Land Use Law Commons^™

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

Wildearth Guardians V. U.S. Dept. Of Agric. Animal And Plant Health Inspection Serv. Wildlife Services, Luke A. Zagar

Public Land & Resources Law Review

WildEarth Guardians v. U.S. Dept. of Agric. Animal and Plant Health Inspection Serv. Wildlife Services considers whether Predator Damage Management (“PDM”) programs in Wilderness Areas violate the Wilderness Act and whether the United States Department of Agriculture’s Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service, Wildlife Services (“Wildlife Services”) violated the National Environmental Policy Act (“NEPA”) in issuing its Final Environmental Assessment (“EA”) and Finding of No Significant Impact (“FONSI”). The Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit affirmed its prior holding in Forest Guardians v. Naimal & Plant Health Inspection Serv., finding that “the Wilderness Act does not prohibit Wildlife Service …

Property Law For Positive Externalities: Carving New Sticks For The Bundle, J.B. Ruhl, James Salzman

William & Mary Law Review

Property law has long confronted a troubling puzzle: Why does doctrine focus so much on eliminating harms flowing as negative externalities from uses of property—curbing pollution, nuisances, and other harmful land uses—while largely ignoring the potential to encourage positive externalities? Why such a strong focus on preventing bads instead of promoting goods? Using a case of a natural capital resource and the ecosystem services of flood control, water purification, and pollination it provides, this Article explains how and why existing doctrine fails to recognize these benefits as distinct property interests, leading to systematic underinvestment in conservation and service provision. We …

The Exactions Illusion: Sheetz’S Missing Dissent, Lee Anne Fennell, Timothy M. Mulvaney

Faculty Scholarship

In April 2024, the Supreme Court unanimously handed down Sheetz v. County of El Dorado, a land use exactions case billed as narrow, inevitable, constitutionally compelled, and obviously correct.  It was none of those things. Sheetz instead ushered in an open-ended shift of policy control over the built environment from state and local legislatures to courts. By its terms, the holding extended the Court’s stringent “exactions” test—which requires the government to prove nexus and proportionality between development conditions and development impacts—beyond its original context of parcel-specific administrative bargains to reach an unspecified set of legislated property conditions. Yet the decision’s …

Land Use And Sovereignty Along The Catawba River, Thomas C. Brugh, Lucile C. Rencher

Student Scholarship

This document-based case study explains how land-use change along the Catawba River Corridor (Lancaster and York Counties, South Carolina) has been produced through the interaction of property rights (dominium) and rule-setting authority (imperium), showing why sovereignty continues to shape development even after land disputes appear “settled.” Through analyzing legal records (Treaty of Nation Ford, the 1959 Catawba Division of Assets Act, the 1986 Supreme Court timing decision, and the 1993 Settlement Act), planning documents, parcel records, and field observations, we trace how shifting jurisdiction and title certainty structured what kinds of land uses were possible and when. We argue that …

Volume 14 Masthead

American Indian Law Journal

No abstract provided.

Legal History: The Curious Case Of The Disappearing Unceded Lakota Territories, Sebastian F. Braun

American Indian Law Journal

This Article discusses whether the Lakota Nation still has title to the unceded territories outlined in the Treaty of 1868. While many accounts focus on the supposed diminishment of the Great Sioux Reservation, the question of the unceded lands has largely been forgotten. It has renewed relevance in the context of the Dakota Access Pipeline, which crosses the lands. From a broader perspective, the case raises questions about how history is understood, constructed, and selected in American Indian Law cases. Most legal cases, especially those concerning treaty rights, are rooted in an interpretation of history; if that history is misinterpreted …

Expansion Of Federal Benefits To Non-Native Adopted Children, Anna-Grace Hockensmith

American Indian Law Journal

There is palpable tension between tribal sovereignty and federal administrative control in the distribution of federal benefits to members of Tribal Nations. This tension is felt by adopted non-Native children who might struggle to receive federal benefits even though the tribe of their adopted parent(s) has accepted them as a member. This Note explores how adoption of a non-Native child by a tribal member intersects with tribal membership and whether that membership should be enough for the child to receive federal benefits.

The Note discusses four main topics, including: (1) tribal membership, adoption, and current federal enrollment criteria; (2) an …

Beyond Icwa: Within Family Court Systems, Mixed Indigenous Families Confront Ongoing Jurisdictional Violence, Nis Wilbur

American Indian Law Journal

Mixed Indigenous families (MIFs) navigating parental custody in the United States can find themselves trapped in a Battleship®-style jurisdictional maze, where tribal, state, and federal authorities collide unpredictably. This legal mess threatens to separate children from their tribal communities, undermines tribal sovereignty, and can force families into years of costly litigation. The problem is rooted in centuries of white supremacist law and policy that systematically dispossess tribes of culture and self-governance: from the Marshall Trilogy to the boarding school era and harmful adoption schemes. Today, legal frameworks like the UCCJEA remain insufficient as they minimize or ignore tribal civil jurisdiction, …

Table Of Contents

American Indian Law Journal

No abstract provided.

Workers’ Compensation Codes In American Indian* Tribal Nations, Autumn N. Siegel

American Indian Law Journal

This Article examines various Tribal Nations’ experiences in developing their own workers’ compensation systems using a comparative law and legal development approach, including direct interviews with a diverse range of tribal members. Tribal Nations’ self-created workers’ compensation codes predominantly rely on local models and expertise to establish and operate their systems. However, Tribal Nations also infuse their own cultural values into their codes, incorporating tribal perspectives and priorities such as valuing traditional medicine and peace-making alternative dispute resolution, providing more generously to volunteers, and incorporating return-to-work programs into their workers’ compensation systems. Some Tribal Nations also find it necessary to …

U.N.Masking American Exceptionalism: How International Frameworks Can Inform American Indian Policy, Kaitlin Reese

American Indian Law Journal

“U.N.masking American Exceptionalism: How International Frameworks Can Inform American Policy,” serves primarily to examine and criticize how American case law, such as Johnson v. M’Intosh, has been used in foreign courts to justify the Doctrine of Discovery and how, despite many other courts eventually acknowledging it as a harmful rule of law in meaningful ways, the United States has done no such thing. This Article walks through not only the legal cases both at home and abroad, but also delves into the historical background that led up to Johnson, examines the cases abroad that integrate the Doctrine of Discovery and …

The Tribal Rules Of Evidence, Nicole Morote

American Indian Law Journal

Rules of evidence shape litigation practice across the country. In this sense, they govern the truth as it enters the court. Legal scholarship has yet to study tribal approaches to evidence— an area with tremendous promise for legal practitioners and evidence rulemakers alike.

This Article is the first to do so. It analyzes an array of tribal evidence codes across the United States. It reveals three frameworks that describe tribes’ approaches to the Federal Rules. In doing so, it offers a modest contribution to the nascent intersection between Tribal law and evidence studies: crucial insight into tribal systems’ unique needs, …

Advancing The Rights Of Nature: Lessons From Sauk-Suiattle V. City Of Seattle, Harry S. Katz

American Indian Law Journal

Advocates for the “rights of nature” seek recognition of legal rights for natural elements such as mountains, rivers, and non-human species as a means of protecting the environment. In the United States, Tribal Nations have been at the forefront of this nascent movement. In a 2022 Washington state case, the Sauk-Suiattle Indian Tribe sued the City of Seattle, alleging that the City’s hydroelectric dams on the Skagit River infringe upon the rights of salmon. Those rights, they claim, include the salmon’s rights to exist, flourish, regenerate, and evolve. The case, known as Sauk-Suiattle Indian Tribe v. City of Seattle, …

Native History Is United States History: How United States History Censorship Leads To Passive Acceptance Of Racial Discrimination And Furthers The Decline Of Tribal Sovereignty, Nickolasa A. Jackson

American Indian Law Journal

Native stories are embedded in the United States Constitution, property law, and the nation’s legal and political framework, but education frequently omits these truths. Such erasure perpetuates misunderstanding, invisibility, and hostility toward Native communities, obscuring the reality that the United States was built through the dispossession, coercion, and suffering of Indigenous Peoples. Whitewashing history has allowed the nation to claim moral virtue and industriousness while denying the foundational role of Indigenous Peoples. The Article emphasizes that Native rights, whether land, water, or other treaty-protected entitlements, as well as inherent rights such as tribal sovereignty, are not charitable or discretionary; they …

Forever Un-Wild: How The Forever Wild Clause “Locks Up” New York’S Closed Correctional Facilities, William Carswell

Pace Environmental Law Review

Article XIV of the New York State Constitution, better known as the “Forever Wild Clause,” enshrines a conservationist ideal into law. The crux of article XIV prohibits the leasing, selling, or exchanging of state-owned land within New York’s Forest Preserve to private entities. Since its inception, this mandate has dictated the State’s approach to management of its Forest Preserve. Whenever New York decides to excise a piece of its Forest Preserve, the cumbersome yet necessary constitutional amendment process is triggered. Renewed attention to this legal requirement is peaking. Since 2009, five former Department of Corrections and Community Supervision sites located …

Center For Biological Diversity V. U.S. Bureau Of Land Management, Erika C. Rader

Public Land & Resources Law Review

The Ctr. for Biological Diversity v. U.S. Bureau of Land Mgmt. marks the Ninth Circuit’s second time considering the Willow Project, which plans to drill oil in Alaska. Environmental plaintiffs brought a series of claims under NEPA, the Reserves Act, ANILCA, and the ESA to stop or stall the Project. Plaintiffs focused on the BLM’s use of a “full field development standard” in assessing alternatives to the Project. Despite the range of claims, the Ninth Circuit allowed the Project to move forward, but on remand required the BLM to explain its reasoning for departing from the full field development standard …

Feudal Is Fine Because Property Is Sovereignty: Rational Basis Equal Protection And The New Noncitizen Land Laws, Jill M. Fraley

Scholarly Articles

States are enacting a new wave of land laws restricting noncitizens’ ownership of real property, prompting immediate constitutional challenges grounded in equal protection and federal preemption. Most commentators assume these laws are unlikely to survive modern scrutiny. This Article argues that these land laws rest on a constitutional logic that remains both doctrinally intact and normatively compelling: the treatment of real property as an incident of state sovereignty rather than an ordinary site of economic regulation.

Against prevailing accounts, this Article shows that the Court’s jurisprudence has never subjected all citizenship-based classifications to heightened scrutiny. Instead, the Court has consistently …

Implementasi Land Freezing Di Kabupaten Kutai Kartanegara Dan Penajam Paser Utara: Antara Pengendalian Pertanahan Dan Pelindungan Hak Keperdataan, Anggita Mustika Dewi, Destriananda Safa Aina, Ananda Mulia Putri Maharani

Jurnal Hukum & Pembangunan

To prevent land speculation by land mafias in the Nusantara Capital City (IKN), the government introduced a land-freezing policy aimed at restricting the transfer of land rights within the IKN area. However, in practice, this policy has been alleged to hinder land registration processes and undermine civil rights of communities within the IKN delineation zone. This study seeks to examine the regulatory framework, implementation, and impacts of the land-freezing policy on land registration and the civil rights of affected communities. Employing an empirical normative legal research method with a statute approach, this research finds that the land-freezing policy has not …

Climate Preemption And Fossil Fuel Entrenchment, Vincent M. Nolette

Sabin Center for Climate Change Law

Mitigating the worst impacts of climate change demands a rapid reduction in greenhouse gas emissions and a transition to renewable, low-carbon sources of energy. This requires building thousands of gigawatts of clean energy at an unprecedented rate and expeditiously retiring existing fossil fuel infrastructure. Yet both parts of this task have been obstructed by state legislative efforts over the last decade — particularly in Republican-led states — to block local governments from reducing greenhouse gas emissions while legally mandating continued fossil fuel reliance. These efforts are accomplished through state climate preemption laws. Framed in neutral or positive terms like “energy …