Law and Society Commons^™

Le Champ De Compétence De La Cour Pénale Internationale, Doreid Becheraoui

Proche-Orient, Études juridiques

No abstract provided.

Taking The Thumb Off The Scale: Rebalancing Parental And Children’S Rights To Empower Child Protective Services, Sebastian Wagner

Utah Law Review

This Note provides background on the current legal framework of state prevention of child maltreatment in the United States. It discusses parental rights and the Parental Rights Doctrine, child rights in the United States, and how states prevent child maltreatment through child protective service agencies.

This Note also explores the legal landscape surrounding the balance of parental rights and children’s rights in child welfare cases. One of the central issues in the current framework is how the Parental Rights Doctrine can significantly limit the state’s ability to intervene in cases where children are at risk. State intervention, governed by vague …

Table Of Contents

Seattle University Law Review

Table of Contents

Volume 49 Masthead

Seattle University Law Review

Volume 49 Masthead

Reimagining Legal Education: The Transformative Power Of Small-Group Instruction, Michael I. Meyerson

Seattle University Law Review

Legal education is failing its students. Those entering their first year of law school have greater anxiety and less developed reading and writing skills than ever before. The traditional large Socratic class, which was never the most effective teaching method, has become increasingly counterproductive.

This Article contends that small-group instruction provides the opportunity for superior teaching, especially for first-year law students. Recent scholarship in active learning, educational psychology, and students’ mental health demonstrates the limitations of the traditional large Socratic class experience. Building on that theoretical foundation and informed by sustained classroom experience, this Article argues that small-group pedagogy more …

Land Without Legacy: The Case For Market-Based Appraisals On Hawaiian Home Lands, Alexis C. Owens

Seattle University Law Review

The Hawaiian Homes Commission Act of 1920 (HHCA) was enacted to restore Native Hawaiians to ancestral lands and promote long term economic self-sufficiency. More than a century later, that promise remains unfulfilled. This Note argues that a central but overlooked barrier lies in the HHCA’s mandated use of the replacement cost appraisal method, which systematically undervalues homestead properties by excluding market forces. In one of the most expensive housing markets in the United States, this approach suppresses home equity, the primary means of intergenerational wealth building, and restricts beneficiaries’ access to credit and financial stability. By severing the connection between …

International Law’S Forgotten Refugees—Palestinian Refugees In Egypt

Seattle University Law Review

This Article examines the legal and humanitarian crisis facing Palestinian refugees who have fled to Egypt amidst the ongoing violence in Gaza. While escaping active conflict, these refugees face systemic barriers to employment and education, rendering their living conditions precarious and unsustainable. The unique legal status of Palestinian refugees stems from the fact that they have been excluded from the 1951 Refugee Convention and its 1967 Protocol, leaving them without any meaningful international protection. This exclusion is rooted in the political complexities of the Palestinian struggle for self-determination and reflects a fragmented legal framework that prioritizes limited humanitarian aid over …

Veiled Justice: Secularism And The Hijab Across Democracies, Mohamed ‘Arafa

Seattle University Law Review

For much of 2022, Iran was gripped by widespread protests led by women who openly challenged the regime’s authority, particularly its compulsory veiling laws, following the death of Mahsa Amini in police custody. Women around the globe came around and showed solidarity with the women in Iran. However, in non-Islamic countries and societies, one can still make out many prejudices and stereotyping connected to the question of whether and to what extent veiling is mandatory for women according to Shārīe’ā law. Is wearing the hijab a choice, or rather, an essential religious practice that religious Muslim women need to obey? …

Rewriting The Playbook: The X’S And O’S Of The House Settlement And The Future Of Student-Athletes’ Voice In Their Compensation, Matthew K.V. Glazer

Seattle University Law Review

Since the formation of the National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA) in the 1900s, collegiate athletes (student-athletes) have been prohibited from using their own name, image and likeness (NIL) for profit. But on July 1, 2021, the NCAA changed course and began allowing student-athletes to profit from their own NIL. In the past few years, U.S. college athletics have undergone significant changes, most notably introducing monetary compensation for student-athletes’ NIL. While these changes were long overdue and ultimately beneficial, they have significantly disrupted the landscape of college sports, giving rise to numerous challenges that some experts have compared to the “Wild …

Mr. Trump Goes To Washington Part Ii: A Review Of Richard Delgado's 2025, Kevin Johnson

Seattle University Law Review

Richard Delgado’s The Rodrigo Chronicles have captivated a generation of law students and legal scholars.  Mapping the terrain of race, racism, and Critical Race Theory (CRT), the skillful, and long-running narrative series stands as a testament to Delgado’s dedication to justice for all.

The Rodrigo Chronicles are simply one of Delgado’s many intellectual contributions and part of an unparalleled scholarly legacy.  As one of the founders of CRT, he produced a landmark body of scholarship –authoring the field's primary text,  making the argument for the regulation of hate speech,  forcefully challenging the Black/white binary of civil rights that long dominated …

Two Strikes And A Prisoner’S Out: The Supreme Court’S Bad Call In Lomax V. Ortiz-Marquez, Molly Guptill Manning

Journal of Law and Policy

Since 1892, federal legislation has provided for the waiver of court filing fees so indigent plaintiffs can access the courts. In 1996, the Prison Litigation Reform Act amended the law. Citing an explosion in the number of prisoner filings (and ignoring the commensurate explosion in the size of the prisoner population), Congress sought to disincentivize prisoners from filing federal actions by denying them an outright waiver and instead requiring them to pay filing fees in installments. It also added a “three strikes” rule. Under the latter provision, if a prisoner files three or more actions or appeals that are dismissed …

With All The Strings Attached: Analyzing Participation Of Disempowered Groups In Structuring New York’S Social Equity Cannabis Investment Fund, Nicholas Schuermann

Journal of Law and Policy

For decades, New York’s selective enforcement of cannabis prohibition has disproportionately targeted low-income Black and brown communities, resulting in mass incarceration, decimated economic opportunity, and entrenched generational harm. In 2021, New York enacted the Marihuana Regulation and Taxation Act (“MRTA”) with an explicit reparative mandate: to redress these harms by lowering barriers to enter the new recreational cannabis market for those severely impacted by prohibition. Central to this effort is the Cannabis Social Equity Investment Fund, a $200 million program designed to provide justice-impacted entrepreneurs with turnkey retail locations, low-interest loans, and business support. In practice, however, the Fund has …

The Martha Wright-Reed Act: How The Fcc Took One Step Forward For Communication Equality For Deaf Individuals In Correctional Facilities And How It Could Be Expanded, Ashley Seebold

Seattle University Law Review

For decades, phone companies preyed on incarcerated individuals and their loved ones due to the lack of regulation of jail phone calls.2 In 2021, the average cost of a fifteen-minute jail phone call was about $3.3 In 2022, the average cost rose to $5.74, while some individuals faced an extreme charge of $24.82 for the same amount of time.4 In the early 2000s, consumer advocate and concerned grandmother Martha Wright-Reed called upon the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) to fix the imbalance so she could speak to her incarcerated grandson.5 Eventually, in 2023, the FCC answered her call to action and …

How The Dod Discourages Military Families From Seeking Mental Health Counseling, Christina Welch

Seattle University Law Review

The Department of Defense’s (DoD) administration of the Exceptional Family Member Program (EFMP) presents significant barriers to mental health care access for military spouses and children. This paper explores how the EFMP, though designed to support military families with special needs, inadvertently creates barriers to mental health treatment. Military family members often do not seek mental health treatment to avoid the program's mandatory enrollment requirements. Military family members often view enrollment in the program undesirable because enrollment can restrict the pool of potential future duty assignment locations that are available to service members.

The lack of comprehensive data collection by …

2025, Richard Delgado

Seattle University Law Review

"In a cutting and provocative social critique in one of the more extended Rodrigo Chronicles, Richard Delgado in 2025 employs skillful narrative—one of CRT’s many contributions to legal scholarship —to tell a gripping story of just how far the nation has descended into darkness with President Trump’s re-election. In Delgado’s vision, law professors—along with other political opponents of the President: immigrants, people of color, LGBTQ+ people, women, the underserved—have targets on their backs."

-excerpt from Kevin Johnson's review of 2025

The Preventative Care Gap: Completing The Aca’S Vision For Health, Abby Nagaich

Seattle University Law Review

This Note examines the preventive care mandate under the Affordable Care Act (ACA) and the legal, political, and practical challenges that threaten its effectiveness. While the ACA significantly expanded access to no-cost preventive services, gaps remain—particularly in behavioral health, obesity management, and equitable service delivery. Ongoing litigation, potential administrative rollbacks, and shifting political leadership further destabilize this critical component of public health policy.

This Note argues that for the ACA to fulfill its original promise—and for any health framework to succeed—preventive care must be redefined as a comprehensive, early intervention approach grounded in both systemic access and patient education. It …

Making Noise Through Law: Indigenous Legal Mobilisation Against A Power Plant In “French” Guiana, Pierre Auzerau

Tipití: Journal of the Society for the Anthropology of Lowland South America

In so-called “French” Guiana, or Guyane, the Kali’na village of Atopo Wipi has fought for years against a hydrogen power plant being built on their land. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork conducted between 2023 and 2024 in Guyane and Western Europe, where I collaborated with various stakeholders to support Atopo Wipi’s resistance to the power plant, my research focuses on the legal dimensions of the Kali’na’s struggle to protect their land. Specifically, this article examines how the Kali’na navigated different normative frameworks, including international human rights standards and French law, to fight the project. Through this analysis, I show how the …

Dealing With The Wrongs And The Rights: Lessons On Lethal Self-Defense From Durham, North Carolina, Emily Bass

DePaul Journal for Social Justice

The tragic loss of seventeen-year-old Trayvon Martin and the lack of accountability that George Zimmerman faced for fatally shooting him in their Florida neighborhood inspired countless calls for politicians to reexamine self-defense laws. Still, long before stand-your-ground laws, the same racist undertones that plagued Zimmerman’s trial prevented other state courts from holding accountable those who use excessive force in proclaimed “self-defense” and killed Black teenagers.

In 1993, then fifteen-year-old Jamal Elliott and several of his friends broke into the garage of Durham, North Carolina resident Michael Seagroves, hoping to steal a motorcycle. As Jamal ran from the garage, Seagroves shot …

Hammurabi’S Laws: Ancient Traditions Of Violence, Aaron Secrist

The Confluence

The tradition of enforcing private property through violence is truly ancient, and goes back thousands of years to the first civilizations. There exists a prevailing attitude that contemporary culture is more “civilized” than the first organized societies – and while it’s true in some ways, our laws are still remarkably similar to those practiced in antiquity. In the following essay, I analyze the Law Code of Hammurabi and examine its parallels to the way laws function today. First, I will provide context for the technological advances that made the first city-states possible, then give a cultural and economic overview of …

Plea Bargain Skepticism When Companies Kill People, Peter R. Reilly

Faculty Scholarship

In 2018 and 2019, two Boeing 737 MAX airplanes fell from the sky, killing 346 people—one of the deadliest corporate crimes in U.S. history. Instead of taking the case to trial, the United States Department of Justice (“DOJ”) addressed the matter by using two different alternative dispute resolution vehicles. First, Boeing was given a three-year deferred prosecution agree-ment. That deal was canceled when DOJ determined the company had breached it. Next, Boeing was given a plea bargain. This Article argues that federal courts, which are empowered to approve or reject plea deals, should be skeptical when the government turns to …

You Can Be Innocent—Or You Can Be Free: Prosecutorial Power And Dark Pleas In Innocence Litigation, Tori Simkovic, Craig Trocino

University of Miami Race & Social Justice Law Review

This Article examines the phenomenon Justice Michael P. Donnelly has termed the “dark plea.” A dark plea is a post-conviction guilty plea extracted from defendants who maintain their innocence but accept freedom over exoneration. Through the lens of State of Florida v. Lawrence K. Johnson, this Article exposes how dark pleas operate at the precise moment when newly discovered evidence threatens to unravel a conviction and expose actual innocence in a nearly two decades old wrongful conviction. Johnson’s case illustrates the coercive dynamics of this type postconviction “bargaining.” After eighteen years of incarceration, compelling DNA recantation evidence, and an appellate …

Qualified Immunity: Emerging Fault Lines In The Eleventh Circuit, Ricky J. Marc

University of Miami Race & Social Justice Law Review

Qualified immunity operates as a central doctrine in federal civil rights litigation, defining the threshold between government accountability and official protection from suit. Within the Eleventh Circuit, this doctrine has developed into a highly structured yet fact-dependent framework that shapes litigation strategy and judicial outcomes. This article offers a comprehensive analysis of qualified immunity in the Eleventh Circuit from 2022 to 2025, drawing on recent precedents involving law enforcement officers and correctional officials. It examines the Circuit’s treatment of clearly established rights, the role of objective reasonableness in determining constitutional violations, and the evidentiary dynamics that influence summary judgment and …

Unsettling Settled Science: The Perils Of And Rationale Behind Blind Faith In Forensic Evidence, Jaclyn Marra

University of Miami Race & Social Justice Law Review

Science—a seemingly compelling and infallible adjudicative element—plays a pivotal role in criminal trials, serving as a cornerstone for evidence interpretation and decision-making. However, the perceived infallibility of scientific evidence often masks its inherent limitations and vulnerabilities. Forensic methods, widely regarded as objective and precise, can suffer from a plethora of inconspicuous constraints—including flawed methodologies, human error, and biases—which undermine their reliability. The American public and legal system frequently place undue trust in forensic evidence and experts, influenced by portrayals of their certainty in media and popular culture. This phenomenon has been referred to as the “Reverse CSI Effect.” This note …

Law School News: Rwu Names Richard "Dick" Sullivan '79 And Judge Lara E. Montecalvo As 2026 Honorary Degree Recipients 4-16-2026, Kelly Brinza

Life of the Law School (1993- )

No abstract provided.

Drug War Repair Guarantees, Amber Baylor

Washington and Lee Law Review

Drug legalization, especially cannabis legalization, is a critical step forward in states’ willingness to address systemic disparities, privacy intrusions, violence, and other harms of the drug war. Yet, reforms center on legalization and repair through a narrow lens, focused on changes to the penal code. The public has found that narrow forms of legalization cannot serve their purported reparative purpose. Narrowly drawn legalization is illusory. Drug war harms and punishment for legalized substance use continue. Legalization reforms are vulnerable to political trends, resulting in rollback and retrenchment of drug war operations.

Legalization cannot deliver on its reparative terms without guarantees. …

Interior Optimal Imprisonment Under Diminishing Marginal Disutility, Tim Friehe, Murat C. Mungan

Faculty Scholarship

This note revisits the important question of how fines and imprisonment should be optimally employed. In D’Antoni et al. (2022), a monotone hazard rate condition implies a corner solution for imprisonment in the observable-wealth benchmark when imprisonment disutility is linear. We show that this result is not robust to offenders facing diminishing marginal disutility of imprisonment. The optimal prison term is interior as long as the marginal disutility associated with large imprisonment terms are low and the harms from the offense are large enough to warrant imprisonment. The sentence length thus becomes a genuine policy margin rather than a boundary …

The Territorial Continuum: American Samoa, Criminal Adjudication, And Territorial Administration, Emmanuel Hiram Arnaud

Faculty Scholarship

The standard account of American territorial expansion posits that territorial acquisition moved along a spectrum of sovereignty. The federal government acquired new inhabited land through conquest or purchase, and the Constitution tasked Congress with organizing and administering the new territories until they were ready to become states. That pattern came to an abrupt halt in 1898 when, at the conclusion of the Spanish-American War, the Supreme Court, fearing the extension of citizenship to, and the permanent integration of, non-White populations into the American polity, suddenly pronounced that the Constitution authorized the holding of colonies. The Court thus sentenced new territories, …

(Mis)Judging Suspicion, Sherri Lee Keene

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

Twenty-five years ago, the Supreme Court decided Illinois v. Wardlow, a Fourth Amendment case that allowed the high-crime nature of a location to be considered in determinations of whether there was reasonable suspicion to support a police stop. In making these determinations, courts rarely acknowledge the role that race can play in decisions that factor in the nature of a location as context. Yet even when the race of a defendant is not mentioned, high-crime area designations can act as a proxy for race inviting racial bias into courts’ analyses. Reasonable suspicion analysis involves the interpretation of a suspect’s …

Using State Sentencing Enhancements To Protect Journalists From Physical Assault, Anthony L. Fargo

Villanova Law Review (1956 - )

No abstract provided.

Lessons Learned From Global Responses To Criminal Abortion Laws, Cynthia Soohoo

Fordham Law Review Online

No abstract provided.