A. Bermann

Faculty Scholarship

Far greater attention is given in literature on international arbitration to limitations on the enforceability of arbitral awards than on the enforceability of agreements to arbitrate. This chapter seeks to redress the balance. While rulings on the enforceability of an award is incontrovertibly within the jurisdiction of the court asked to enforce the award, authority to determine the enforceability of an arbitration agreement is allocated between courts and arbitral tribunals themselves. The chapter seeks to determine which defenses to enforcement of arbitration agreements may be lodged before a court ("gateway issues") and which are necessarily reserved to the tribunal ("non-gateway …

Vol. 44, No. 3, Summer 2024: Table Of Contents, Northern Illinois University Law Review

Northern Illinois University Law Review

Table of Contents and Masthead for Volume 44, Issue 3 of the Northern Illinois Law Review

The Securities And Environment Commission? The Sec Greenhouse Gas Disclosure Rule For Investment Advisers And Companies And The Fight Against Administrative Overreach, Isaiah P. Harlan

Northern Illinois University Law Review

This article discusses the 2022 Supreme Court case West Virginia v. EPA in which the Supreme Court utilized the Major Questions Doctrine to analyze the EPA’s Clean Power Plan. After detailing the litigation leading up to and the ultimate decision in West Virginia v. EPA, I describe the SEC’s proposed rule requiring enhanced environmental disclosures and analyze the cited statutory authority in the proposed rule. Based upon the statutory and case law analysis that I have done, I conclude that the SEC has acted outside of the scope of its congressionally delegated authority.

Esg Factors In Municipal Securities Disclosures: Toward A Materiality Concept, Justin Marlowe

Northern Illinois University Law Review

State and local governments in the United States finance most of their infrastructure investment with debt instruments known as municipal bonds. The federal government does not directly regulate when or how municipal issuers access the municipal bond market, and only indirectly regulates the content of municipal borrowers’ disclosure to investors. A consequence of that unique regulatory structure is that municipal borrowers have wide discretion on whether to disclose falling property values, rising crime rates, and other long-term threats to their ability to repay investors. This is at odds with the ever-expanding information needs of investors who seek to align their …

Firearms Carceralism, Jacob D. Charles

Minnesota Law Review Vols. 106:2 onward (2021-present)

Gun violence is a pressing national concern. And it has been for decades. Throughout nearly all that time, the primary tool lawmakers have deployed to stanch the violence has been the machinery of the criminal law. Increased policing, intrusive surveillance, vigorous prosecution, and punitive penalties are showered on gun offenders. This Article spotlights and specifies this approach--what it calls “firearms carceralism”--and details how a decades-long bipartisan consensus generated a set of state-centered solutions to gun violence that has not meaningfully impacted the problem. Instead, those policies have exacerbated racial inequity and compounded civic and community harms. The Article traces the …

Scientific Context, Suicide Prevention, And The Second Amendment After Bruen, Eric Ruben

Minnesota Law Review Vols. 106:2 onward (2021-present)

The Supreme Court declared in New York State Rifle & Pistol Ass'n v. Bruen that modern gun laws must be “consistent with this Nation's historical tradition of firearm regulation” to survive Second Amendment challenges. Scholarship has shown how this test of historical analogy presents difficulties because of how technological, legal, and social change has shaped policy over the centuries. This Article is the first to assess Bruen as it applies to suicide-prevention laws, and, in doing so, illuminates another form of change that complicates Bruen's implementation: scientific progress. As this Article shows, early generations of Americans fundamentally misunderstood mental illness …

The Relationship Between Force Majeure Clauses And The Excuse Defenses, Gregory Crespi

SMU Law Review Forum

Many commercial contracts include force majeure clauses that excuse the parties from performing some or all of their obligations upon the occurrence of specified supervening events. The law is unclear as to the proper relationship between such clauses and the assertion of common law or statutory excuse defenses such as impossibility, impracticability, or frustration of purpose with regard to supervening events that are outside of the scope of such clauses. In particular, under what circumstances, if any, should a force majeure clause be regarded as preclusive of these excuse defenses with regard to those supervening events that the clause does …

Rays Of Hope For The Administrative State, Peter L. Strauss

Faculty Scholarship

The assault on Chevron has not yet been resolved, but it is next to impossible to believe that the sensible Justices of the Court will go any further than to reaffirm that deciding questions of the scope of agency authority is exclusively for judicial resolution (though perhaps with Skidmore-like attention to the views of the agency, so much more familiar with its statutes as a whole). This was the position clearly taken by the Court in 1940, in United States v. American Trucking Ass’ns., and to go beyond it into decision, rather than review, of agency judgments would …

Risky Retirement: A Proposal For Ftc Oversight Of Self-Directed Iras, Jillian Sarro

Hofstra Law Review

The article discusses the growing concern over self-directed individual retirement accounts (IRAs) and their potential to jeopardize retirement security. Topics include the risks of noncompliance with IRA rules, as highlighted by a Rhode Island couple who owed the IRS due to improper handling of their IRA assets, the penalties resulting from prohibited transactions and improper asset storage, and the increasing cases of taxpayers making costly mistakes with self-directed IRAs.

The Needless Search For A Founding-Era "Hearsay" Definition, Jeffrey Bellin

University of Michigan Journal of Law Reform

Modern Confrontation Clause doctrine permits only unconfronted “out-of-court statements that would have been admissible in a criminal case at the time of the founding.” To operationalize this concept, the Supreme Court identifies “testimonial hearsay” as the Clause’s primary concern. Its opinions regularly dive into the historical record to refine what counts as “testimonial” but ignore that record in defining “hearsay.” This omission cannot last. Cases in the lower courts, and one on the Court’s recent docket, concern testimonial but (arguably) non-hearsay statements. And while confrontation jurisprudence is supposed to be tied to founding-era evidence law, the “hearsay” definition, casually referenced …

Connecting The Dots: Sharing Hidden Histories Of Regional Inventors’ Patents, John Schlipp, Kris Kallies

Journal of the Patent and Trademark Resource Center Association

Patent and Trademark Resource Centers (PTRCs) support inventors, entrepreneurs, and researchers with patent and trademark information. Some PTRCs share regional patent history as part of their community outreach. This article focuses on PTRCs that have developed online databases and published works documenting regional patents, thereby providing hidden historical insights for historians, genealogists, and students. It spotlights the development of Georgiavation, a historic patent database developed by the PTRC at Georgia Southern University. Finally, this article offers guidance for libraries, museums, and other institutions interested in documenting their state or regional patent histories. This can result in a more inclusive narrative …

Risk-Taking And Reform: Innovation For A Better Education, Megan M. Carpenter

The University of New Hampshire Law Review

No abstract provided.

Criminal Legal Reform In New Hampshire: One Law Professor's Activism, Albert E. Scherr

The University of New Hampshire Law Review

Criminal legal reform is a perpetual work in progress. The system itself is, at best, maddeningly imperfect. It too often fails to produce anything close to justice. Structural problems afflict the system in a way that incarcerates too many people, particularly people of color. For example, over the last thirty years, the Innocence Project has demonstrated imperfections in the system caused by faulty eyewitness identification procedures by ineffective assistance of counsel, by prosecutorial misconduct, by shoddy forensic practices and by police behavior that produced false confessions.

That the United States has well over fifty-one independent criminal legal systems frustrates efforts …

Bridging The Paradigmatic Crevasse Between Lawyers And Scientists: The Need For New Institutional Models, Stanley P. Kowalski, Stanley Kowalski

The University of New Hampshire Law Review

The professions of science and law have traditionally been siloed paradigms, operating often in tandem with each other but rarely intersecting in the interdisciplinary pasture which separates them, a pasture from which an abundance of synergistic collaboration and ensuing creative concepts might sprout. However, the erstwhile never the twain shall meet situation is neither realistic nor even tenable in the current century, a century increasingly dominated by science, technology, invention, innovation, and intellectual property. Simply put, whereas lawyers are risk averse and build constructed realities to argue points and serve clients, scientists seek an objective assessment of truth and accept …

Nextgen Licensure & Accreditation, Nachman N. Gutowski

The University of New Hampshire Law Review

The Bar Exam is changing. The National Conference of Bar Examiners is pushing full steam ahead with a replacement for the current elements that make up the Uniform Bar Exam (UBE). This new exam, called the NextGen Bar Exam (NextGen), is scheduled to launch in Summer 2026. Current American Bar Association (ABA) accreditation standards do not consider the coming changes. A full picture of what the adjustments will look like is hazy and very much in the trial stages still. These shifts impact current law students, the legal education practices of law schools, and accreditation standards. There is a near-universal …

A Drug's Life: The Untapped Potential Of Secondary Pharmacology Studies In Drug Development, Christina Scott

The University of New Hampshire Law Review

The United States Food and Drug Administration has evolved over the past century to regulate new medicine and protect the public from harmful or ineffective drugs. Drug development and testing science have advanced rapidly alongside the FDA’s increased regulation, enabling pharmaceutical companies to assess a drug's potential adverse reactions by studying its reactivity with various proteins called "off-target receptors." Off-target proteins are often screened and reported in the Investigational New Drug Application as a percentage indicating the drug's binding strength to each protein, which suggests the strength of a particular adverse drug effect. Adverse drug effects often lead to unfavorable …

Masthead

The University of New Hampshire Law Review

No abstract provided.

New And Useful Improvements: The Role Of Institutional Culture, Leadership, Incentives, And Regulation In 30 Years Of Legal Education Since The Maccrate Report, Greg Brandes

The University of New Hampshire Law Review

New and useful improvements – in the words of the patent statute – have emerged from legal education’s pursuit of seamlessly developing contributing members of the legal profession, as the 1992 MacCrate Report advocated. These include the widespread adoption of distance learning techniques for better teaching and assessment, course pedagogy that is more inclusive for students with diverse learning needs, and a new subset of the academy schooled and interested in the science of teaching and learning. But it has not been easy.

Efforts to improve legal education have sometimes foundered and other times flourished because of varying faculty and …

Front Matter

Hofstra Law Review

No abstract provided.

How To Handle The Truth: Avoiding Improper Sentencing Argument In Courts-Martial, Cooper C. Millhouse, Stephen Paul

Hofstra Law Review

The Court of Appeals for the Armed Forces has identified a variety of sentencing arguments as improper. These arguments are improper because they encourage courts-martial to abandon disinterested impartiality or because they ask courts-martial to consider facts or opinions unrelated to the accused’s culpability. This Article catalogs and classifies the improper arguments that violate these principles for use by the JAG Corps.