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Missouri Law Review

No abstract provided.

The Filming Dilemma: The Potential Speech Cost Presented By Camera Coverage Of Defamation Cases, Alexandra M. Gutierrez

Missouri Law Review

For the better part of the last century, journalists have used free press and free-speech principles to advocate for camera access to newsworthy trials. But it was not until 2022 that news organizations succeeded in broadcasting defamation proceedings, and—in the process—gave libel litigants a novel opportunity to present their stories both to jurors and to the public at large. Because news organizations are themselves frequent targets of defamation lawsuits, this development may not be a categorical good for the press. The filming of defamation proceedings could provide motivated litigants with one more incentive to sue real and perceived critics, insofar …

Internet Famous: Are Online Influencers And Micro-Celebrities Public Figures Under Defamation Law?, Frank D. Lomonte, Stephanie J. Leibert

Missouri Law Review

Social media and video-sharing sites have introduced the concept of “micro-celebrity,” a person who attains fame – rapidly, and potentially fleetingly – among a niche audience of internet users for doing something colorful. As with anyone who participates in the sometimes sharp-elbowed give-and-take of online discourse, these niche celebrities are increasingly being drawn into controversies that can result in litigation. For nearly 60 years, the Supreme Court’s Sullivan standard has afforded critics an extra measure of breathing space when they comment on the conduct of “public” personalities –people with outsized influence, and the ability to defend themselves effectively through counterspeech. …

All The Rumors Are True: Verification, Actual Malice, And Celebrity Gossip, Jasmine E. Mcnealy

Missouri Law Review

More than half of Americans get their news from social media. These spaces – social media platforms, video and audio recommender systems, social news and gossip boards – have their own fact-checking and editorial cultures that, although not the exact same as those found in newsrooms, offer similar controls for the distribution of information. While imperfect, just like the controls of traditional media, these fact-checking cultures may offer a response to recent US judicial rejection of actual malice and provide a route of inquiry for courts examining evidence to determine if a defamation plaintiff has met the heightened standard. This …

Half Past Inexcusable: The Lanham Act Needs To Disassociate With The Doctrine Of Laches, Jared Gillen

Missouri Law Review

Who condones time’s ability to place such an incessant stranglehold on one’s emotions? Well, no one, but it is inevitable: time dictates every facet of life. For example, a brief glance at the clock elicits a myriad of potential responses. One possibility is anticipation: painstakingly watching the clock count down the hours, minutes, and seconds until the weekend. The feeling is excruciating. However, the instant the minute hand aligns with that pesky 12 provides an instantaneous, captivating sense of relief. There is no feeling like 5 PM. Conversely, no amount of begging or pleading with Father Time can change the …

Form Over Substance: How Tort Reform Policy Prevailed Over Constitutional Protection, Kate Frerking

Missouri Law Review

Tort reform has become a prominent and contested issue as legislatures around the country are seeking to reconsider and rewrite the rules of civil tort litigation. Missouri, like many other states, focuses its effort on legislative remedy limitations in the form of statutory caps on noneconomic damages—attractive targets for nationwide reform efforts. There is uncertainty as to whether, and to what extent, this reform measure implicates the constitutional right to trial by jury. The Missouri Supreme Court addressed this issue in Ordinola v. University Physician Associates, and it affirmed the statutory caps on noneconomic damages imposed by the Missouri General …

Personhood, Property, And Public Education: The Case Of Plyler V. Doe, Rachel F. Moran

Faculty Scholarship

Property law is having a moment, one that is getting education scholars’ attention. Progressive scholars are retooling the concepts of ownership and entitlement to incorporate norms of equality and inclusion. Some argue that property law can even secure access to public education despite the U.S. Supreme Court’s longstanding refusal to recog- nize a right to basic schooling. Others worry that property doctrine is inherently exclusionary. In their view, property-based concepts like resi- dency have produced opportunity hoarding in schools that serve affluent, predominantly white neighborhoods. Many advocates therefore believe that equity will be achieved only by moving beyond property-based claims, …

"They Don't Know What They Don't Know": A Study Of Diversion In Lieu Of Lawyer Discipline, Leslie C. Levin, Susan Saab Fortney

Faculty Scholarship

Lawyer misconduct can have devastating consequences for clients. But what is the appropriate regulatory response when lawyers make less serious mistakes? For almost thirty years, jurisdictions have offered some lawyers diversion in lieu of discipline. Diversion is intended to help educate lawyers or treat those with impairments so that they do not reoffend. Yet remarkably little is known about how diversion operates, whether it is used appropriately, and how well it seems to work. This Article addresses these questions. It draws on the limited published data and on interviews with disciplinary regulators in twenty-nine jurisdictions about their use of diversion. …

Forum Fights And Fundamental Rights: Amenability’S Distorted Frame, James P. George

Faculty Scholarship

Framing—the subtle use of context to suggest a conclusion—is a dubious alternative to direct argumentation. Both the brilliance and the bane of marketing, framing also creeps into supposedly objective analysis. Law offers several examples, but a lesser known one is International Shoe’s two-part jurisdictional test. The framing occurs in the underscoring of defendant’s due process rights contrasted with plaintiff’s “interests” which are often dependent on governmental interests. This equation ignores, both rhetorically and analytically, the injured party’s centuries-old rights to—not interests in—a remedy in an open and adequate forum.

Even within the biased frame, the test generally works, if not …

Latinas In The Legal Academy: Progress And Promise, Raquel E. Aldana, Emile Loza De Siles, Solangel Maldonado, Rachel F. Moran

Faculty Scholarship

The 2022 Inaugural Graciela Oliva ́rez Latinas in the Legal Academy (“GO LILA”) Workshop convened seventy-four outstanding and powerful Latina law professors and professional legal educators (collectively, “Latinas in the legal academy,” or “LILAs”) to document and celebrate our individual and collective journeys and to grow stronger together. In this essay, we, four of the Latina law professors who helped to co-found the GO LILA Workshop, share what we learned about and from each other. We invite other LILAs to join our community and share their stories and journeys. We hope that the data and lessons that we share can …

Foreword: Property And Education, Timothy M. Mulvaney, Latoya Baldwin Clark

Faculty Scholarship

Education policy is today a flashpoint in public discourse at both the national and state levels. This focus is for good reason. Public schools are highly segregated. School spending is stratified. The need for infrastructural renovations is extensive and expanding. Student debt has reached historic highs. For-profit companies are exploiting school districts’ limited resources for everything from curricular content to lunch menus. The list goes on.
This moment presents an opportunity to highlight a threshold issue on which it seems prudent for this discourse to direct greater attention: the interconnections between education and property law. Indeed, decisions surrounding property—crafting district-mapping …

Preventing Vicarious Trauma And Encouraging Self-Care In Clinical Legal Teaching, Deeya Haldar, Sarah Katz

Faculty Publications

Vicarious trauma, sometimes called “compassion fatigue” or “secondary trauma,” is a term for the effect that working with survivors of trauma may have on counselors, therapists, doctors, attorneys, and others who directly help them. Vicarious traumatisation refers to harmful changes that occur in professionals’ views of themselves, others, and the world as a result of exposure to the graphic or traumatic experiences of their clients. While it is unusual for law students to experience vicarious trauma in a clinical legal education setting, there are good reasons to introduce the concept of vicarious trauma and measures to prevent vicarious trauma through …

Contingency And Contestation In Christianity And Liberalism, Michael P. Moreland

Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

Attaining Academic Tenure, Amy A. Emerson, Charlotte Schneider

Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

What If Critical Race Theory Were Just A Legal Theory? A Christian Critique, Timon Cline, Neil Shenvi

Liberty University Law Review

The national debate over Critical Race Theory (CRT) continues to grow and deepen. Some Christians seemingly find CRT legitimate, useful, and nonthreatening to Christian theological commitments. This view is incorrect. CRT is in fundamental conflict with Christianity due to its misguided perspectives on law, morality, truth, and justice. Although CRT is more than “just a legal theory,” this article examines CRT’s legal origins and outlook, showing the inevitable tension between its claims and a Christian understanding of reality. This article also calls attention to several policy proposals suggested by CRT scholars to demonstrate how they are incompatible with Christian views …

Racial Reconciliation: A Biblical Framework, Rodney D. Chrisman

Liberty University Law Review

American society is greatly polarized and divided on many issues, including issues relative to racial reconciliation. Attempts at progress in this area are impeded by the United States’s historical backdrop of slavery, the statesponsored oppression of Jim Crow laws, and personal racism, among other complications. Even the American church tolerated and justified these racial divides. Modern discussions are plagued by the widespread misuse of important terms as well as disagreements on what racial reconciliation looks like and how to achieve it. Starting from the belief that God has spoken authoritatively on all issues, this article attempts to provide a biblical …

Racial-Ethnic Harm And Healing: Comparative National Mechanisms For Social Remorse And Repair, R Drew Smith

Liberty University Law Review

Today a sharp divide exists between Americans. Although they agree that racial harm occurred in this country’s history, they disagree about the extent of harm to be acknowledged and the means of repair to achieve justice and social healing. The United States’ history of (attempted) racial reconciliation includes initiatives by white Christians since the 1950s that formally acknowledged the sin of racism but mostly lacked corresponding political activism. The tensions and divergences between attitudinal and structural approaches to interracial cooperation that existed a half-century ago persist today. This article seeks to provide a broader, global perspective to the United States’ …

Reimagining Resistance: The Voting Rights Act's Immediate Resistance, Julian Maxwell Hayter

Liberty University Law Review

This piece situates the current fight over voting rights and the Voting Rights Act of 1965 into historical context. More specifically, Hayter argues that current contention over minority voting dates to 1965 itself. Resistance to the Voting Rights act is not only older than many people know, but the continuity of that resistance also forces us to question telling the story of the American Civil Rights Movement as a triumph narrative.

The Scope Of The Prison Mailbox Rule, Caitlyn B. Switzer

Liberty University Law Review

Federal courts are filled with situations where an inmate might rely on the prison mail system to mail a document to the court. However, the prison mail system is notoriously unreliable. The prison mailbox rule was formed to provide a fair opportunity for inmates to personally mail a filing to the court before the expiration of the legally permitted time to file.

Federal Rule of Appellate Procedure 4(c) codifies the prison mailbox rule. It provides that an inmate’s appeal is considered filed with the clerk when the inmate delivers the filing to prison mail authorities. Prior to the Supreme Court’s …

The Right To The Copy: A Case For Applying Physical Takings Protection To Intellectual Property, Samuel S. Johnson

Liberty University Law Review

Perhaps the only exception to the rule that every rule has its exceptions is the law of unintended consequences. An example may be found in the Supreme Court’s 2020 ruling in Allen v. Cooper. Seeking to protect the rights of states against the federal judiciary, the Court ruled that states are immune from suit in federal court for copyright infringement. As a consequence, the only courts with jurisdiction over copyright infringement cases were summarily closed to copyright owners who found themselves the victims of state piracy of their works.

Copyright owners thus find themselves in a materially weakened position relative …

A Premier Paradigm Shift: The Impact Of Artificial Intelligence On U.S. Intellectual Property Laws, Dustin J. Corbett

Liberty University Law Review

Intellectual Property (IP) rights in the United States are constitutionally prescribed for the express purpose of encouraging human innovation. The patent and copyright systems fulfill this purpose by incentivizing authors and inventors to disclose their efforts to the public, which disseminates the knowledge to the public and thereby works to maximize the creative potential of humanity. In turn, human creativity has sparked successive eras of technological and industrial revolution, altering every aspect of human experience and redefining our everyday experiences and our vision of the future. However, the old guard of established industry—whose market is most susceptible to displacement by …

Parental Vaccine Refusal As A Fundamental Right: Why Jacobson V. Massachusetts Cannot Justify Rational Basis Review For Compulsory Vaccine Mandates Applied To Minor Children, Ethan Carlson

Liberty University Law Review

This Comment discusses the standard of review for compulsory vaccine mandates for minor children under the Fourteenth Amendment. In Jacobson v. Massachusetts, the Court deferred to the wisdom of the legislature when the Board of Health in Cambridge, Massachusetts, created a compulsory vaccine mandate for every adult in Cambridge. Although the Court did not create the rational basis test in 1905, subsequent Supreme Court cases increasingly deferred to the state police and state parens patriae powers in justifying compulsory vaccine mandates for both children and adults. Both state and federal court opinions following Supreme Court precedent have upheld vaccine mandates …

Greened Out: Improving Virginia's Recreational Marijuana Legislation, M Logan Blake

Liberty University Law Review

With the passage of the Cannabis Control Act in 2021, Virginia became the first southern state to legalize recreational marijuana. However, the operative language of the new possession statute, “a person 21 years of age or older may lawfully possess on his person or in any public place not more than one ounce of marijuana,” coupled with the lawful ability to grow four marijuana plants in residences, created interpretational issues. What would happen to a lawful home-grower whose marijuana plants produced more than one ounce? The General Assembly fixed this problem in a 2022 budget amendment that created a blanket …

Shuttering The New Star Chamber: Toward A Populist Strategy Against Criminal Equity In The Family Court, David N. Heleniak

Liberty University Law Review

Representing a return to criminal equity, the American domestic violence restraining order system evokes the Anglo-American cultural memory of the Star Chamber. Turkey’s recent withdrawal from the Istanbul Convention, the Council of Europe’s counterpart to the United States’ Violence Against Women Act, is part of a larger populist opposition to “gender ideology” that is unlikely to take hold in the United States. Hopefully, however, it will inspire a populist movement in the United States that draws upon a commitment to traditional notions of due process and the preservation of parent–child relationships to put an end to at least some of …

#Nofilter: How Discovery Filter Teams Breach Privilege Rights And Why They Require Stricter Regulation, Kelly Murray

Global Business Law Review

This note examines the Supreme Court’s substantial need to weigh in on how filter teams should be used given current circuit splits and identifies several best practices to remedy the issues they currently present. Part I discusses the principal issues for which filter teams are scrutinized. Namely, numerous district courts hold that filter teams provide the government with the unfair advantage of determining which materials from their opposing counsel are privileged. This often leads to an overly broad inclusion of privileged documents, which can violate defendants’ Sixth Amendment rights to a fair and complete trial. Some courts even go so …

Corporate Governance And The Audit Function In Jordan And The Uk: A Comparative Perspective, Bashar Malkawi

Global Business Law Review

Superior corporate governance forms the bedrock of a prosperous economy. An integral component of outstanding corporate governance is the role of transparent, accurate and freely available information with respect to a company’s books and records. Numerous stakeholders including current and potential investors, business partners, employees, regulators and the public, rely on the integrity of the financial reporting. The law on external auditors in Jordan has undergone significant improvement, yet substantial gaps exist between current law and best practices. The Article focuses on the role of the auditor in ensuring superior corporate governance. The goal of this Article is to assess …

The Effect Of Information On Blame Attributed To Four Entities In A Police Shooting, Pauline Meyer

Student Theses and Dissertations

Police shootings continue to negatively impact the public perception of police. When it comes to attributing blame in a police shooting, both internal and external factors affect how much blame a person places on the entities involved. One hundred and twenty Arkansas State undergraduate students enrolled in a psychology or criminology course were randomly assigned to one of the three type of information groups: the episodic, thematic-pattern of violence (TPV), or the thematic-police reform (TPR) group, and then read about the Stephon Clark shooting in 2018. Participants attributed blame scores to the four entities involved: Stephon Clark, the police chief, …

Moral Panics And Politicians Who Create Them: A Comparative Historical Analysis Of The Crack-Cocaine And Methamphetamine Epidemics In The United States, Sasha Nicole Burdsal

Student Theses and Dissertations

This study compares two widely known drug epidemics: the crack-cocaine epidemic and the methamphetamine epidemic that has shifted our criminal justice system and societies within the last 40 years. The research is conducted utilizing a qualitative content analysis, with a concentration on the rhetoric of politicians who create a moral panic around any specific drug when beneficial to them. Racial disparity demonstrated through inconsistent sentencing and mistreatment of individuals is investigated, along with the militarization of police as ordered by government officials. The War on Drugs – a war that can never be won – is thoroughly reviewed to elucidate …

The Right Of Publicity: A New Framework For Regulating Facial Recognition, Jason M. Schultz

Brooklyn Law Review

For over a century, the right of publicity (ROP) has protected individuals from unwanted commercial exploitation of their identities. Originating around the turn of the twentieth century in response to the newest image-appropriation technologies of the time, including portrait photography, mass-production packaging, and a ubiquitous printing press, the ROP has continued to evolve along with each new wave of technologies that enable companies to exploit peoples’ images and identities for commercial gain. Over time, the ROP has protected identities from misappropriation in photographs, films, advertisements, action figures, baseball cards, animatronic robots, video game avatars, and even digital resurrection in film …

America Is Tripping: Psychedelic Pharmaceutical Patent Reforms Fostering Access, Innovation, And Equity, Quentin Barbosa

Brooklyn Law Review

A resurgence in federally approved psychedelic research has spawned the Psychedelic Renaissance, and with each study it becomes increasingly clear that psychedelics have the potential to revolutionize mental health treatment. However, if Congress fails to reform the industry’s patent procedures, threats to innovation in the budding field of psychedelic medicine will manifest in their ugliest form. Psychedelics are a class of hallucinogenic drugs that primarily trigger substantially altered states of consciousness, including psychological, visual, and auditory changes. Medical research on psychedelics has produced staggering results that indicate psychedelics have the potential to be significantly more effective in treating mental illnesses …