Courts Commons^™

Pacific Islands And The U.S. Military: The Legal Borderlands Of The Environmental Movement, Sonia Lei

Seattle University Law Review

Climate change remains an urgent, ongoing global issue that requires critical examination of institutional polluters. This includes the world’s largest institutional consumer of petroleum: the United States military. The Department of Defense (DoD) is a massive institution with little oversight, a carbon footprint spanning the globe, a budget greater than the next ten largest nations combined, and overly generous exemptions to environmental regulations and carbon reduction targets. This Comment examines how this lack of accountability and oversight plays out in the context of three Pacific islands that have hosted U.S. military bases for decades. By considering the environmental impact of …

John Coxe's Exchequer Reports, William Hamilton Bryson

Law Faculty Publications

John Coxe was born circa 1695. He was the eldest son of Charles Coxe (c. 1661-1728), a bencher and treasurer of Lincoln's Inn and member of Parliament. John Coxe matriculated at Magdalen College, Oxford, on 23 January 1712, and he was admitted as a student at Lincoln's Inn on 27 January 1712; he was called to the bar in 1718, and made a bencher in 1743. On the death of his father in 1728, he inherited Nether Lypiatt, in Gloucestershire, an imposing manor house that his father had built in 1717. He was the Clerk of the Letters Patent from …

Supplemental Jurisdiction And § 1367: The Good, The Bad, And The Ugly, Wendy Perdue

Law Faculty Publications

Among the outstanding accomplishments of Judge Joseph F. Weis, Jr. was his work chairing the Federal Court Study Committee. Appointed by Chief Justice Rehnquist at the direction of Congress, the committee undertook a fifteen month study of the problems in the federal court system. The final report was issued in 1990 and made a series of recommendations addressing a broad range of topics including tax jurisdiction, narcotics prosecutions, habeas cases, sentencing reform, disability adjudications, and diversity jurisdiction, which the committee recommended eliminating entirely...

Nationality, Chiara Giorgetti

Law Faculty Publications

Nationality provides the foundation for the protection of a person, be it natural or corporate, under international law. As such, it is an essential and also a complex concept. It is essential because it provides the crucial link between the State and physical or juridical persons that ties the substantive principles of international investment law (IIL) to those individuals who can benefit from them, and thus also grants them access to their rights and remedies. It is also a complex concept because it is both a domestic and an international concept and not neatly regulated. International law recognizes the right …

"Who Are The Landlords Here?" - Group Rights In The Age Of Populism: Jewish Ownership Of Symbolic And Geographic Space In Israel, Meital Pinto

Cardozo International & Comparative Law Review

The world is witnessing the rise offar-right political parties. In Israel's recent national legislative election, Jewish Power (Otzma Yehudit), a far-right, anti-Arab political party, reached an unprecedented achievement. The party won six seats in the Knesset and its leader, Itamar Ben Gvir was appointed as the Minister of National Security. "Who are the Landlords Here?" was the party's election slogan; it signals that Jews should not only own the state but also its public space. This normative political statement aligns with the dominant attitude towards group rights for the Arab-Palestinian citizens of Israel. The dominant attitude perceives group rights in …

Taking Care Of Our Future: Considering Gender In Juvenile Reentry Reform, Delaney J. Dibble

Roger Williams University Law Review

No abstract provided.

From Andy Warhol To Barbie: Copyright’S Fair Use Doctrine After Andy Warhol Foundation V. Goldsmith, Niki Kuckes

Roger Williams University Law Review

No abstract provided.

From Margins To Center: Elevating The Voices Of Disadvantaged Families In Child Welfare, Jerron R. Wheeler

Faculty Articles

This essay sheds light on the systemic challenges faced by indigent, minority families within the child welfare system, using personal experiences from my time as a student at the University of Florida Levin College of Law as a lens. This essay aims to highlight the intersection of poverty, race, and the child welfare system, showing how these factors can hinder parents' ability to reunite with their children despite their best efforts. The essay seeks to underscore the urgent need for a more nuanced, multidisciplinary approach to child welfare advocacy that includes legal professionals, social workers, and health professionals working collaboratively …

Music, Mayhem, And A Mississippi: Still Burning-The Hope Of Smothering The Deleterious Effects Of Deliberate Indifference, Angela Dixon

Cardozo Journal of Equal Rights & Social Justice

The article argues that the deliberate indifference standard, as applied in Eighth Amendment jurisprudence, fails to adequately address inhumane and unconstitutional prison conditions, particularly in Mississippi. It critiques the standard for prioritizing prison officials' intent over objective conditions, allowing systemic neglect and racial disparities to persist. The analysis advocates for a shift toward an objective standard to better protect human dignity and hold prison administrators accountable.

Invisible Adjudication In State Supreme Courts, Adam B. Sopko

Publications

As the U.S. Supreme Court continues retrenching important constitutional rights, interest is shifting to state courts and constitutions to serve as a backstop. More and more, state supreme courts are at the center of some of our most important debates of law and policy, resolving questions concerning bodily autonomy, democracy, the environment, and more. The increased attention on state supreme courts highlights the complexity and nuance that attend these institutions and reveals our limited understanding of how they operate and influence society. This Article examines one such aspect of state supreme court practice: the shadow docket. While the U.S. Supreme …

Appoint Judge Ana De Alba To The Ninth Circuit, Carl Tobias

University of Richmond Law Review

The United States Senate must rapidly appoint Eastern District of California Judge Ana de Alba to the Ninth Circuit. This appellate tribunal is a preeminent regional circuit, which faces substantial appeals, has the largest complement of jurists, and clearly includes a massive geographic expanse. The nominee, whom President Joe Biden designated in spring 2023, would offer remarkable gender, experiential, ideological, and ethnic diversity realized primarily from serving productively with the California federal district, and state trial, courts after rigorously litigating for one decade in a highly regarded private law firm. For over fifteen years, she deftly excelled in law’s upper …

Merging The Bench, Bar, And Law Schools: How A Student Scholars Program Achieves Professional Identity Through Scholarly Writing, Mentorship, And Presentation, Joan Foley, Robin Boyle, Troy Kessler

Scholarly Works

This Article describes an innovative co-curricular program, the Student Scholars Program, that provides law students with an opportunity to present their scholarly papers before the bench, bar, and law school community. The Program aids law schools in meeting accreditation standards, such as the ABA Standards 302 and 303. Standard 302 requires law schools to achieve specific learning outcomes. Standard 303(b)(3) requires law schools to provide "substantial opportunities" for students to develop a "professional identity." This program aids schools in achieving these standards. Furthermore, this program increases interaction between students and the legal profession by creating episodic mentoring opportunities. Launched in …

Protecting Title Ix’S Promise: The Injustice Of Indifference In Title Ix Peer Sexual Harassment Cases, Emily Harvey

Emory Law Journal

Title IX of the Education Amendments of 1972 promised dramatic measures to address sex-based discrimination in education. In the context of civil suits against schools involving peer sexual harassment, these measures have yet to live up to their promise. Under the existing standard, student victims of peer sexual harassment must demonstrate that their educational institutions responded to their reports of harassment with “deliberate indifference.” This standard favors institutions over students as it imposes liability only in the most egregious cases. A deepening conflict between the circuit courts regarding what deliberate indifference actually requires compounds concerns over the standard’s ineffectiveness. Courts …

The End Of Arbitrage: Recent Chancery Court Decisions Highlight Delaware’S Need To Overturn Transkaryotic, Celia Golod

Emory Law Journal

Appraisal is a legislatively created right that affords a shareholder the ability to seek a judicial ruling on the fair value of their stock when their corporation undergoes a merger that they do not support. While this remedy is intended to protect shareholders from faulty merger negotiating, in the 2010s hedge fund petitioners in Delaware flooded the Delaware Chancery Court to use the remedy to make a profit—a tactic called appraisal arbitrage. While appraisal arbitrage theoretically acts as a back-end market check on controller abuses, appraisal litigation is lengthy and requires court resources. Further, appraisal arbitrage allows hedge fund petitioners, …

The Procedure Of Democratic Erosion, Kevin L. Cope, Mila Versteeg

Emory Law Journal

In recent years, several popularly elected leaders have moved to consolidate their power by eroding checks and balances. Courts are commonly the target of such power-consolidating reforms, though they are not the only such target. Depending on their nature, such reforms are variously characterized as eroding democracy or being illiberal. But while they may be substantively undemocratic or illiberal, these reforms tend to be procedurally lawful. That is, they do not subvert the constitution outright but work within the existing constitutional framework, with reformers either formally changing the constitution or seeking new interpretations.

Why would leaders pursuing undemocratic reform follow …

Democratic Backsliding In The American States: The Case Of Judicial Independence, Meghan Leonard

Faculty Publications – Politics and Government

With ever-increasing gridlock and polarization at the national level, many new policy changes in the U.S. have come at the state level, including legislation that takes the form of democratic backsliding by restricting the right to vote, limiting free speech and expression, and gerrymandering state and federal legislative districts. A key component missing from scholarly discussion of federalism and the erosion of electoral democratic norms is the effect of federalism on the structure of institutions within the states, particularly on judicial independence. In this article, I examine the relationship between measures of democracy and introduction of court-curbing legislation in the …

Altered Stakes: Reimagining The Amount-In-Controversy Requirement, Steven Gensler, Roger Michalski

Faculty Articles

Which state-law cases should Congress allow into federal court? Congress's answer has always been "only the big ones." This article revisits the choice to limit diversity jurisdiction to higher-value cases and critically examines how Congress has approached setting the amount threshold. It surveys alternate ways Congress could use case value to sort which cases make it into the diversity docket. We explore lotteries, auctioning access to the highest bidder, setting an amount in controversy maximum rather than the current minimum, pegging the jurisdictional amount to the minimum wage or the cost of a hamburger, employing relative measures that use multiples …

Virtual Justice?: An Analysis Of Access To Court For People Experiencing Homelessness, Kaitlin Humer

Theses and Dissertations (Comprehensive)

Homelessness in Canada remains a wicked social problem that often intersects with compounding forms of marginalization. The criminalization of homelessness and living life in the public sphere explain, in part, why this population is likely to interact with the criminal justice system. Following the onset of the pandemic, the courts were forced to modernize and embrace digital technologies to maintain operations. Now four years since these changes, there are no signs of turning back and the court system is continuing forward with a hybrid model. Despite this, there is minimal research on the impact of virtual court proceedings on people …

Is Jacobson V. Massachusetts Viable After A Century Of Dormancy? A Review In The Face Of Covid-19, Sawan Talwar

Touro Law Review

The COVID-19 pandemic has stretched us into the vast unknowns, emotionally, logically, politically, and legally. Relying on their police power, governments inched into the darkness of the powers’ fullest extent, leaving many to wonder whether the exercise of this power was constitutional. This Article examines the extent of the police power that both the federal and state governments have, and how Jacobson v. Massachusetts1 was the “silver bullet” for governments across the United States. Further, this Article provides an overview of police power, and the status of COVID-19 mandates. This Article additionally examines quarantine case law and provides an analysis …

Foreword: The Life, Work & Legacy Of Felix Frankfurter, The Justice Known As “Ff”, Rodger D. Citron

Touro Law Review

No abstract provided.

SchröDinger’S Dissent: The Hybrid Authority Of A Dissenting Opinion, Christina M. Frohock

Marquette Law Review

A dissenting opinion is the Schrödinger’s cat of authorities: both the law and not the law simultaneously. Courts and scholars often clarify that a dissenting opinion is not binding. Outside the universe of precedent, that authority defies easy description. Emerging from the pen of a judge wearing a black robe and acting in an official capacity, a dissenting opinion exhibits the form of the law. Yet, beneath that lofty sheen, a dissent exhibits the substance of commentary. A dissenting judge writes to undercut the law, providing a case law coda. This Article describes the traditional categories of authority, primary and …

Fair Cross Section And Tribal Jury Composition: Vawa 2022 Tribal Criminal Jurisdiction Series, Paula Hannaford-Agor, Steve Aycock

Faculty Publications

The Violence Against Women Reauthorization Act of 2013 (VAWA 2013) amended the Indian Civil Rights Act (ICRA) to ensure that non-Indian criminal defendants in Tribal courts have the right to a trial by an impartial jury that is drawn from sources that 1) “reflect a fair cross section of the community” and 2) “do not systematically exclude any distinctive group in the community, including non-Indians.” This requirement applies when a non-Indian who is criminally prosecuted in Tribal court faces possible imprisonment.

The implementation of these jury provisions has been a topic of discussion among the Inter-Tribal Working Group on Special …

Clearing Up The Confusion: A Three-Part Framework For Applying The Copyright Preemption Clause To Right Of Publicity Claims, Annie Seay

Emory Law Journal

To prevent conflicting state-law interests and federal copyright interests in a single claim, Congress enacted Section 301 of the Copyright Act of 1976—providing a two-prong test to determine when a state-law claim is preempted by federal copyright law. Though Section 301 appears to be a clear and simple test, it has proven to be anything but. Between 1986 and 2023, six of the thirteen circuit courts decided whether state-law right of publicity claims are preempted by federal copyright law using the Section 301 two-prong test, but each court’s analysis was vastly different from the other. Specifically, the Second, Third, Fifth, …

Behind Closed Doors: How Some Civil Settlements May Harm The Public Good, Madison Donahue-Wolfe

University of San Francisco Law Review

No abstract provided.

Criminal Courteaucracy, Evelyn Malavé

Faculty Publications

Scholars have increasingly recognized that criminal courts in the age of mass incarceration, particularly lower criminal courts, have effectively shifted from an adjudicatory system of justice to a managerial system of justice. Rather than adjudicating guilt or innocence, criminal courts are engaged in risk management and social control. However, literature on criminal courts has almost exclusively focused on judges, prosecutors, and defense attorneys, and their roles in the adjudication of criminal cases. This Article will focus instead on the managerial function of criminal courts by shining a spotlight on a less-scrutinized set of actors: criminal-court administrators.

Through an in-depth case …

The Consumer’S Choice To Boycott, Agnes Bresee

Seattle University Law Review

In the wake of employees losing their jobs upon voicing their political opinions concerning Israel, Harvard and Columbia law students’ job offers being rescinded upon expressing support for Palestine, and the names and social media profiles of individuals who support Palestine being collected and listed on Canary Mission, such backlash may leave many Americans wondering what form of resistance to settler-colonialist apartheid is acceptable in the twenty-first century. Recently, the movement to collectively boycott brands like Starbucks, which sued its Worker’s Union for a tweet expressing support for Palestine; Disney, which donated money to Israel; and McDonald’s, where a location …

What Mediation Romantics Can Learn From The Model T (Or Maybe The Chevrolet Trax), Nancy A. Welsh

Cardozo Journal of Conflict Resolution

When mediation was reintroduced to the U.S. in the 1970s, it was infused with a democracy-and-self-determination-enhancing, social justice ethos. As the process has been very successfully institutionalized, however, these ambitions have been scaled backalthough, at least arguably, certain "mediative elements" have actually been adopted (or coopted) by other procedural innovations. Perhaps it is time for those of us frustrated with the evolution of mediation to reconcile ourselves to the reality and value of a "basic" model of mediation designed for the sole purpose of getting parties from dispute to settlement-in much the same way that the basic model of a …

Table Of Contents, Seattle University Law Review

Seattle University Law Review

Table of Contents

A Different Approach To Agency Theory And Implications For Esg, Jonathan Bonham, Amoray Riggs-Cragun

Seattle University Law Review

In conventional agency theory, the agent is modeled as exerting unobservable “effort” that influences the distribution over outcomes the principal cares about. Recent papers instead allow the agent to choose the entire distribution, an assumption that better describes the extensive and flexible control that CEOs have over firm outcomes. Under this assumption, the optimal contract rewards the agent directly for outcomes the principal cares about, rather than for what those outcomes reveal about the agent’s effort. This article briefly summarizes this new agency model and discusses its implications for contracting on ESG activities.

Overseeing The Administrative State, Jill E. Fisch

Seattle University Law Review

In a series of recent cases, the Supreme Court has reduced the regulatory power of the Administrative State. Pending cases offer vehicles for the Court to go still further. Although the Court’s skepticism of administrative agencies may be rooted in Constitutional principles or political expediency, this Article explores another possible explanation—a shift in the nature of agencies and their regulatory role. As Pritchard and Thompson detail in their important book, A History of Securities Law in the Supreme Court, the Supreme Court was initially skeptical of agency power, jeopardizing Franklin Delano Roosevelt (FDR)’s ambitious New Deal plan. The Court’s acceptance …