Law and Society Commons^™

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 …

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 …

Public Perceptions Of The Use Of Artificial Intelligence In Voir Dire, Carson Snyder

Honors Projects

Attorneys have increasingly utilized AI tools to improve efficiency, and one area of application is in jury selection, or voir dire. Public concerns involving AI can have negative implications on how the use of AI tools in voir dire would be received. This study seeks to answer how an attorney’s use of AI in voir dire impacts the public’s perception of the process. Previous research is limited, though findings relating to privacy being a leading concern, increased perception of risk for when error outcomes are more serious, and historical abuse of peremptory challenges outline potential reasons for public disapproval of …

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 …

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 …

Presumed Guilty By Proximity: How Geofence Warrants Undermine The Fourteenth Amendment, Radha Patel

University of Miami Race & Social Justice Law Review

Geofence warrants are utilized as a surveillance tool to gather location data on every user within a specific area and are being integrated into policing without a stable legal framework. This integration threatens individual rights and disproportionately impacts people and communities of color. While these warrants are often scrutinized under the Fourth Amendment, this note argues that they significantly undermine the Fourteenth Amendment by granting law enforcement excessive discretion. This unchecked discretion allows systemic bias and racial profiling to influence criminal investigations, creating the potential for wrongful convictions. The analysis in this note details the three-step execution process of geofence …

Rethinking Objectivity: The Problem Of Pretext In The Fourth Amendment, Monu S. Bedi

Indiana Law Journal

Pretextual encounters continue to erode the legitimacy of the Supreme Court’s Fourth Amendment jurisprudence. Simply put, a police officer can act on personal bias or animus as long as the search or seizure is deemed “objectively reasonable.” Numerous scholars (e.g., Bennett Capers, Gabriel Chin, and David Harris) have critiqued this objective standard, contending it perpetuates discriminatory practices, particularly against communities of color. The late Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg herself suggested that the Court might need to reconsider the legal precedent she helped establish. More recently, Orin Kerr has also argued that the Court’s reliance on objective determinations is inconsistent with …

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 …

Lost And Found, Katherine M. Houlden

Nebraska Journal on Advancing Justice

No abstract provided.

Home Of The Brave, Land Of The Free: The Star-Spangled Banner's Contested History, Michael H. Hoffheimer

Nebraska Journal on Advancing Justice

No abstract provided.

Pearl's Perfect Last Will - Crushed By Infantilism Bias, Edward F. Fogarty Mr

Nebraska Journal on Advancing Justice

No abstract provided.

Dangerous Or Neglected, Amanda Landaverde

Nebraska Journal on Advancing Justice

No abstract provided.

The Call To Action, And My Reluctant Answer, Audrey R. Svane

Nebraska Journal on Advancing Justice

No abstract provided.

Legacy: Introduction To Issue 2, Nicholas L. Marti

Nebraska Journal on Advancing Justice

No abstract provided.

Volume 2, Issue 2 Masthead, Njaj Editorial Board

Nebraska Journal on Advancing Justice

No abstract provided.

A Prosecutor’S Ethical Duty To Divert, Jordan Stevenson

Legal Writing Competition Winners

In an American courtroom, litigants are divided across an aisle, a gavel grants or divests rights, and a community takes sides. This creates a narrative of duality in the justice system, which many believe is vital to the adversarial legal system. A criminal trial is seen as perpetrator versus victim, but the legal posture is actually government versus individual. In fact, a prosecuting attorney has ethical obligations not just to victims, witnesses, and the broader community, but to defendants as well, in part due to their tremendous discretion to bring or dismiss criminal charges. A prosecutor’s power is far too …

The Multi-Hatted Court: Community Courts As Boundary Organizations, Peter Dixon, Hadar Dancig-Rosenberg

Northwestern University Law Review

As a variety of the problem-solving court model, community courts have received significant scrutiny and debate. Do they help individuals by addressing the underlying needs that contribute to criminal behavior? Do they extend an unjust criminal legal system by making help conditional upon judicial involvement? This Article moves beyond such debates to ask how community court professionals and the communities who engage with them manage these and other tensions that are inherent to the model itself. As the second in a series of articles drawing on semi-structured interviews and focus groups with diverse stakeholders at the Red Hook Community Justice …

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 …

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 …

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