Criminal Law Commons^™

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 …

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 …

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 …

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 …

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 …

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 …

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

Stuck Behind Bars: How Neglect Of The Mental Health Epidemic In U.S. Correctional Facilities Fuels Recidivism, Alayna Bhatti

Binghamton University Undergraduate Journal

The nation is failing to protect the rights of all citizens. Various studies and sources of academic research show that health services in U.S. prisons fall far below the standards for health services on the ‘outside world’. Legal scholar Joshua Price highlights how mentally ill inmates are victims of the U.S. criminal justice system. “A set of institutions disavowed responsibility, leading to conditions where their own demons got the better of them, with awful consequences. Did these institutions, or the people in them, love justice?” (Price, 501) How is justice really served when these inmates are destined to be trapped …

Incarcerated Youths In Canada And The United States: A Comparative Analysis, Grace A. Mastrangelo

Binghamton University Undergraduate Journal

Are children, who commit adult crimes, deserving of adult punishments? According to the United Nations, not if it harms their well-being. Article 3 of the Convention on the Rights of the Child (CRC) adopted by the United Nations in November 1989, states that 1) the best interests of the child should be the primary consideration of all state actions involving children, 2) governments must allot children the protection and care necessary for their well-being, and 3) governmental institutions, services, and facilities that deal with children must uphold adequate standards for the safety, health, and supervision of children. The CRC is …

Law And The (Re)Production Of Class Hierarchies In Egypt, Ahmad Abdelnaby

Theses and Dissertations

This thesis investigates how Egypt’s legal system, structurally tilted toward the elite and constitutive of inequality, has interacted with the country’s entrenched culture of class-based discrimination to produce a legal culture uniquely comfortable with hierarchy. It contends that class-based discrimination in Egypt has evolved from a social prejudice into a juridical condition, one in which the law does not merely mirror inequality but actively constructs and rationalizes it. By examining the intersection between legal structure and Egypt’s entrenched moral order of class-based discrimination, the study reveals a legal culture that no longer hides its hierarchies behind the veil of neutrality …

Policing Agency Data Trusts, Barry Friedman

Northwestern University Law Review

Policing agencies are indiscriminately collecting, retaining, and using vast quantities of personal data from people who are suspected of no unlawful conduct whatsoever. This has caused expressions of concern or caution from many quarters, including—notably—the Director of National Intelligence (DNI). In a declassified report, the Office of the DNI stated that massive amounts of data are being collected “on nearly everyone that is of a type and level of sensitivity . . . that could be used to cause harm to an individual’s reputation, emotional well-being, or physical safety.”

This practice of universal data collection presents a conundrum. As many …

Perlmutter Center's Derrick Hamilton, Reform Advocates Secure Passage Of New York State's Prison Justice Omnibus Package, Benjamin N. Cardozo School Of Law

Cardozo Law News Archive

Cardozo School of Law recognized Derrick Hamilton, Deputy Director of the Perlmutter Center for Legal Justice, and fellow criminal justice reform advocates for their role in advancing New York State's Prison Justice Omnibus Package. The legislation expands transparency, oversight, and accountability in state correctional facilities and reflects the advocacy of the End Prison Violence campaign.

Death Without Discretion: The Legality Of Mandatory Capital Punishment In Tanzania, Kimberly Austin

Human Rights Brief

The African Court on Human and Peoples’ Rights (AfCHPR) recently found that Tanzania’s mandatory death penalty by hanging violates the rights to life and dignity, guaranteed under Articles 4 and 5 of the African Charter on Human and Peoples’ Rights (the Charter). The Court’s judgment on June 26, 2025, in Tembo Hussein v. United Republic of Tanzania demanded rapid reform of Tanzania’s criminal laws in the name of preserving human rights.

Witness And Record On Complicity And Clergy Abuse, Scott Douglas Jacobsen, Amos N. Guiora, Katherine Archer, Hermina Nedelescu, Melanie Sakoda

Utah Law Faculty Scholarship

This first anthology assembles a multi-jurisdictional set of interviews to examine clergy abuse and institutional responses. The primary emphasis is Orthodoxy contexts and comparative discussion across religious settings. The core material consists of advocacy perspectives, firstperson accounts, and professional analyses. We need thoughtful clergy to speak out. The core problems: sexual abuse, spiritual abuse, power-asymmetrical relationships, and failure in impartial authoritative mechanisms of consequence, acting or even existing, in the first place.

“No One Can Hear You Scream”: Intimate Partner Violence And Family Justice Centers In Rural America, Jordan Stevenson

Legal Writing Competition Winners

In rural Kentucky, where cars are a necessity to traverse the rugged Appalachian Mountains and sparsely populated farmlands, “Barbara’s” abusive husband couldn’t let her get away—so he set her car aflame. Although census-defined rural areas contain only 20% of the United States population, some studies have found that intimate partner violence is more common and severe in rural areas than urban or suburban regions. 

People, especially women, in rural areas experience intimate partner violence in unique ways tied to their geographic and cultural context. Consequently, organizations, courts, and law enforcement struggle to meet the needs of affected populations in rural …

Computational Clinical Judgment: Predicting Risk With Large Language Models, Hannah Laqueur, Ryan W. Copus

Faculty Works

For seventy years, research has shown actuarial methods outperform clinical judgment. Yet actuarial approaches have limitations: they generally rely on structured data; cannot exploit rare case-specific details; have limited accuracy where outcome data are scarce or incomplete; and cannot offer case-level justifications. Large language models (LLMs) offer a different approach. Like actuarial methods, they aggregate information algorithmically, but like clinicians, they bring general knowledge and can provide case-level justifications. We prompted seven LLMs to assess rearrest risk from 113 parole hearing transcripts and compared their predictions to a machine learning model trained on 4,000 cases with 91 administrative variables. GPT-5 …

Incarcerated Persons’ Day In The Sun: Why Prisoners Should Have A Right To Fresh Air And Direct Sunlight, David Gross

Indiana Journal of Law and Social Equality

One word sums up the current state of a prisoner’s rights to fresh air and direct sunlight: conditionality. Because the rights are conditional in the United States, the sword of litigation hangs above prisons while residents are subject to violations of their limited constitutional rights. International law and medical research respectively recognize the right to, and need for, outdoor recreation. However, the grueling deliberate indifference standard debilitates attempts to change this reality in the courthouse. Thus, the impetus of change must come from the expansion of statutory rights. The right to fresh air and direct sunlight can be energized …

Vice, Morality, And Immigration: Critiquing And Examining The Application Of Legal Moralism In The Criminalization Of Immigrants For Vice-Related Crimes, Sofia Garcia

Indiana Journal of Law and Social Equality

No abstract provided.

Interrogating The Facts Of The Case, Anna Roberts

Indiana Law Journal

Buried within many criminal judicial opinions is the origin of their “facts”—the interrogation room. Criminal law pedagogy should expose this origin. If we treat the alleged product of interrogation as “what happened,” as criminal cases (and professors) sometimes do, we obscure the ways in which interrogators are trained to incriminate and to co-create confessions. We also risk obscuring subsequent layers of reporting by police, prosecutors, or judges.

Recent scholarly literature urges criminal law professors to teach differently, warning that we distort, sanitize, and bolster the carceral state when we erase governmental agents and bypass procedure. Treating the “facts of the …

Let’S Talk About The Biological Reality Of Sex, Baby, John Parsi

FIU Law Review

Sex is at the very core of individual identity. It affects the conception of the self and the way others view the individual. Every day, one’s sex may open and close doors, access to communities, and opportunities. Laws that define sex may affirm scientific knowledge and protect people, or threaten to unravel the facts and the reality of sex. A deep unmooring of sex is underway, and this Article aims to halt it. On day one of the current presidential term, January 20, 2025, President Trump signed an Executive Order on “Defending Women from Gender Ideology Extremism and Restoring Biological …

Cruel And Unusual Punishments And The Constitutional Status Of The Idea Of Progress, R. George Wright

FIU Law Review

To this point, we have developed some idea of what progress might have meant to the constitutional Framers, ratifiers, and later judges. We need not attempt the fruitless task of doing any precise head count of the variations of the concrete meaning, perceived likelihood, or value of progress among those parties. Doubtless some persons were more optimistic than others.178 But we need only assume that enough constitutional Framers, ratifiers, and judicial interpreters sufficiently shared any mainstream understanding of progress. Any such constitutional legitimacy of the idea, or the multiple ideas, of progress licenses the language of progress embraced in Trop.

Let’S Modify Safety Valve To Value Family Ties, Laura Ginsberg Abelson

Faculty Journal Articles and Book Chapters

Federal sentencing law has long struggled to balance the breadth of drug conspiracy liability with the prin­ciple of proportional punishment. The statutory “safety valve” provision, codified at 18 U.S.C. § 3553(f) and mirrored in the U.S. Sentencing Guidelines, was designed to provide relief from mandatory minimum sentences for low- level, nonviolent offenders. Yet its requirement that defendants disclose all information concerning the offense sometimes places family-member codefendants in an untenable position: they may avoid harsh penalties only by incriminating loved ones. The requirement also conflicts with other provisions of the Guide­lines that provide guidelines reductions, but not relief from mandatory …

Looking Forward, Reflecting Back: The Promise Of Dispute Resolution To Reform The Criminal Legal System, Cynthia Alkon

Faculty Scholarship

The criminal legal system in the United States is plagued by serious and systemic problems. There have been countless efforts at reform over the last many decades that have included changes in what is a crime, how crimes are punished, how prosecutors do their job, and changes in policing. Yet, despite these efforts, problems such as mass incarceration remain deeply embedded. It is easy to be swept up in pessimism when discussing the criminal legal system. Change is hard, at best incremental, and we seem to be in the beginning of an era of backlash against recent reforms. This is …

Eroding Protections: The Decline Of Miranda Rights And Its Impact On Due Process In Contemporary America, Autumn G. Pelfrey

Honors Undergraduate Theses

This thesis examines whether the protections established in Miranda v. Arizona, 384 U.S. 436 (1966), remain robust within contemporary criminal justice practice or have been weakened through doctrinal and practical developments. Miranda warnings were originally designed to mitigate the risk that coercive custodial interrogation would produce compelled or unreliable self-incrimination. Since 1966, however, both judicial interpretation and evolving law-enforcement practices have created a growing gap between Miranda’s formal legal promise and its practical operation in real-world interrogations.

The study evaluates the erosion of Miranda’s protective force through three primary mechanisms. First, doctrinal developments have narrowed Miranda’s scope by redefining …

The Limits Of "Punishment", Benjamin Levin

Scholarship@WashULaw

“Punishment” is an all-important category in criminal legal thought. Conventional scholarship adopts a narrow definition and focuses on justifying penal sanctions. Much critical work, in contrast, seeks to expand the category—defining more practices and institutions as “punishment.” In this Article, I argue that the focus on purposes of punishment and on what constitutes punishment distracts from a larger theoretical and practical issue—much of what the criminal system does probably isn’t punishment as such. Certainly, a carceral sentence is punishment. But what about a curfew requirement for a defendant awaiting trial? What about a restriction on gun ownership post conviction? What …