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The Catholic University of America, Columbus School of Law

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Articles 1 - 14 of 14

Full-Text Articles in Common Law

A Matter Of Public Concern: Eliminating The Public Concern Test To Safeguard New York Times Co. V. Sullivan, Alyssa T. Calcerano Apr 2025

A Matter Of Public Concern: Eliminating The Public Concern Test To Safeguard New York Times Co. V. Sullivan, Alyssa T. Calcerano

Catholic University Law Review

In recent years, Justices Thomas and Gorsuch have expressed a strong interest in reconsidering, and perhaps overruling, the landmark defamation decision, New York Times Co. v. Sullivan. The Court’s defamation jurisprudence has undergone many changes since the landmark case was decided, namely, the Court has since adopted a test known as the “public concern” test. Though adopted by only a plurality of the Court, the “public concern” test has been integrated into the defamation decisions of lower federal courts and state courts. This comment encourages the Court to abandon any push toward the wholesale abandonment of Sullivan and, instead, …


Delivery Drivers Deserve The Whole Package: Package Delivery Drivers And The Transportation Worker Exemption Of The Federal Arbitration Act, Evan Kelly Feb 2025

Delivery Drivers Deserve The Whole Package: Package Delivery Drivers And The Transportation Worker Exemption Of The Federal Arbitration Act, Evan Kelly

Catholic University Law Review

Package delivery is a ubiquitous part of modern American life, and package delivery driving is a fast-growing occupation in the United States. These drivers work long hours in a fast-paced, highly regimented environment, and because of arbitration agreements they are made to sign, they often cannot go to court to settle disputes with their employers. Under the Federal Arbitration Act (FAA), these arbitration agreements are generally “valid, irrevocable, and enforceable.” However, the FAA includes an exemption (known as the “Transportation Worker exemption”) that excludes arbitration agreements in “contracts of employment for seamen, railroad employees, or any other class of worker …


The First Amendment, Discrimination, And Public Accommodations At Common Law, Adam J. Macleod Jan 2024

The First Amendment, Discrimination, And Public Accommodations At Common Law, Adam J. Macleod

Scholarly Articles

Many recent cases of constitutional conflict have pitted First Amendment liberties of speech, religious exercise, and association against nondiscrimination rules and policies, especially laws governing public accommodations and public forums. To resolve these cases and to understand how civil rights fit together, courts and scholars need a logical and satisfying account of the foundations of public accommodations law. But the law seems to be confused and legal scholars are of different minds. Some assert that proprietors who open their premises and services to the public have no right at common law to exclude or refuse service to anyone. Others find …


A How-To Guide For When Your Favorite Meme Account Is Defamed: Involuntary Public Figures In Defamation, Privacy, And Intentional Infliction Of Emotional Distress Law, Elizabeth Mcmullen Jan 2024

A How-To Guide For When Your Favorite Meme Account Is Defamed: Involuntary Public Figures In Defamation, Privacy, And Intentional Infliction Of Emotional Distress Law, Elizabeth Mcmullen

Catholic University Journal of Law and Technology

The world we live in today has changed infinitely since the inception of our Constitution and early legal doctrine. Our Founding Fathers could never have predicted that we would one day live in a world where anyone living in any corner of the globe could garner millions of followers. Whether someone finds him or herself to be particularly proficient in writing Harry Potter fan fiction or to be the best creator of memes with an American Girl Doll focus, ordinary citizens could find themselves suddenly jolted out of quiet anonymity by one unexpectedly viral post. Despite years of Instagram micro-fame, …


America’S Two Pastimes: Baseball And Constitutional Law; Review Of Adrian Vermeule, Common Good Constitutionalism, Paul J. Larkin Oct 2023

America’S Two Pastimes: Baseball And Constitutional Law; Review Of Adrian Vermeule, Common Good Constitutionalism, Paul J. Larkin

Catholic University Law Review

For the last 50 years, the two prevailing constitutional interpretation methodologies have been Originalism and Living Constitutionalism. The former treats the Constitution almost like a contract and demands that interpreters focus on the ordinary contemporary understanding its terms would have received when they became law. The latter treats the Constitution as a charter for the structure of a new government that would survive and mature as needed to protect both the nation and its people as new threats to government and civil liberties arise. Professor Adrian Vermeule’s book Common Good Constitutionalism offers a new approach to constitutional interpretation, one that …


Climate Discrimination, Duane Rudolph Mar 2023

Climate Discrimination, Duane Rudolph

Catholic University Law Review

This Article focuses on the coming legal plight of workers in the United States, who will likely face discrimination as they search for work outside their home states. The Article takes for granted that climate change will have forced those workers across state and international boundaries, a reality dramatically witnessed in the United States during the Dust Bowl of the 1930s. During that environmental emergency (and the devastation it wrought), workers were forced across boundaries only to be violently discriminated against upon arrival in their new domiciles. Such discrimination is likely to recur, and it will threaten the livelihoods of …


Enforcing Constitutional Rights Through Computer Code, Steve Young Jan 2018

Enforcing Constitutional Rights Through Computer Code, Steve Young

Catholic University Journal of Law and Technology

Lawmaking and enforcement has advanced since Hammurabi first wrote out his legal code thousands of years ago. Today, the American legal system relies on legislatively-enacted federal, state, county, and municipal legal codes, agency-created regulations, the judge-made common law, and various law enforcement entities. This can be a confusing and complex system of rules and their explanations with varying degrees of enforcement. Blockchain technology is an automatic and efficient alternative to written codes that must be humanly-enforced. There has been limited scholarly interest in the implications of a legal application of blockchain technology to a political system but there have been …


Alexa, Who Owns My Pillow Talk? Contracting, Collaterizing, And Monetizing Consumer Privacy Through Voice-Captured Personal Data, Anne Logsdon Smith Jan 2018

Alexa, Who Owns My Pillow Talk? Contracting, Collaterizing, And Monetizing Consumer Privacy Through Voice-Captured Personal Data, Anne Logsdon Smith

Catholic University Journal of Law and Technology

With over one-fourth of households in the U.S. alone now using voice-activated digital assistant devices such as Amazon’s Echo (better known as “Alexa”) and Google’s Home, companies are recording and transmitting record volumes of voice data from the privacy of people’s homes to servers across the globe. These devices capture conversations about everything from online shopping to food preferences to entertainment recommendations to bedtime stories, and even phone and appliance use. With “Big Data” and business analytics expected to be a $203 billion-plus industry by 2020, companies are racing to acquire and leverage consumer data by selling it, licensing it, …


Of Trees, Vegetation, And Torts: Re-Conceptualizing Reasonable Land Use, L. Daniel Bidwell Jan 2014

Of Trees, Vegetation, And Torts: Re-Conceptualizing Reasonable Land Use, L. Daniel Bidwell

Catholic University Law Review

No abstract provided.


Prosecution Appeals Of Court-Ordered Midtrial Acquittals: Permissible Under The Double Jeopardy Clause?, David S. Rudstein Jan 2012

Prosecution Appeals Of Court-Ordered Midtrial Acquittals: Permissible Under The Double Jeopardy Clause?, David S. Rudstein

Catholic University Law Review

No abstract provided.


Response: There Is No Common Law Of Severability, Kevin C. Walsh Jan 2012

Response: There Is No Common Law Of Severability, Kevin C. Walsh

Scholarly Articles

In this solicited response to The New General Common Law of Severability, I first offer an interpretation of Ayotte and subsequent Supreme Court decisions as continuous with existing doctrine instead of a departure from it. I then suggest that much of Scoville’s evidence for a federalization of severability doctrine is better viewed as evidence of doctrinal looseness rather than of doctrinal change. I conclude by returning to the lessons of severability’s doctrinal history, suggesting that the prehistory of severability doctrine may supply a better guide for how courts should deal with problems of partial unconstitutionality in the future.


Cigarette Smoking As A Public Health Hazard: Crafting Common Law And Legislative Strategies For Abatemen, George P. Smith Ii Jan 2007

Cigarette Smoking As A Public Health Hazard: Crafting Common Law And Legislative Strategies For Abatemen, George P. Smith Ii

Scholarly Articles

The debate over when, and to what extent, the government may regulate public smoking, is a contentious one of great moment. The point at which the line will be drawn with regard to an individual's right to smoke in public is narrowing. This right may stop at public restaurants and the workplace; or it may reach as far as public stadia, outdoor gathering spots and public streets. In 2006, one report showed 461 municipalities in thirty-three states and the District of Columbia, had adopted one-hundred percent smoke-free coverage in restaurants, bars or workplaces; and 135 municipalities had one-hundred percent coverage …


In The Tribunal Of Conscience: Mills V. Wyman Reconsidered, Geoffrey R. Watson Jan 1997

In The Tribunal Of Conscience: Mills V. Wyman Reconsidered, Geoffrey R. Watson

Scholarly Articles

In this Article, Professor Watson explores the historical record surrounding Mills v. Wyman, 20 Mass (3 Pick) 207 (1825), one of the leading American cases on moral obligation in contract law. In Mills, the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court refused to enforce a father's promise to compensate a Good Samaritan who had cared for the father's dying son. Professor Watson combs the historical evidence--court records, census reports, genealogical data, probate records, military rolls, and so on-and argues that the Mills court got both the facts and the law wrong. According to Professor Watson, the father did not make the promise in …


Aesthetic Nuisance: Re-Educating The Judiciary, George P. Smith Ii Jan 1995

Aesthetic Nuisance: Re-Educating The Judiciary, George P. Smith Ii

Scholarly Articles

This article discusses how the traditional common-law refusal to grant relief for an aesthetic nuisance has been eroded by various case decisions. The author suggests an “average person” standard for the judiciary to follow for recognizing an aesthetic nuisance.