Civil Rights and Discrimination Commons^™

The Disparate Impact Of The California Wildfires On Minority Communities: Exposing Environmental Injustice & Zoning Flaws, Jasmyn Hardin

University of Cincinnati Law Review

No abstract provided.

Outbound Investment Restrictions And International Law’S Challenge, Harlan Grant Cohen

Seattle University Law Review

The Outbound Investment Rule, restricting U.S. investment in certain Chinese advanced technology sectors, has largely been portrayed as an incremental measure, a modest extension to fill loopholes in the existing investment screening regime. But while perhaps the logical next step in the securitization of the economy, the Outbound Investment Rule actually reflects a momentous shift in the relationship between governments and business, one playing out in the United States and around the world and worth attention. Unlike traditional investment screening, the Outbound Investment Rule operates like a sanctions regime, designed not to protect the U.S. economy, but to hamper the …

Resilient Dispute Resolution Systems For International Energy Conflicts, Guillermo J. Garcia Sanchez

Seattle University Law Review

Energy-related conflicts are on the rise, spanning diverse issues such as the impacts of rare mineral mining on local communities, the impacts of sanctions on energy investments due to the Russia-Ukraine war, and the impacts of expanded subsidies on the electric vehicle and solar panel industries. Increasingly, companies, communities, and governments are clashing over the challenges of pursuing disparate and sometimes competing energy policies. This Article argues that dispute resolution mechanisms in the energy investment sector must be fundamentally rethought. Traditional semi-adjudicatory models, which focus on winners and losers, fail to accommodate the complex and multifaceted nature of contemporary energy …

Restricting Data Flows Is A Sign Of Weakness, Nikolas Guggenberger

Seattle University Law Review

There has been a seismic shift in American attitudes toward the free flow of data across borders.  In less than a decade, the United States has transitioned from condemning barriers to digital trade to constructing a digital fortress of its own. It passed legislation requiring TikTok’s parent company to divest its U.S. operations or face a nationwide ban affecting 170 million U.S. users, citing national security concerns about its ties to China and the potential for data surveillance and content manipulation. Upon legal challenge by TikTok on First Amendment grounds, the Supreme Court affirmed the ban’s constitutionality. Recent federal legislation …

Product Nationality And Corporate Identity, Trang (Mae) Nguyen

Seattle University Law Review

Global supply chains have long depended on a deceptively technical device: the attribution of a “nationality” to goods. A trade law principle, rules of origin assign products an “economic passport” that governs how they are treated at the border, including what markets they may enter and which tariff rates apply. In recent years, however, product nationality has taken on a new and far more ambitious role. As U.S. trade policy increasingly intersects with national security and human rights policy, policymakers rely on nationality-based measures to police supply chain linkages, curb geopolitical issues, and discipline firms for their links to forced …

Global Supply Chain Resilience In Emerging Technologies: A Case Study Of Bitcoin Mining, Kishanthi Parella, Carla L. Reyes

Seattle University Law Review

The United States has put into motion bold plans in critical and emerging technologies to bolster its national and economic security.  For example, the federal government created a national bitcoin strategic reserve and a stockpile of other cryptocurrency; while several states have committed to or are considering similar goals.  However, the security of these reserves is dependent on two types of supply chains within the Bitcoin mining industry: analogue supply chains, relating to the physical components needed for Bitcoin mining, and data supply chains, relating to the complex and layered logistical network of actors that create input into the software …

Volume 49 Masthead

Seattle University Law Review

Volume 49 Masthead

A Comparative Study Of Chinese And American Approaches To Shaping International Outer Space Law And Norms, Ariel G. Silverman

Seattle University Law Review

This article explores convergences and divergencies in the United States and PRC’s responses to the stalemate in the United Nations over the future of outer space resource governance. I do so by systematically analyzing these leading space-faring nations’ policy-positions and tactics deployed to shape norms around three substantive areas of outer space resource governance: rights of ownership and scope of utilization of space resources, mechanization of the “benefits sharing” principle, and the rights and responsibilities of the private sector. I theorize that these leading space-faring nations have adopted divergent approaches due to their differing historical relationships with international law and …

Table Of Contents

Seattle University Law Review

Table of Contents

Third-Party Funding: Balancing Transparency, National Security, And Access To Justice, Victoria Shannon Sahani

Seattle University Law Review

Many lawmakers who have recently become aware of the multi-billion-dollar global third-party funding industry are raising new national security concerns that further complicate preexisting, longstanding debates about transparency, disclosure, access to justice, and the best way to regulate third-party funding. In response, this Article briefly asserts three main points relating to the question of how best to regulate third-party funding. First, this Article explains the third-party funding industry, including its global regulatory landscape and how it serves three distinct populations: consumers, businesses, and law firms. Second, this Article explains that third-party funding is one tool that can help expand access …

The Field Of International Business Transactions Law, Kathleen Claussen

Seattle University Law Review

This Article studies the evolution of the scholarly subfield referred to as the law of “international business transactions” (IBT). It reviews data on academic articles, courses, textbooks and other signifiers of the growth of this research area. Beginning around 1960, scholars began to use the term “international business transactions” and by the 1980s, several law schools were offering a course by that title. A handful of dedicated textbooks soon followed. These data reflect a gradual increase in research on the topic of IBT, particularly in the United States, but also considerable diversity of subject matters covered by those works. The …

Kim Gyeong-Seok And The Origins Of Northeast Asia’S Corporate Accountability Movement For War And Colonialism, Timothy Webster

Seattle University Law Review

For the past three decades, a transnational reparations movement has unfolded across Northeast Asia. Hundreds of victims—assisted by attorneys, academics, and activists—seek remedies from Japan for various atrocities committed during World War II, colonialism, and other historical injustices.  They press their claims in street protests, legislative hearings, dramatic performances, and other fora.  The “comfort women” are the best known of these claimants; their global redress campaign ex-tends from noisy protests outside of Japan’s embassy in Seoul, to mute statues in raucous boroughs of Berlin.  More obscure, though larger in number, were the roughly one million Koreans who performed forced labor …

Navigating Compliance In A Geopolitical Era: The Case Of Chinese Multinationals In The United States, Ji Li

Seattle University Law Review

This Article examines how Chinese multinational companies (MNCs) approach compliance in the United States amid deepening geo-political rivalry and intensified regulatory scrutiny. Drawing on original survey data, this Article maps variations in compliance structures, staffing, and governance mechanisms across Chinese firms and identifies key determinants such as industry-specific regulatory intensity, listing status, and organizational imprinting from headquarters. The analysis employs a dual institutional framework to explain how compliance systems emerge from the interplay between host-state regulatory demands and home-state institutional legacies, producing hybrid structures that blend local adaptation with headquarters-driven replication. Findings reveal that while certain compliance features—such as committee …

Volume 14 Masthead

American Indian Law Journal

No abstract provided.

Legal History: The Curious Case Of The Disappearing Unceded Lakota Territories, Sebastian F. Braun

American Indian Law Journal

This Article discusses whether the Lakota Nation still has title to the unceded territories outlined in the Treaty of 1868. While many accounts focus on the supposed diminishment of the Great Sioux Reservation, the question of the unceded lands has largely been forgotten. It has renewed relevance in the context of the Dakota Access Pipeline, which crosses the lands. From a broader perspective, the case raises questions about how history is understood, constructed, and selected in American Indian Law cases. Most legal cases, especially those concerning treaty rights, are rooted in an interpretation of history; if that history is misinterpreted …

Expansion Of Federal Benefits To Non-Native Adopted Children, Anna-Grace Hockensmith

American Indian Law Journal

There is palpable tension between tribal sovereignty and federal administrative control in the distribution of federal benefits to members of Tribal Nations. This tension is felt by adopted non-Native children who might struggle to receive federal benefits even though the tribe of their adopted parent(s) has accepted them as a member. This Note explores how adoption of a non-Native child by a tribal member intersects with tribal membership and whether that membership should be enough for the child to receive federal benefits.

The Note discusses four main topics, including: (1) tribal membership, adoption, and current federal enrollment criteria; (2) an …

Beyond Icwa: Within Family Court Systems, Mixed Indigenous Families Confront Ongoing Jurisdictional Violence, Nis Wilbur

American Indian Law Journal

Mixed Indigenous families (MIFs) navigating parental custody in the United States can find themselves trapped in a Battleship®-style jurisdictional maze, where tribal, state, and federal authorities collide unpredictably. This legal mess threatens to separate children from their tribal communities, undermines tribal sovereignty, and can force families into years of costly litigation. The problem is rooted in centuries of white supremacist law and policy that systematically dispossess tribes of culture and self-governance: from the Marshall Trilogy to the boarding school era and harmful adoption schemes. Today, legal frameworks like the UCCJEA remain insufficient as they minimize or ignore tribal civil jurisdiction, …

Table Of Contents

American Indian Law Journal

No abstract provided.

Workers’ Compensation Codes In American Indian* Tribal Nations, Autumn N. Siegel

American Indian Law Journal

This Article examines various Tribal Nations’ experiences in developing their own workers’ compensation systems using a comparative law and legal development approach, including direct interviews with a diverse range of tribal members. Tribal Nations’ self-created workers’ compensation codes predominantly rely on local models and expertise to establish and operate their systems. However, Tribal Nations also infuse their own cultural values into their codes, incorporating tribal perspectives and priorities such as valuing traditional medicine and peace-making alternative dispute resolution, providing more generously to volunteers, and incorporating return-to-work programs into their workers’ compensation systems. Some Tribal Nations also find it necessary to …

U.N.Masking American Exceptionalism: How International Frameworks Can Inform American Indian Policy, Kaitlin Reese

American Indian Law Journal

“U.N.masking American Exceptionalism: How International Frameworks Can Inform American Policy,” serves primarily to examine and criticize how American case law, such as Johnson v. M’Intosh, has been used in foreign courts to justify the Doctrine of Discovery and how, despite many other courts eventually acknowledging it as a harmful rule of law in meaningful ways, the United States has done no such thing. This Article walks through not only the legal cases both at home and abroad, but also delves into the historical background that led up to Johnson, examines the cases abroad that integrate the Doctrine of Discovery and …

The Tribal Rules Of Evidence, Nicole Morote

American Indian Law Journal

Rules of evidence shape litigation practice across the country. In this sense, they govern the truth as it enters the court. Legal scholarship has yet to study tribal approaches to evidence— an area with tremendous promise for legal practitioners and evidence rulemakers alike.

This Article is the first to do so. It analyzes an array of tribal evidence codes across the United States. It reveals three frameworks that describe tribes’ approaches to the Federal Rules. In doing so, it offers a modest contribution to the nascent intersection between Tribal law and evidence studies: crucial insight into tribal systems’ unique needs, …

Advancing The Rights Of Nature: Lessons From Sauk-Suiattle V. City Of Seattle, Harry S. Katz

American Indian Law Journal

Advocates for the “rights of nature” seek recognition of legal rights for natural elements such as mountains, rivers, and non-human species as a means of protecting the environment. In the United States, Tribal Nations have been at the forefront of this nascent movement. In a 2022 Washington state case, the Sauk-Suiattle Indian Tribe sued the City of Seattle, alleging that the City’s hydroelectric dams on the Skagit River infringe upon the rights of salmon. Those rights, they claim, include the salmon’s rights to exist, flourish, regenerate, and evolve. The case, known as Sauk-Suiattle Indian Tribe v. City of Seattle, …

Native History Is United States History: How United States History Censorship Leads To Passive Acceptance Of Racial Discrimination And Furthers The Decline Of Tribal Sovereignty, Nickolasa A. Jackson

American Indian Law Journal

Native stories are embedded in the United States Constitution, property law, and the nation’s legal and political framework, but education frequently omits these truths. Such erasure perpetuates misunderstanding, invisibility, and hostility toward Native communities, obscuring the reality that the United States was built through the dispossession, coercion, and suffering of Indigenous Peoples. Whitewashing history has allowed the nation to claim moral virtue and industriousness while denying the foundational role of Indigenous Peoples. The Article emphasizes that Native rights, whether land, water, or other treaty-protected entitlements, as well as inherent rights such as tribal sovereignty, are not charitable or discretionary; they …

The Next Frontier Of Environmental Advocacy, Center For Rights And Justice (Crj), Alexander Reinert, Wilson Dunlavey, Raya Salter, Dr. Maria Antonia Tigre

2025 Event Invitations

The Center for Rights and Justice invites you to hear from three experts on environmental litigation and policy in a panel discussion moderated by Professor Alex Reinert. The discussion will be far-ranging, touching on domestic and international litigation, environmental policy, and climate justice.

• Wilson Dunlavey, a partner at the leading class action firm in the country, represents government entities, consumers, small businesses, workers, fishers, and residents in complex litigation against fossil fuel companies, automobile manufacturers, and other polluters.
  
  
• Raya Salter is the Founder and Executive Director of the Energy Justice Law & Policy Center and is an attorney, consultant, educator …

Clihhr And Other Institutions Publish Report "Resistance: Mura Struggle Against Canadian Potash Mining In Brazil's Amazon", Benjamin N. Cardozo School Of Law

Cardozo Law News Archive

The Cardozo Law Institute in Holocaust and Human Rights (CLIHHR), together with university legal clinics in Brazil, Canada, and the United States, published a report examining the impacts of a proposed Canadian potash mining project in the Brazilian Amazon and its potential risks to Indigenous communities and the environment.

Living Property, Joseph William Singer

Seattle University Law Review

The Supreme Court has increasingly defined property rights that are per se exempt from regulation in the absence of compensation, most recently in Cedar Point Nursery v. Hassid (2021) and Tyler v. Hennepin County (2023). The Court claims that it can identify property rights that are categorically protected from regulation by reference to history, tradition, and precedent. Yet this approach is oddly ahistorical; it is inconsistent with the fact that property law changed dramatically over U.S. history, as well as varying tremendously among the states. It is also inconsistent with the historical context of the Founding era. At that time, …

Table Of Contents

Seattle University Law Review

Table of Contents

The Roots Of Credit Inequality, Andrea Freeman

Seattle University Law Review

Debt oppression began before the United States became a country. Settlers enslaved Africans and Indigenous people, treating them as property that they could buy and sell for their economic and personal benefit. When enslavement became illegal, new economic systems and laws that included sharecropping, Black Codes, and Jim Crow kept Black people in servitude. Laws that prohibited enslaved people from owning property or selling goods to white people evolved into restrictions on Black people’s occupations and market participation, both formal and informal. When Black entrepreneurs overcame these obstacles and built wealth within Black business enclaves, white people enforced their racist …

“A Plain Denial”: Reclaiming Equal Protection In American Juvenile Law, Addie C. Rolnick, David S. Tanenhaus, Justin Iverson, Danielle L. Silvestri

Seattle University Law Review

Juvenile courts are based on the premise that children are different from adults and should therefore be treated differently. Children may be treated more informally by courts, punished for different purposes, and brought before the court for different behaviors. Since In re Gault, the Supreme Court has been clear that there are limits to how different juvenile courts can be. Juveniles are entitled to many of the same procedural protections as adult criminal defendants, although the Court has preserved some procedural differences where it has determined that their benefit is outweighed by the need to preserve the informality, flexibility, …

Redefining Section 230 Immunity, Lucas Dini

Seattle University Law Review

Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act has provided broad immunity to online platforms for third-party content which was the foundation for the internet's growth. However, the rise in the use of artificial intelligence (AI) to produce algorithms to curate content to users of online services has blurred the line between being a passive host of third party content and active editorial control. This Note examines the legal, policy, and constitutional implications of applying Section 230 immunity to platforms that use AI to curate and promote third-party content. This analysis argues that algorithmic promotion of third-party content constitutes a platform's …