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Articles 1 - 30 of 130
Full-Text Articles in Law and Society
Resiliency Planning And The Reorganization Of Legal Authority In Rural Maine, Nicholas F. Jacobs, Skylar Thielbar
Resiliency Planning And The Reorganization Of Legal Authority In Rural Maine, Nicholas F. Jacobs, Skylar Thielbar
Maine Law Review
Resiliency has become a dominant and largely unchallenged organizing principle of contemporary state-local governance in Maine, particularly as it affects rural towns and communities dependent on extractive industries. This Article argues that resiliency planning is not merely a policy orientation, but a distinct form of legal authority, which operates through an administrative structure that is closed off to normal channels of political accountability and judicial review. Focusing on Maine, the Article shows how statewide resiliency planning reallocates authority across state and local institutions, shaping fiscal access and territorial development without triggering the doctrinal safeguards of public law. Rural governance, where …
Betschart V. Oregon: A Seven-Day Standard For Maine, Henry Gates
Betschart V. Oregon: A Seven-Day Standard For Maine, Henry Gates
Maine Law Review
Maine lacks a clear standard for ensuring the right to counsel for indigent defendants. The State’s public defense system is struggling to meet Maine’s constitutional mandate: To provide indigent defense services in rural areas and across the state. An aging bar with few new attorneys working in rural areas—where there are often higher relative prosecution rates and a corresponding increased need for legal services—is contributing to the problem. This has resulted in a legal system that negatively impacts rural communities and indigent defendants to the point that one court concluded the state is violating the Sixth Amendment. Following the Ninth …
One Year's Seeding: Looking Back On The Last Seven Years Of Maine's Progress Toward Rural Justice, Christopher Northrop, Seth Main
One Year's Seeding: Looking Back On The Last Seven Years Of Maine's Progress Toward Rural Justice, Christopher Northrop, Seth Main
Maine Law Review
Nationally, the crisis in access to legal services in rural areas continues to grow despite significant attention and efforts to reverse this troubling trend. This Article explores Maine’s efforts to address our legal deserts. The Article’s starting point is a retrospective look at our 2019 national symposium on rural justice and accompanying Maine Law Review issue. We will try to measure successes and failures, while also addressing the significant impact caused by the intervening pandemic. The Article will then shift to an analysis of the current landscape, focusing on the role of the University of Maine School of Law. We …
Legal Deserts Over Time, Cory L. Dodds
Legal Deserts Over Time, Cory L. Dodds
Maine Law Review
Legal deserts—counties with exceptionally low attorney availability—shape housing stability, personal safety, health outcomes, and economic security in rural communities. Yet, national scholarship has not yet determined whether attorney scarcity is transient or durable and relies largely on cross-sectional snapshots and population-based headcounts benchmarked to the American Bar Association’s (ABA) threshold of one attorney per 1,000 residents. These measures can obscure temporal dynamics, overstate functional supply, and embed contested normative assumptions about adequacy. This Article offers a national, longitudinal, and definition-sensitive analysis of legal deserts using county-level data from the forty-eight contiguous states at three observation points. Attorney supply is measured …
The Other Right To Counsel: The Civil Guarantee In State Constitutions, Dmitry Bam
The Other Right To Counsel: The Civil Guarantee In State Constitutions, Dmitry Bam
Maine Law Review
When most people speak of the right to counsel, they speak in the singular. After the Supreme Court’s seminal decision in Gideon v. Wainwright, the right to counsel in criminal prosecutions has become one of our most cherished fundamental rights. It is a right ingrained in our culture. Even children can recite the mantra that the accused have the right to a lawyer, and if they can’t afford a lawyer, one will be provided to them free of charge. It is no surprise, then, that our constitutional focus is trained on the criminal defendant’s right to counsel. After all, there …
Foreword, Adam Fortier-Brown
Foreword, Adam Fortier-Brown
Maine Law Review
Access to legal services in America has emerged as one of the most pressing structural challenges facing the legal community. As attorneys increasingly concentrate in metropolitan areas, large areas are left with few practicing attorneys and challenging prospects of attracting many more. The consequences of this challenge reach across nearly every aspect of life in these communities—from housing and family stability, to starting or winding down businesses, and critically, to the constitutional guarantees that attach when someone is charged with a crime. Yet, these challenges have also generated a period of genuine creativity and collaboration between communities and different institutions. …
Rurality And Redistricting: California's Proposition 50, Rural Identity, And Democratic Legitimacy, Lisa R. Pruitt
Rurality And Redistricting: California's Proposition 50, Rural Identity, And Democratic Legitimacy, Lisa R. Pruitt
Maine Law Review
When California voters embraced mid-decade congressional redistricting in 2025, the greatest media attention landed on the state’s First Congressional District, CA-01. It is residents of that district who are likely to feel the consequences of the new maps most profoundly. In the form established by the California Citizens Redistricting Commission in 2021, CA-01 occupied more than 26,000 square miles in the state’s northeastern corner. The district included a number of inland counties stretching from Modoc, tucked into the corner formed by the Oregon and Nevada state lines, to Colusa, in the Great Central Valley. The cluster of ten counties—hereinafter “old …
The Sour Truth: Maine's Refusal To Provide Agricultural Workers Equal Employment Rights By Statutory Exclusion, Natalie Jump
The Sour Truth: Maine's Refusal To Provide Agricultural Workers Equal Employment Rights By Statutory Exclusion, Natalie Jump
Maine Law Review
Agricultural work is some of the most dangerous and grueling work there is, but you wouldn't know that from the way Maine's wage and hours laws have treated agricultural workers, both historically and today. Until 2025, farmworkers were not entitled to Maine minimum wage and were guaranteed only the significantly lower federal minimum wage. The Maine State Legislature decided that agricultural workers deserved more and passed a law during the first session of the 132nd Legislature that required agricultural workers to be paid Maine minimum wage. However, agricultural workers remain statutorily exempt from the definition of "employee" and therefore still …
A Seventh Amendment Remedy For Housing Instability, Gregory M. Zlotnick
A Seventh Amendment Remedy For Housing Instability, Gregory M. Zlotnick
Maine Law Review
After the 2023–2024 Supreme Court term, housing advocates despaired over the expected, yet still unwelcome, decision in City of Grants Pass v. Johnson. While focusing on this case is understandable, this Article suggests that scholars, policymakers, and advocates should train their focus on another, perhaps less-expected case from the previous Supreme Court term: SEC v. Jarkesy. In Jarkesy, the Court affirmed a defendant’s constitutional right to a jury trial in an administrative proceeding that sought to enforce a right similar to one found at common law. The Court’s capacious interpretation of the Seventh Amendment in Jarkesy has implications for state-law …
Attorneys And The Summary Contempt Sanction, Maine Law Review
Attorneys And The Summary Contempt Sanction, Maine Law Review
Maine Law Review
It is indisputable that an orderly, disciplined courtroom is a prerequisite for the administration of justice. Rules necessarily backed by sanctions insure needed decorum and sobriety within the courtroom. One method used to promote courtroom order is the summary criminal contempt procedure embodied in 18 U.S.C. § 401(1) and implemented under Rule 42(a) of the Federal Rules of Criminal Procedure. In practice, the nature of the procedure has triggered criticism that summary criminal punishment of indecorous courtroom conduct fails to provide constitutional safeguards of due process of law. Most recently, the decision of In re Dellinger has reemphasized the problems …
Defense Of Indigents In Maine: The Need For Public Defenders, Peter Avery Anderson
Defense Of Indigents In Maine: The Need For Public Defenders, Peter Avery Anderson
Maine Law Review
During the past ten years the United States Supreme Court has engineered a major reworking of criminal procedure through judicial review. In no area of criminal procedure has the overhaul been so drastic as in the right to court appointed counsel. From a time when court appointment of counsel was virtually nonexistent, the right has been expanded to the extent that counsel is now available in nearly all cases and stages of the proceedings. This rapid growth of the right to counsel has placed an understandable strain on state and federal judicial systems. Various means of coping with the demands …
Media Access And The First Amendment's Romantic Tradition, Merle W. Loper
Media Access And The First Amendment's Romantic Tradition, Merle W. Loper
Maine Law Review
Jerome Barron must be regarded as the legal profession's leading advocate of a legally enforceable public right of access to use the communication media-both printed and electronic. This book, above all, is an advocacy of that right and a survey of the need for public access. Professor Barron further discusses certain problems that an access right might raise-such as the allocation of access time and the regulation of offensiveness in broadcasting-and explores various aspects of these problems. As advocacy, the book is much more persuasive of the need for access to the contemporary media than it is of the prospects …
Breaking Up With The Anti-Hero: How 303(B)(3) Can Help Law Schools Mitigate Their Perennial Devices, Prices, Vices, And Crises, Kelly M. Gamble
Breaking Up With The Anti-Hero: How 303(B)(3) Can Help Law Schools Mitigate Their Perennial Devices, Prices, Vices, And Crises, Kelly M. Gamble
Maine Law Review
The American Bar Association’s issuance of Standard 303(b)(3) represents a pivotal shift compelling law schools to adapt their approach to the evolving needs of law students, lawyers, and the profession. The Standard serves as an invitation to re-evaluate the relationship between the primary curriculum and student support frameworks. This Article proposes a comprehensive approach to infuse professional identity development throughout the first year of law school. While professional identity development requires ongoing efforts, sometimes tailored to particular practice interests, this Article contends that all students benefit from early explicit instruction on foundational professional identity competencies. This Article first outlines the …
Co-Parents With Benefits, Jessica Feinberg
Co-Parents With Benefits, Jessica Feinberg
Faculty Publications
The relationshipbetween individuals who share a common child merits significant legal and societal attention. An increasingly high percentageofchildren are being raisedby parents who are not married to each other, and modern social science research demonstrates that the quality of the relationship between co-parents has serious implications for children's well-being. When co-parentage is unaccompanied by marriage, however, the law historically has attachedfew, if any, rights and obligations to the relationship. This historical disregard for the relationship between non-marital co- parents fails to promote children's best interests. Children whose parents are not marriedto each other should not be excludedfrom the benefits that …
In Re Debra B.: The Best Interest Standard In Court-Authorized Sterilization Of The Mentally Retarded, Sheila M. Donahue
In Re Debra B.: The Best Interest Standard In Court-Authorized Sterilization Of The Mentally Retarded, Sheila M. Donahue
Maine Law Review
Pursuant to the Due Process in Sterilization Act of 1982, Maine courts may hear petitions for sterilization of the mentally retarded. In In re Debra B., a mother petitioned to have her mentally retarded daughter sterilized. The Maine Supreme Judicial Court, sitting as the Law Court, vacated the order granting the petition. In a unanimous opinion, the court held that a finding of procreative capability is a sine qua non for determining whether sterilization is in an incompetent person's best interest. Through its holding, the court thereby extended the statute's clear and convincing standard of proof to a factor not …
From "Maine Law" To Model Act: Liquor Liability In Maine, William P. Shumaker
From "Maine Law" To Model Act: Liquor Liability In Maine, William P. Shumaker
Maine Law Review
With the passage of the Maine Liquor Liability Act by the 112th Legislature, the State of Maine has completed a thorough reexamination of its public policy in the area of liability for injuries resulting from the use of alcoholic beverages. For 130 years the state's policy in this area was expressed by the statute commonly known as the dram shop act, the essential provisions of which had remained unchanged for over a century. This statute held sellers and other providers of alcoholic beverages strictly liable to any third party injured as a result of the intoxication of the recipient of …
Pornography Commissions And The First Amendment: On Constitutional Values And Constitutional Facts, David A.J. Richards
Pornography Commissions And The First Amendment: On Constitutional Values And Constitutional Facts, David A.J. Richards
Maine Law Review
The interlinked questions of free speech, obscenity, and pornography are contextually sensitive—as are many other great issues of constitutional principle—to both normative and factual arguments; that is, much of the disagreement in the discussion of these questions centers on the proper interplay of constitutional values and facts. To what extent, for example, should constitutional values be sensitive to empirical research about the consequences of pornography distribution and use? If sensitive at all, how sensitive? Must the state, for example, satisfy a heavy burden of justification in terms of showing harm caused if it is to abridge pornography distribution and use, …
A Defendant's Right To Counsel In Commitment Hearings For Nonpayment Of A Criminal Fine, Barbara A. Appleby
A Defendant's Right To Counsel In Commitment Hearings For Nonpayment Of A Criminal Fine, Barbara A. Appleby
Maine Law Review
The federal constitutional right of an indigent defendant to appointed counsel in state court proceedings derives from two constitutional provisions. First, the sixth amendment, as incorporated by the due process clause of the fourteenth amendment, provides the basis for an absolute right to counsel in criminal prosecutions leading to actual imprisonment. Second, the due process clause, as an independent source of individual rights, provides the basis for the right to counsel in civil proceedings. Both the sixth amendment and the due process rights may be implicated in a hearing for non-payment of a criminal fine. Title 17-A, section 1304 of …
Maine's Unintentional Murder Statute: Depraved Indifference On Trial, Louis B. Butterfield
Maine's Unintentional Murder Statute: Depraved Indifference On Trial, Louis B. Butterfield
Maine Law Review
Perhaps nowhere in the law is the demand for reason and justice more compelling than in the penal law, and nowhere in the penal law is the need for fairness greater than in the law defining murder. The notion of fairness in Anglo-American criminal law is embodied in the concept of mens rea. For over three hundred years, the basic tenet of penal law has been that "actus non facit reum, nisi mens sit rea." A mens rea element serves to define a crime in positive terms and also provides the basis for defenses that negate the subjective culpability element. …
Coping With Confusion: A Unitary Procedure For Judicial Review Of The Referendum Process, Daniel L. Cummings
Coping With Confusion: A Unitary Procedure For Judicial Review Of The Referendum Process, Daniel L. Cummings
Maine Law Review
Although our state and national political systems are models of representative government, the Maine Constitution provides an important mechanism for direct democracy. Indeed, the people of Maine expressly reserve in the state constitution "power to propose laws and to enact or reject the same at the polls independent of the Legislature." Maine people propose such laws by means of the referendum process. Use of the referendum has become an increasingly widespread mechanism for addressing pervasive societal concerns such as land use regulation, environmental policy and public health issues. The prevalence of interest group politics undoubtedly influences Maine's electorate to use …
Withdrawal Of Life-Sustaining Treatment: Patients' Rights—Privacy Rights, Patricia Lerwick
Withdrawal Of Life-Sustaining Treatment: Patients' Rights—Privacy Rights, Patricia Lerwick
Maine Law Review
As medical expertise and technologies improve, many patients who would otherwise die of their illnesses or injuries survive. For many of these patients and their families, the knowledge and therapies that save their lives are a blessing. Unfortunately for some, survival means not recovery, but rather a severely limited existence dependent on some form of life-sustaining treatment, such as a ventilator or feeding tube. For some of these patients, such an existence is not a blessing, but a curse, not a triumph over death, but rather a cruel prolonging of their dying. These patients, or their families, seek to have …
Cameras In Maine's Courts: Has The Time Come? Will It Ever?, Joseph M. O'Connor
Cameras In Maine's Courts: Has The Time Come? Will It Ever?, Joseph M. O'Connor
Maine Law Review
Should television cameras be allowed in Maine's courtrooms? The answer to this question implicates policies involving the rights of parties, witnesses, the media, and the public. Nearly ten years ago, the Supreme Court ruled conclusively that there is no constitutional impediment to allowing television coverage of trials in state courts. Since then, the majority of states have promulgated rules, with greater or lesser degrees of restriction, allowing television coverage of proceedings in their courts. This trend has not abated; with the adoption of audio-visual coverage rules by the Vermont Supreme Court in 1989, Maine is now the only New England …
The Child Witness In Sexual Abuse Cases In Maine: Presentation, Impeachment, And Controversy, Kermit V. Lipez
The Child Witness In Sexual Abuse Cases In Maine: Presentation, Impeachment, And Controversy, Kermit V. Lipez
Maine Law Review
In any sexual abuse trial, the entry of the child into the courtroom is a dramatic moment. The large door to the courtroom opens. A small child enters, accompanied by a victim advocate who walks with the child toward the witness stand. At the end of the public seats, the child is turned over to a court officer who escorts the child to the witness stand. In the typically high-ceilinged, expansive courtroom where we conduct our jury trials, the small child looks even smaller. Some children slouch in the witness chair, as if they were trying to hide. The jurors …
Respect My Authority: The Past, Present, And Future Of The Public Authority, Tom J. Letourneau
Respect My Authority: The Past, Present, And Future Of The Public Authority, Tom J. Letourneau
Ocean and Coastal Law Journal
This comment synthesizes various historical aspects of motor vehicle infrastructure in the United States. The network of issues at play involves centuries of public policy decisions made at the local, state, and federal level, which twentieth century legal innovations hastened and curdled into the car culture we are all a part of today. The public authority is the paradigm of these legal innovations, but it has outlived its usefulness in the face climate change and burgeoning issues relating to urbanism.
The Case For Second Chances: A Pathway To Decarceration In Maine, Catherine Besteman, Leo Hylton
The Case For Second Chances: A Pathway To Decarceration In Maine, Catherine Besteman, Leo Hylton
Maine Law Review
The Article argues that Maine incarcerates too many people, for too long, for too many things, at too great of an expense. We offer evidence to support this claim, briefly review some of the criminal legal legislation that shaped our present reality, and show how recent efforts at reform have been, at best, only modestly successful. In concert with a growing number of expert voices across the country calling for strategies of decarceration, our goal is to demonstrate the need for second chance legislation in Maine in the form of the reinstatement of parole, an effective clemency process, a far-reaching …
Private Environmental Nudges, Anthony Moffa
Private Environmental Nudges, Anthony Moffa
Faculty Publications
Environmentalist outcry against single-use plastics has rapidly translated into municipal and state policy. Bans and taxes on plastic bags, and, to a lesser extent, polices targeting plastic food/drink containers and plastic straws, have popped up all over the country. Many large national corporations, including Starbucks, Disney, and Hyatt to name a few, have also taken steps to reduce the amount of single-use plastics that their customers add to the waste stream.
Two ongoing discussions in the environmental law scholarship parallel these innovations in policy. The first re-examines the proper role for subnational governments in environmental policymaking, reviving a debate about …
Reform Through Resignation: Why Chief Justice Roberts Should Resign (In 2023), Scott P. Bloomberg
Reform Through Resignation: Why Chief Justice Roberts Should Resign (In 2023), Scott P. Bloomberg
Faculty Publications
Many proponents of reforming the Supreme Court have expressed support for adopting a system of eighteen-year staggered term limits. These proposals, however, are hobbled by constitutional constraints: Amending the Constitution to implement term limits is highly implausible and implementing term limits through statute is likely unconstitutional. This Essay offers an approach to implementing term limits that avoids these constitutional constraints. Just as President Washington was able to establish a de facto Presidential term limit by not seeking a third term in office, Chief Justice Roberts is uniquely positioned to establish a new norm of serving eighteen-year terms on the Court. …
Hart Failure: The Supreme Judicial Court's Interpretation Of Nonjudicial Demeanor, Harold T. Kelly Jr.
Hart Failure: The Supreme Judicial Court's Interpretation Of Nonjudicial Demeanor, Harold T. Kelly Jr.
Maine Law Review
Among the inherent powers of the Maine Supreme Judicial Court is the power to regulate the officers of its courts. As the court explained in Board of Overseers of the Bar v. Lee, “each of the three co-equal branches of government has, without any express grant, the inherent right to accomplish all objects necessarily within the orbit of that department when not expressly allocated to, or limited by the existence of a similar power in, one of the other departments.” It is not surprising that the Supreme Judicial Court has for many years regulated, through formal disciplinary proceedings, the conduct …
Gender And Specialization In The Practice Of Divorce Law, Richard J. Maiman, Lynn Mather, Craig A. Mcewen
Gender And Specialization In The Practice Of Divorce Law, Richard J. Maiman, Lynn Mather, Craig A. Mcewen
Maine Law Review
In the past two decades, the gender composition of the legal profession in the United States has changed dramatically. While women comprised less than five percent of the nation's lawyers in 1970, the proportion of women lawyers had increased to more than 19% by the end of 1988, and roughly 40% of new lawyers each year are now women. However, the movement of women into the legal profession has not been easy. As a consequence, considerable commentary has been focused on the significant problems of sexual harassment, discrimination, and other forms of gender bias, and on such issues as the …
The Unmet Legal Needs Of The Poor In Maine: Is Mandatory Pro Bono The Answer?, Wendy F. Rau
The Unmet Legal Needs Of The Poor In Maine: Is Mandatory Pro Bono The Answer?, Wendy F. Rau
Maine Law Review
In 1989, the Maine Commission on Legal Needs was formed to study the civil legal needs of Maine's poor population and to develop a plan for meeting those needs. Similar projects have been undertaken in a number of other states and by the American Bar Association in recent years. Each study has revealed a significant unmet need among the poor for assistance with legal problems. There seems little doubt that the situation is serious and widespread. The difficulty lies in finding a solution. One proposal that has been advanced is mandatory pro bono, a program that would require attorneys to …