Law and Economics Commons^™

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

Applying The Indian Commerce Clause To Indian Commerce, Adam Crepelle

Northwestern University Law Review

Indian country commerce generates tens of billions of dollars annually and is a constant source of litigation. These disputes typically revolve around jurisdictional conflicts: whether states, tribes, or both possess regulatory authority over the business operating in Indian country, particularly those involving non-Indians. Despite numerous court cases, no clear legal framework has emerged, creating pervasive uncertainty regarding fundamental issues, such as state taxation of tribal transactions and the proper forum for resolving Indian country contract disputes. Interestingly, these commercial cases overlook the Indian Commerce Clause—the constitutional provision designed to address such matters.

This Article argues the Indian Commerce Clause prohibits …

Toys As Evidence, Randall K. Johnson

Faculty Works

This Essay asks and answers a single question, which was posed during a recent symposium at the National Museum of Toys & Miniatures. Could the study of revealed preferences, which is the idea that observed behaviors are the best indicator of one’s beliefs, improve our collective understanding about what constitutes unlawful discrimination in certain U.S. markets? A possible answer, which is informed by the Brown v. Board of Education decision, is the study of revealed preferences may improve our collective understanding for three reasons.

One reason is the study of revealed preferences provides a window into how some producers and …

The Equity Dead Zones: Legal Intersectionality Failure Points In Chapter 13 Bankruptcy, Tearria N. Simmons

The Guardianship Journal

Legal intersectionality failure points describe the systemic fractures that occur where overlapping legal, social, and economic inequalities converge, potentially producing compounded barriers to relief. Each failure point marks a site of marginalization. In what ways do individuals already recognized as vulnerable in Chapter 13 bankruptcy face a heightened risk when multiple forms of disadvantage intersect? When these intersections combine in mutually reinforcing ways—racial, economic, and relational disparities colliding with structural deficiencies in family, property, and bankruptcy law—does it result in pronounced negative outcomes, and, if so, what are those outcomes? Within this convergence, could there be a space where compounded …

Myth Busters: A Review Of “Debt’S Grip”, Susan Block-Lieb

Brooklyn Journal of Corporate, Financial & Commercial Law

Debt’s Grip follows a long line of literature that looks to combat legal and cultural myths about consumer debt and consumer bankruptcy with quantitative and qualitative analysis on these topics. Who files for bankruptcy and why? Fighting longstanding myths is tough work, but Pamela Foohey, Robert M. Lawless and Deborah Thorne have marshalled a strong set of tools, and strong intellectual allies, to support this epic battle.

Power, Tools, And Process: Some Reflections On Bankruptcy Minimalism, Edward J. Janger

Brooklyn Journal of Corporate, Financial & Commercial Law

In Unjust Debts: How Our Bankruptcy System Makes America More Unequal, Melissa Jacoby offers a brilliant and sweeping indictment of the way in which bankruptcy law is currently practiced in the United States. As she puts it, “This book is a story of falling out of love. With a law.” Like me, Professor Jacoby came of professional age, at the close of the first age of the Bankruptcy Code. Enacted in 1978, we both learned the statute in the mid-1990s, at a time when the transformative power of the 1978 Code was reaching its peak. On the business side, corporations …

Malapportionment: A Murder Mystery, Daniel Wodak

Northwestern University Law Review

Malapportionment—electoral districts with divergent ratios of people to representation—was ruled to be unconstitutional in a widely venerated series of cases before the Warren Court. Those cases held that a principle of political equality, one person, one vote, is required by the Constitution. But what is the content of that principle? Many Justices and commentators declare that it is vague, empty, circular, or meaningless. This creates a murder mystery. Malapportionment was killed, but by what exactly? This Article seeks an answer by focusing on the Supreme Court’s commitments about the scope and strictness of one person, one vote: it …

Investigating The Relationship Between Noun Classes And Plant Folk Taxonomy In Chasu Language Of Kilimanjaro Region In Tanzania, Peter Rabson Mziray

Journal of Humanities and Social Sciences

The current study investigates the relationship between noun classes and plant folk taxonomy in Chasu (G 22). The study focuses on two objectives: the first objective is to describe the plant folk taxonomy in Chasu and the second objective is to determine the relationship between noun classes and plant folk taxonomy in Chasu. Data were collected from rural villages in Same and Mwanga districts by using free listing, field interviews (jungle-walk-and-identify), and written texts containing Chasu plant names. The findings reveal that Chasu folk taxonomy reflects different ethnobotanical categories; including a unique beginner which is mmea/mimea ‘plant(s)’, and three life …

Competition, Comity, And Confusion: Reconciling The Ftaia’S Import Exclusion With Its Direct Effects Provision, Elliot Lam

Fordham Law Review

The debate surrounding the Sherman Act’s extraterritorial scope represents a tension between two competing objectives: protecting the U.S. economy from foreign anticompetitive conduct on one hand and respecting the sovereign authority of other nation-states on the other. Applying U.S. law abroad risks undermining sovereign authority by regulating foreign economies, though such regulation appears necessary in some cases to protect U.S. consumers.

Congress’s attempt to square these objectives through enacting the Foreign Trade Antitrust Improvements Act of 1982 (FTAIA) failed to settle the matter. The statute left courts with two new questions: how to distinguish “import” from “nonimport” commerce, and how …

Living Property, Joseph William Singer

Seattle University Law Review

The Supreme Court has increasingly defined property rights that are per se exempt from regulation in the absence of compensation, most recently in Cedar Point Nursery v. Hassid (2021) and Tyler v. Hennepin County (2023). The Court claims that it can identify property rights that are categorically protected from regulation by reference to history, tradition, and precedent. Yet this approach is oddly ahistorical; it is inconsistent with the fact that property law changed dramatically over U.S. history, as well as varying tremendously among the states. It is also inconsistent with the historical context of the Founding era. At that time, …

Table Of Contents

Seattle University Law Review

Table of Contents

The Roots Of Credit Inequality, Andrea Freeman

Seattle University Law Review

Debt oppression began before the United States became a country. Settlers enslaved Africans and Indigenous people, treating them as property that they could buy and sell for their economic and personal benefit. When enslavement became illegal, new economic systems and laws that included sharecropping, Black Codes, and Jim Crow kept Black people in servitude. Laws that prohibited enslaved people from owning property or selling goods to white people evolved into restrictions on Black people’s occupations and market participation, both formal and informal. When Black entrepreneurs overcame these obstacles and built wealth within Black business enclaves, white people enforced their racist …

“A Plain Denial”: Reclaiming Equal Protection In American Juvenile Law, Addie C. Rolnick, David S. Tanenhaus, Justin Iverson, Danielle L. Silvestri

Seattle University Law Review

Juvenile courts are based on the premise that children are different from adults and should therefore be treated differently. Children may be treated more informally by courts, punished for different purposes, and brought before the court for different behaviors. Since In re Gault, the Supreme Court has been clear that there are limits to how different juvenile courts can be. Juveniles are entitled to many of the same procedural protections as adult criminal defendants, although the Court has preserved some procedural differences where it has determined that their benefit is outweighed by the need to preserve the informality, flexibility, …

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 …

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 …

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 …