Jurisdiction Commons^™

Let The Sunshine In: Crafting Constitutional Transparency Regulations For Content Moderation, Caitlin Ring Carlson

Seattle University Law Review

In response to public concern about the impact of social media, legislators in some U.S. states have developed laws to regulate the process of content moderation. Many include mandatory transparency and disclosure requirements, some of which courts have already deemed an unconstitutional infringement on social media platforms’ right to free expression. This article explores the parameters for crafting constitutional social media transparency regulations using existing U.S. media policy and insights from recent legal challenges. The resulting analysis identifies content neutral transparency requirements that mandate the disclosure of purely factual, non-controversial information as those most likely to withstand judicial scrutiny. Specifically, …

This Is Not A Game: The Addictive Allure Of Digital Companions, Nizan Geslevich Packin, Karni Chagal-Feferkorn

Seattle University Law Review

Artificial Intelligence (AI) agents have become an inescapable part of modern childhood, reshaping education, leisure activities, entertainment, and social interaction. From AI-powered tutors that adapt to individual learning styles to emotionally responsive chatbots that simulate human companionship, these systems promise unprecedented personalization, cognitive stimulation, and social support. However, these benefits mask significant risks that remain unregulated and inadequately addressed.

Although adults are also susceptible to forming deep emotional bonds with AI companions—often trusting them as if they possessed genuine understanding and empathy—children are particularly vulnerable. Their misplaced trust can more severely distort social development, weaken critical thinking, and foster unhealthy …

Detention Of Foreign Seafarers And Vessels: Pollution Prevention Or Piracy?, Edward Maccoll, Marshall Tinkle

Ocean and Coastal Law Journal

The purpose of this Article is to interrogate the legal basis for holding foreign crewmembers against their will in connection with APPS prosecutions. Part I examines the underlying justification for prosecuting foreign vessel owners for foreign conduct under APPS. It first discusses the international anti-pollution regimen from which APPS emerged. Next, the Article explores the handful of cases in which APPS prosecutions have been challenged and for the most part sustained, and then offers a critique of the rationale for such prosecutions. Part II explores the lawfulness of the techniques to detain foreign crewmembers and press those crewmembers into the …

Statutes And Special Interests, Kirsten Matoy Carlson

Northwestern University Law Review

Who really decides what statutes say? Most Americans think that special interests play an outsized role in our lawmaking processes. Yet empirical studies have produced little evidence that special interests get everything, or even most of, what they ask for from Congress. This Article takes an innovative new approach to tackling the difficult question of how advocates influence legislation. It presents the first comprehensive empirical study of how advocates influence the law through amendments in the legislative process. The Article analyzes an original dataset of 2,137 witnesses and their testimony at referral hearings on 108 Indian-related bills in the 97th …

Legislative Reforms To End Lawfare By State And Local Prosecutors, Elizabeth Beske

Legislative Testimony & Comments

WASHINGTON, D.C. - The House Judiciary Subcommittee on the Constitution and Limited Government will hold a hearing on Tuesday, March 4, 2025, at 2:00 p.m. ET. The hearing, "Legislative Reforms to End Lawfare by State and Local Prosecutors," will examine the use of lawfare tactics by the Biden-Harris Administration to weaponize the rule of law against political opponents. It will further highlight legislative reforms to end politically motivated state and local prosecutions.

Is Snap Removal Unconstitutional?, Ryan H. Nelson

Pepperdine Law Review

In snap removal, an individual removes a civil action to federal district court from the courts of a state where one or more putative defendants are a citizen before any such putative defendant has been served with process. By removing before any forum-state defendants are served, the removal arguably eludes the forum-defendant rule, which prohibits removal based solely on the diversity or alienage jurisdiction statute if “any of the parties in interest properly . . . served as defendants is a citizen of the State in which such action is brought.” For years, federal judges and legal academics have disputed …

Through A Glass Darkly: How Securities Disclosures Give A Distorted View Of The Economy, Gerald F. Davis

Seattle University Law Review

Our understanding of the American economy often relies on stylized facts derived from mandatory disclosures by listed corporations. Data vendors like Standard & Poor’s vacuum up 10Ks and proxy statements into databases, and scholars distill these into tentative maps. This may have been adequate for a postwar economy centered on asset-heavy manufacturers, but it is increasingly out of step with an information-based economy. Companies listed on the stock market are fewer in number and less representative than they were, light in tangible assets and people, and heavy on IP. Basic facts such as what industry they are in are increasingly …

Table Of Contents, Seattle University Law Review

Seattle University Law Review

Table of Contents

Corporate Scenarios: Drawing Lessons From History, Madison Condon

Seattle University Law Review

As corporations are increasingly pressed to reveal information about their exposure to climate-related risks, they are often asked to undertake and disclose the outcome of “scenario analysis.” In this exercise, corporations, including financial institutions, examine how their business would fare under different pathways the future may take. One oft-used scenario, for example, is the International Energy Agency’s “Net-Zero by 2050: A Roadmap for the Energy Sector.” This Essay presents a history of the use of scenarios as a corporate planning tool, particularly in the oil industry, arguing that it is key for understanding our present moment and the role of …

Shareholder Expression In A Time Of Heightened Political Tension, Aaron A. Dhir

Seattle University Law Review

In this article, I provide context for my forthcoming research project on shareholder proposals and racial equity audits. Since the murder of George Floyd in May of 2020, progressive shareholder actors have increasingly used the proposal mechanism to advance diversity, equity, inclusion, and justice-related goals. These proposals have frequently gone beyond requesting the usual corporate fare of diversity trainings, intersectionality workshops, affinity groups, etc. Instead, a more ambitious type of proposal asks corporate America to conduct racial equity audits, defined as “an independent, objective and holistic analysis of a company’s policies, practices, products, services and efforts to combat systemic racism …

Corporate Governance Speech, Sarah C. Haan

Seattle University Law Review

The State has always regulated the intra-firm communications that make corporate governance possible, most commonly by mandating disclosures of information by a corporation to its shareholders. Some such laws are labeled “securities regulation,” but securities regulation is a broad category that extends to speech by actors who are outside the corporate enterprise as well. Also, the conventional securities regulation category does not capture all such laws; other examples, including informationforcing mandates, can be found in state corporate law. This Article uses the term “corporate governance speech” to describe the communications among shareholders, directors, and officers through which corporate governance is …

Dark Accounting Matter, Colleen Honigsberg

Seattle University Law Review

Physicists calculate that approximately 85% of the matter in the universe is composed of “dark matter” that “does not absorb, reflect, or emit electromagnetic radiation and is therefore difficult to detect.” The S&P 500 currently trades at a price-to-book value of 4.2, suggesting that book value accounts for less than 20% of the S&P 500’s market value. The remaining 80% appears nowhere in these firms’ balance sheets—it is invisible to contemporary accounting techniques and constitutes “dark accounting matter.”

Some “dark accounting matter” is composed of factors commonly described as components of “ESG.” Human capital, for example, is an intangible asset …

The Employees’ Dilemma: Balancing Internal Reporting, Whistleblowing, And Insider Trading Risks, Geeyoung Min

Seattle University Law Review

The Essay examines how recent developments in insider trading regulations and whistleblower reward programs can lead to unintended and counterproductive results of discouraging employees from using internal reporting channels within corporate compliance programs. While the presence of a robust and well-functioning corporate compliance program is a critical factor both in mitigating the level of public enforcement actions against companies and in protecting corporate managers from liability in private litigation, these programs often provide little incentive for employees to report potential misconduct internally.

Corporate compliance programs are designed to promote the upward information flow within the company, which is essential for …

How The Antidiscrimination Law Of Commercial Transactions Really Works, Helen Norton

Seattle University Law Review

A variety of businesses now cite 303 Creative when seeking First Amendment protection for their refusal to serve certain customers based on those customers’ protected class status. How this litigation will play out remains to be seen. But future courts need not, and should not, repeat the 303 Creative Court’s misunderstanding of how the antidiscrimination law of commercial transactions actually works.

Part I of this Essay explains the Court’s longstanding understanding of the antidiscrimination law of commercial transactions, and then describes the Court’s failure to engage with this precedent in 303 Creative. Part II then identifies the 303 Creative decision’s …

Green Dividends: A Case Study In Green Dividends And The Conditions For Private Ordering Solutions, Anne M. Tucker

Seattle University Law Review

This Essay introduces a novel private ordering solution to facilitate corporate investments in pro-social and environmental initiatives: Green dividends. Green dividends are an optional increase in shareholder dividends that are returned to the company to be reinvested in environmental initiatives or kept by a shareholder.

Green dividends pose an alternative to the current gridlocked debate that corporations can’t, won’t, shouldn’t, and shouldn’t even try to act in pro-social or environmental ways. Turning the common refrains on their head converts each narrative into an element for a successful private ordering solution: authority, accountability, shareholder buy-in, and government- backed enforcement. With Green …

Does Climate Disclosure Work To Reduce Greenhouse Gas Emissions? Emerging Evidence Suggests Cautious Optimism, Cynthia A. Williams

Seattle University Law Review

Significant regulatory resources have been spent developing global, voluntary climate and sustainability disclosure standards, such as the TCFD, TNRD, and ISSB’s Sustainability and Climate Disclosure standards, or domestically required disclosures, such as in the EU and in the U.S. Thus, it is important to evaluate whether this disclosure, particularly voluntary, qualitative disclosure, will have the power to shift the allocation of capital, will have a significant effect on the management of climate risk within firms, and ultimately will reduce climate change risk and biodiversity loss.

In this Article, several interrelated questions will be discussed. First, what does the empirical evidence …

The Rise And [?] Of Anti-Administrativism, Gary Lawson

UF Law Faculty Publications

Scholars have proclaimed the administrative state to be "Under Siege" or subject to a "Never-Ending Assault." Was the election of President Donald Trump on November 5, 2024 the sixth, if not yet the seventh, day around the walls? 

This seems an appropriate time to consider the present and future of opposition to the administrative state – something that has come to be dubbed "anti-administrativism." The first task, as is usually the case when one seeks intellectual clarity, is to figure out what one is talking about. What is this "anti-administrativism"? Without knowing the answer to that seemingly simple question, one …

Winding Authority: Consent By Registration And The Legal Singularity, Christina Frohock

Articles

More than forty years ago, the Pennsylvania legislature enacted a uniquely broad and explicit statute directed at out-of-state corporations: registration as a foreign corporation constitutes consent to general personal jurisdiction in the Commonwealth. Pennsylvania's consent-by-registration statute has faced Fourteenth Amendment due process challenges in state and federal courts alike, rising all the way to both the Supreme Court of Pennsylvania and the U.S. Supreme Court. This Article first tracks the myriad challenges to the Pennsylvania statute, culminating in the U.S. Supreme Court's opinion in Mallory v. Norfolk Southern Railway Co. in 2023. The Article then argues that the statute's zigzagging …

The Reedy Creek Improvement District: A Comparative Analysis Underscoring The Problems In Hampering Special Districts, J. Patrick Moll

Dickinson Law Review (2017-Present)

In 2022, the Florida legislature passed a bill that removed the administration of the Reedy Creek Improvement District, the special district governing the Walt Disney World Resort. The bill replaced it with the Central Florida Tourism Oversight District. Governor Ron DeSantis hailed this legislation as a success in reigning in a corporation operating with unchecked and unprecedented levels of governmental authority. Since its inception, however, the replacement administration has contended with claims of ethical violations, inefficiency, and unconstitutional enactment. Before the repeal of the Walt Disney World special district, special districts themselves were not often present in the Nation’s everyday …

Personal Jurisdiction’S Aberrant Theory Of Consent, Roger Michalski

American University Law Review

Consent has been a pillar of personal jurisdiction doctrine at least since Pennoyer. The Supreme Court recently strengthened this pillar by deeming a corporate registration statute to constitute consent. Consent to submit to a court’s adjudicatory power can now be unintentional, based on inaction, is irrevocable, does not have to be informed, is all-or-nothing, and is blind to power inequalities. Failing to say “no” at the right time in the right way means “yes.”

Such a theory of consent clashes with what consent means elsewhere. In other contexts, we are reminded that “no means no,” the “absence of no does …

Is Federal Question Jurisdiction Arising Or Setting, Lumen N. Mulligan

Faculty Works

In this essay, I respond to Professor Arthur D. Hellman. Hellman argues that "there is reason to be concerned that the [federal] judicial system falls short of the Framers' expectations--primarily by denying many litigants in cases presenting federal questions 'their real day in an Article III court,' but also by fostering 'balkanization' rather than uniformity in the interpretation of federal law." It is a privilege to comment upon Hellman's thoughtful piece. In doing so, I begin by questioning the value of originalist interpretations of Article III jurisdiction both descriptively and normatively. I then turn to an intra-originalist critique that paints …

Correcting Course: How Congress Can Streamline U.S. Engagement With The International Criminal Court, Sophia N. Ramcharitar

Cardozo Law Review de•novo

Since its participation in the 1998 Rome Conference, the United States has vocalized opposition to key components of the International Criminal Court’s (ICC) jurisdiction. This opposition has informed longstanding positions taken by the executive branch and motivated anti-ICC legislation passed by Congress. Support for the ICC’s investigation in Ukraine challenged these narratives across the legislative and executive branches, but the ICC’s arrest warrants of Israeli officials in 2024 renewed Congress’s heightened skepticism of the court and sowed political divisions on efforts to sanction the ICC. Congress’s oscillation on the ICC within the past several years prompts a larger question of …

After Courts: Democratizing Statutory Law, Ryan D. Doerfler, Samuel Moyn

Michigan Law Review

In Federalist No. 78, Alexander Hamilton argued for locating interpretive authority over law separately from those institutions tasked with formulating it. Hamilton’s vision, never accurate as a description of American practice, has not been credible for a long time. To the extent enormous power is still allocated to judges, our legal institutions have been out of step with our legal theory, which has long regarded them as political actors and policymakers. More practically, every term it is clearer and clearer that the role of the Supreme Court in statutory cases (including checking administrative rulemaking and other processes) is, if anything, …

The Inadequacy Of Perpetuating Vestiges Of Segregation In K-12 Curriculum: The Justiciability Of Reviewing Duties To Adequacy In Florida's Education Clause, Soumya Sreerama

American University Journal of Gender, Social Policy & the Law

Although the Supreme Court declared segregation the most abusive affront to education and ruled to eliminate vestiges of segregation “root and branch,” those same roots have grown unchecked to remain prominent today. One of the undercurrents of state-sponsored discrimination that has escaped desegregation remedies is the skewed, whitewashed curriculum that permeated K-12 classrooms in Jim Crow America. More troubling, is that those vestiges of an inadequately biased curriculum are still slithering in students’ courses today. Although student movements and education reformists have attempted to counter skewed curricula by supplementing them with separate ethnic studies courses, states like Florida recently passed …

Loper Bright And The Great Writ, Anthony G. Amsterdam, James S. Liebman

Faculty Scholarship

Chevron deference is dead. The Court’s forty-year, seventy-decision experiment with Article-III-court deference to “reasonable” agency interpretations of ambiguous federal statutes failed, killed in part by concern that it unduly curbed the “judicial Power” to enforce the rule of law in the face of politics, partisanship, and mission-driven agency decision-making.

“AEDPA deference” lives. The Court’s twenty-five-year, seventy-two decision experiment with Article-III-court deference to “reasonable” state-court interpretations of the Constitution under the 1996 Antiterrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act continues to relegate criminal defendants to prison or death, notwithstanding federal habeas judges’ independent judgment that the state courts have misread or misapplied …

Volume 48 Masthead, Seattle University Law Review

Seattle University Law Review

Volume 48 Masthead

Voting Matters: Materiality Considerations And The Shareholder Vote, Renee M. Jones

Seattle University Law Review

For the shareholder franchise to have meaning, shareholders must have access to relevant information to inform their voting decisions. The securities laws’ disclosure requirements play an essential role in informing the shareholder vote.

This Essay focuses on the question of the materiality of information in the context of shareholder voting. It addresses the question of whether ESG-related information is material, positioning the materiality inquiry within the context of shareholders’ voting decisions. It explores the definition of materiality with a focus on the “reasonable investor” concept embedded within the definition. The Essay argues that the implicit expectations of many commentators that …

Volume 48 Masthead, Seattle University Law Review

Seattle University Law Review

Volume 48 Masthead

Understanding The Big Three’S Wavering Support Of Environmental And Social Shareholder Proposals, Jeff Schwartz, Jefferson Jensen

Seattle University Law Review

Because of their substantial equity portfolios, BlackRock, Vanguard, and State Street (the Big 3) are central players in corporate governance. It is, therefore, critical to understand how they vote. One puzzle is that their support for shareholder proposals on environmental and social matters appears to waiver. In 2020, for instance, BlackRock supported 11.1% of environmental proposals at S&P 500 firms. In 2021, it seemingly reversed course, supporting 55.2%. It then flipped again, supporting 32.1% in 2022. Such statistics suggest that the Big 3 are constantly changing their views on these topics. This Article seeks to better understand whether this is …

Volume 48 Masthead, Seattle University Law Review

Seattle University Law Review

Volume 48 Masthead