Courts Commons^™

Mandating Fluoride: A Constitutional Exercise Of Police Power, Anita Jahangiri

Seattle University Law Review

This Note addresses the ongoing debate over fluoridation: the regulation of fluoride levels in public water systems. Extensive research indicates fluoridation, when regulated at the recommended concentration, is both safe and highly effective in preventing dental caries. Better known as cavities, dental caries is a preventable yet widespread health issue that disproportionately affects low-income populations. Reducing dental health disparities among economic classes is a pressing public health issue. Fluoridation is not merely a policy option, but a critical, proven tool to address such disparities and uphold the collective welfare of Washingtonians. This Note focuses on fluoridation as a public health …

Neurodiversity In The Courtroom: Expanding Jury Service Accessibility Beyond Physical Disability, Samantha L. Mabe

Seattle University Law Review

The Americans with Disabilities Act has required equal access to jury service for decades; however, efforts to accommodate jurors with disabilities have been slow to develop beyond some minor accommodations for physical disabilities. While neurodivergent people frequently struggle to navigate a world catered toward neurotypical people, jury service remains inaccessible for many neurodivergent people who need accommodations to attend trial and engage in jury deliberations. If courts and advocates do not consider how to develop accommodations to secure the service of neurodivergent jurors, they will miss out on the unique skillsets that neurodivergent people can bring to resolving disputes.

Disabled …

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 …

Overcrowding The System: Rethinking Juvenile Justice In Washington State, Mckenna White

Seattle University Law Review

The recent crisis at Green Hill School highlights the detrimental consequences of severe overcrowding in Washington State’s Juvenile Rehabilitation system—a problem exacerbated by the implementation of the JR to 25 legislation. This Note argues that the juvenile rehabilitation system, which is currently struggling to manage a wide age range of offenders, necessitates a fundamental rethinking of juvenile justice practices. By examining neurological research indicating continued brain development into the mid-twenties, along with the high prevalence of trauma among justice-involved youth, this Note proposes the creation of a dedicated third system of care within the Department of Children, Youth, and Families …

The Perlmutter Center For Legal Justice At Cardozo Law Secures Release Of Ernest Taylor After Serving 22 Years In Prison For A Minor Theft, Benjamin N. Cardozo School Of Law

Cardozo Law News Archive

Announcement of the Perlmutter Center securing Ernest Taylor's release after resentencing.

Addressing The Root Of Housing Insecurity: Washington Should Divest From “Crime-Free” Housing Programs, Sarah Cerdena

Seattle University Law Review

Crime-Free Rental Housing Properties (CFRHPs) have proven to be an ineffective and inequitable approach to public safety. Often, tenants in these properties are evicted—at times, extrajudicially—as a result of conduct that does not rise to violations of their lease provisions, much less criminal behavior. By placing extraordinary power in the hands of local law enforcement to carry out these ordinances, CFRHPs predictably pose significant harm to Black and Latinx communities, survivors of domestic violence, disabled tenants, and low-income tenants generally. Recently, the Washington State Supreme Court grappled with the tensions arising between CFRHPs and the enforcement of Washington landlord-tenant law. …

Volume 49 Masthead

Seattle University Law Review

Volume 49 Masthead

Esg Investing Breaches Erisa Fiduciary Duties? A Closer Look At Spence V. American Airlines, Inc., Eric Chin-Ru Chang

Seattle University Law Review

In Spence v. American Airlines, Inc., the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Texas found that American Airlines breached its fiduciary duties due to BlackRock’s ESG investing practices. Contrary to some reports suggesting that the ruling prohibits ESG investing under ERISA, a closer look at the ruling shows that the court only targeted American Airlines’ failure to manage conflicts of interest appropriately, rather than the legality of ESG investing itself. In light of the intensifying ESG backlash in the United States, this Article cautions against further restrictive measures on ESG investing. Such measures would exacerbate the widening …

Women In Robes 10-28-2025, Roger Williams University School Of Law

School of Law Conferences, Lectures & Events

No abstract provided.

Brief Of Amicus Curiae Lindsay And Matt Moroun Religious Liberty Clinic In Support Of Plaintiff-Appellant, John A. Meiser, Meredith Holland Kessler

Court Briefs

No. 25-5641
Roderick E. Theis, II v. InterMountain Education Service District Board of Directors

On Appeal from the United States District Court for the District of Oregon
No. 2:25-cv-00865-HL

From the Introduction

The First Amendment promises religious believers, of all faiths, the right “to participate on equal terms” in public life. Rosenberger v. Rector & Visitors of Univ. of Va., 515 U.S. 819, 852–53 (1995) (Thomas, J., concurring). The Supreme Court has repeatedly rejected the idea that individuals sacrifice those rights by accepting government employment. See, e.g., Pickering v. Bd. of Educ. of Twp. High Sch. Dist. 205, …

Law School News: Seeing Justice Up Close 10-22-2025, Alli-Michelle Conti

Life of the Law School (1993- )

No abstract provided.

Law School News: Rwu Law Student And Alum Honored By Justice Assistance For Their Commitment To Justice 10-22-2025, Helga Melgar

Life of the Law School (1993- )

No abstract provided.

Generative Suspicion And The Risks Of Ai-Assisted Police Reports, Andrew Guthrie Ferguson

Northwestern University Law Review

Police reports play a central role in the criminal justice system. Many times, police reports exist as the only official memorialization of what happened during an incident, shaping probable cause determinations, pretrial detention decisions, motions to suppress, plea bargains, and trial strategy. For over a century, human police officers wrote the factual narratives that shaped the trajectory of individual cases and organized the entire legal system.

This practice is about to change with the creation of AI-assisted police reports. Today, with the click of a button, large language models (LLMs), a type of generative AI using predictive text capabilities, can …

Take In Case Of Emergency: Reconciling Necessity Takings With The Original Meaning Of The Takings Clause, Tony Smith

Northwestern University Law Review

Does the Fifth Amendment’s Takings Clause permit the state to destroy property without compensation whenever it declares an emergency? The long-standing doctrine of necessity empowers the state to do exactly that.

Courts dating back to common law England have permitted governments to claim a privilege of necessity to avoid paying for private property they destroy in times of crisis. The privilege rests on the principle that the public good sometimes outweighs the harm the individual suffers. Today’s courts and academics stretch this principle to its limits, arguing necessity should be used as a vehicle for combating all manner of social …

What On Earth Is A Burden On Interstate Commerce?, Andrew Jordan

Northwestern University Law Review

What is a burden on interstate commerce? That’s an important question under the Dormant Commerce Clause’s Pike balancing test. But it’s a question whose answer has proven elusive. This shouldn’t be a surprise. After all, states disagree about what counts as a burden or a benefit, and how much weight each has. And there aren’t any obvious constitutional principles we can point to for resolving those disagreements. Recently, some scholars have tried to ground dormant commerce doctrine in economic cost–benefit analysis. The supposed virtue of that approach is that it is neutral as to competing preferences. Thus, for the Court …

Promising The First Amendment: (De)Regulating Speech In Higher Education, Max M. Schanzenbach, Kimberly A. Yuracko

Northwestern University Law Review

The war between Hamas and Israel has caused havoc in higher education. Amid student unrest, alumni pressure, congressional hearings, civil rights investigations, and student lawsuits, universities stand at a crossroads. The current situation, in which most private universities unevenly regulate student speech under ambiguous student codes, is not sustainable politically or legally. A tsunami of litigation and regulatory actions has already begun. One increasingly favored response is for private universities to more vigorously enforce existing codes or expand their scope. An alternative is for private universities to deregulate student expression and commit by contract to the First Amendment. This Article …

Rule Or Reason? The Role Of Balancing In Antitrust Law, Michael A. Carrier, Mark A. Lemley

Notre Dame Law Review Reflection

In this Essay, we argue that the proper test for antitrust’s rule of reason is a four-step, burden-shifting framework that ends with a balancing of the likely harms and benefits of particular conduct. One reason balancing has become rare even in circuits that permit it is that it seems hard. Antitrust is shot through with economic theory and evidence, and courts aren’t experts in economics. So they tend to look for shortcuts that allow them to resolve the case without having to apply that economic evidence to assess the likely net effect of a defendant’s conduct. But those shortcuts themselves …

Structurally Harmless: Why Brecht Should Apply On Collateral Review Of Structural Errors, Jaden M. Lessnick

Notre Dame Law Review Reflection

Even when a prisoner has overcome all of AEDPA’s requirements and the Supreme Court’s equitable bars to relief, the writ of habeas corpus may issue only as “law and justice” require. The Court has recognized in recent Terms that the habeas statute thus confers on courts discretion to deny relief notwithstanding the satisfactions of the statutory and equitable preconditions. This discretion, the Court has said, is not boundless. A judge may grant the writ only after considering the principles of finality and federalism. Whatever else that includes, the Supreme Court has made clear that a judge must apply Brecht’s …

The Jurisprudence Of Constitutional Entitlement, David Schraub

William & Mary Bill of Rights Journal

Lawyers are accustomed to thinking of constitutional law as a familiar binary: Either a given governmental policy or practice is constitutional and therefore permitted, or unconstitutional and forbidden. But not all constitutional laws are created equal. A state practice which may be constitutional in concept (such as the death penalty) may, in some or many applications, violate specific constitutional rules and become impermissible. When a policy which has been affirmed to be constitutional in general repeatedly runs up against problems as-applied, a legal tension emerges: can the state implement the policy or not? This dilemma illuminates a third constitutional category: …

The Future Of Virtual Proceedings In The Federal Courts, Jeremy Fogel, Mary S. Hoopes

Indiana Law Journal

The federal courts are notoriously hesitant to modify their procedures and policies. Much of this “small c” conservatism is driven by a concern that their rules be “trans-substantive” and suited to a wide range of circumstances. For years, they stubbornly resisted allowing remote proceedings and similar uses of technology in the courtroom because of concerns that permitting them could affect the quality of lawyering and decision-making, compromise the safety of jurors and witnesses, and diminish the public’s perception of the courts. The COVID-19 pandemic abruptly changed this, forcing judges to alter radically the way they conducted proceedings.

Nearly five years …

Rethinking Courtroom Presence In The Virtual Era, Jenia Iontcheva Turner

Indiana Law Journal

Technological innovation has made virtual appearances by criminal defendants increasingly common. These appearances have advanced efficiency but also raised questions about the scope of both the right and the duty of defendants to be physically present in court. Should judges, for example, be allowed to hold virtual arraignments, even if a defendant wishes to appear in person? Can defendants opt for virtual appearances at will? While courts are beginning to address these questions, they have yet to develop a coherent framework to evaluate when virtual appearances are constitutional and appropriate. This Article seeks to contribute to this project by examining …

Assessing Market Efficiency In Corporate And Securities Litigation, Charles Korsmo, Minor Myers

Indiana Law Journal

In recent decades, courts have increasingly looked to trading prices as evidence—often conclusive evidence—in high-stakes corporate law disputes over a company’s fair value. This development has been especially dramatic, and consequential, in Delaware. Where a stock trades in an efficient market, the logic goes, the prevailing trading price can be used to resolve any disputed issue of valuation. But this expedient comes with an unavoidable question: When is a market “sufficiently efficient” for a court to rely on it as a measure of value?

 Federal courts have long experience evaluating the relative efficiency of trading markets in the context of …

Laboratories Of Judicial Ethics: A Comparative Analysis Of Judicial Conduct Commissions In Tennessee, Rhode Island, And North Carolina, And Their Implications For Regulating The U.S. Supreme Court, Johnny Galloway

William & Mary Bill of Rights Journal

It is hardly necessary to recite the recent ethics controversies that have embroiled the Supreme Court. In the last several years, several revelations have rocked the Supreme Court and led members of Congress, President Joe Biden, and the public to question the Court’s ethical standards and impartiality. Whether the Court’s partiality and imprudence are real or perceived, recent developments like these have spurred calls for a binding code of ethics to be either adopted voluntarily by the Court or imposed involuntarily by congressional action. Given the fierce debate over ethics regulation of the U.S. Supreme Court, it is noteworthy that …

The Lone Dissent, Grant Christensen, Anne Mullins

Washington and Lee Law Review

What can be learned when a Supreme Court Justice decides to write a lone dissent? There exists a powerful set of incentives for Supreme Court opinions to achieve consensus. Although closely divided cases grab news headlines, unanimous opinions are actually the most commonly issued judicial alignment, and cases in which a single Justice dissents are the most unlikely. Despite voluminous academic discussion of judicial behavior, no legal scholarship has focused on the lone dissent. This Article is designed to insert consideration of lone dissenting opinions into the broader discussion of judicial behavior.

Looking at the set of Supreme Court opinions …

A Call For Canceling Compassionate Release And Restoring Federal Parole, Honorable Chief Judge C.J. Williams

Washington and Lee Law Review

The current federal sentencing scheme is a patchwork quilt of provisions that grant judges virtually unfettered and unreviewable discretion imposing sentences on the front-end and in granting compassionate release on the back end. It was not designed in the beginning to be this way. The advisory-only sentencing guidelines scheme we have now resulted from the Supreme Court’s finding that mandatory guidelines violated the Constitution. The recent sentencing reform movement—of which compassionate release is a significant part—has sought to find ways of ameliorating what is seen as the draconian result of the war on drugs. The question is whether granting Article …

Civil Appeals Mediation Program 2024 Mediation Colloquy: 50 Years Of Building Bridges Through Appellate Mediation

Cardozo Journal of Conflict Resolution

On December 17, 2024, the Second Circuit Court of Appeals and its CAMP program hosted Justice Sotomayor to celebrate the 50th Anniversary of the establishment of CAMP. During the Colloquy, the 50th Anniversary CAMP documentary video was premiered.

Pleasure & Pain In Intellectual Property, Andrew Gilden

William & Mary Law Review

Intellectual property produces pleasure. IP laws incentivize investment in popular culture, helping to ensure the viability of entertainment industries and the steady production of our favorite shows, cherished brands, and beloved celebrities. Across IP-heavy industries, creators cite the joy of writing, composing, coding, and experimenting as a motivation for countless hours in the office, studio, or lab. Nonetheless, in a broad range of settings, and across several areas of IP, courts have responded with hostility to personal accounts of pleasure in IP disputes. When a defendant admits to using IP because they are fans of the plaintiff, or because they …

The Roberts Court Paradox, John C. P. Goldberg, Benjamin C. Zipursky

Fordham Law Review

As perhaps the most conservative Supreme Court of the past century, the Roberts Court regularly touts its commitment to traditional ideals, including the rule of law. Yet Trump v. United States seems ready to place presidents entirely or largely above the law by granting them absolute or near absolute immunity from criminal prosecutions for official conduct. And Trump is not a one-off: from judicial recusal to qualified immunity to due process decisions, the Court frequently seems to display indifference to values of accountability and impartiality that have long been thought integral to the rule of law. What is going on? …

Emotionally Unstable: Addressing Emotional Distress As A Concrete Injury In Data Breach Cases Post-Transunion, Anna P. Cox

Fordham Law Review

Data breaches and data breach litigation are exponentially on the rise. Plaintiffs whose information is stolen in a data breach often claim emotional distress for fear of future harm the data breach may cause. However, plaintiffs who bring suit in federal court must show that they have suffered an injury in fact for purposes of Article III standing before a federal court will exercise jurisdiction. The U.S. Supreme Court’s decision in TransUnion LLC v. Ramirez requires that plaintiffs who seek money damages under a theory of risk of future harm show that they have suffered a present concrete injury to …

Fixing The Fix: The Case For Unifying The Remedial Framework Of Apa Rulemaking Challenges, Dea Devlin

Fordham Law Review

Vacatur is the default remedy for successful administrative rulemaking challenges brought under the Administrative Procedure Act (APA). Yet its broad and sweeping effects raise critical questions regarding its appropriateness as a one-size-fits-all remedy. Unlike injunctive relief, which is subject to a rigorous heightened standard, and remand without vacatur, which has a comparable standard of its own, vacatur is routinely awarded without similar scrutiny, leading to inconsistencies in the judicial application of remedies in APA challenges.

Although vacatur can provide a plaintiff with relief, its award conflicts with underlying principles of equity and proportionality. In rulemaking challenges, vacatur can create regulatory …