Law and Society Commons^™

Watch Or Report? Livestream Or Help? Good Samaritan Laws Revisited: The Need To Create A Duty To Report, Patricia Grande Montana

Cleveland State Law Review

In July 2017, a group of five Florida teenagers taunted a drowning disabled man while filming his death on a cell phone. In the video, the teenagers laughed and shouted harsh statements like "ain’t nobody finna to help you, you dumb bitch." At the moment the man’s head sank under the water for the very last time, one of the teenagers remarked: "Oh, he just died" before laughter ensued. None of the teenagers helped the man, nor did any of them report the drowning or his death to the authorities.

Because the Good Samaritan law in Florida, like in most …

Partisan Gerrymandering And The Illusion Of Unfairness, Jacob Eisler

Catholic University Law Review

Contemporary political discussions have given increasing attention on gerrymandering. Most discussions of gerrymandering focus on the practice’s illegitimate use as a weapon to distort popular democracy. This has been the Supreme Court’s focus as well, but all to no avail. The Supreme Court’s gerrymandering jurisprudence illustrates the difficulty in policing the practice, with the Court struggling to formulate a coherent test to determine when gerrymandering is permissible and when it runs afoul.

The increase focus on gerrymandering as a weapon invites a discussion whether the practice may is inherently illegitimate. This Article suggests two conditions, described as “partisan loyalty” and …

A Fresh Look At Title Vii: Sexual Orientation Discrimination As Sex Discrimination, Anthony Michael Kreis

All Faculty Scholarship

Since 2006, the Illinois Human Rights Act has prohibited discrimination in employment because of an employee’s sexual orientation or gender identity. Until 2017, employees discriminated against because of their sexual orientation had no federal cause of action, however. In a landmark decision, Hively v. Ivy Tech, the Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit became the first appellate court to hold that federal law’s prohibition of sex discrimination in the workplace also proscribed sexual orientation discrimination. The Hively decision is a substantial departure from decades’ worth of Seventh Circuit precedent and created a split between the circuits. This Article examines …

Legal Ethics And The Political Activity Of Government Lawyers, Andrew Martin

Articles, Book Chapters, & Popular Press

The ability to engage in political activity is an essential feature of a democratic society. However, the ability of government lawyers to do so is unclear. While most governments have passed legislation identifying permissible political activity of their employees, it is unclear how the professional obligations of lawyers apply in this context and how these professional obligations interact with this legislation. This article answers these questions. The duty of loyalty to the client requires most government lawyers to refrain from all political activity at the same level of government. The special professional obligations of Crown prosecutors require these lawyers to …

“So Teacher, What Is The Right Answer?” Incorporating Critical Thinking Into The Mexican Legal Education: The Application Of The Us Model, Dr. Ying Chen

University of Miami Inter-American Law Review

No abstract provided.

The Final Rule: A Call For Congressional Action To Return The Flsa And The Middle Class To Its Former Glory, Ashley Singrossi

University of Miami Business Law Review

2017 was full of change in America. But not for the middle class. The middle class remained stagnant, if not shrinking—as it has been for decades. Many scholars and economists theorize why the class that is the backbone of America—that once flourished as the beacon of hope for hard–working people around the world—has steadily declined over the past few decades. The answer lies in labor regulation. Federal labor regulations helped build America’s robust middle class. But those regulations are outdated and ineffective. If we want to see the middle class restored to its prosperity, and stop it from slowly slipping …

An Argument To The State Of Maine, The Town Of Wells, And Other Maine Towns Similarly Situated: Buy The Foreshore - Now, Orlando E. Delogu

Maine Law Review

This paper has its roots in the finality of what have come to be called the Moody Beach decisions. In the last of these two cases, Maine's Supreme Judicial Court, sitting as the Law Court, held that the public's right to use the intertidal zone was limited to those uses and activities spelled out in the Colonial Ordinance of 16411647: “We agree with the Superior Court's declaration of the state of the legal title to Moody Beach. Long and firmly established rules of property law dictate that the plaintiff oceanfront owners at Moody Beach hold title in fee to the …

Creating A Classroom Component For Field Placement Programs: Enhancing Clinical Goals With Feminist Pedagogy, Linda Morton

Maine Law Review

There exists a historic conflict between the more traditional Langdellian philosophy of legal education, and the experiential philosophy of apprenticeship programs, now known as field placement programs. The conflict is most recently apparent in the American Bar Association's (ABA) attempts to impose a more traditional classroom format on field placement programs through its regulations, guidelines, and instructions pertaining to law school accreditation. The ABA argues that law schools need to allocate greater instructional resources toward their field placement programs, particularly programs that provide more than one-half a semester's credit. Such programs should include a classroom component that meets ABA guidelines. …

The Pro Bono Collaborative Project Spotlight: Pro Bono Collaborative Aci Civil Legal Clinics Project Expands To Women's Facility (05-03-2018), Roger Williams University School Of Law

Pro Bono Collaborative Staff Publications

No abstract provided.

Confronting Silence: The Constitution, Deaf Criminal Defendants, And The Right To Interpretation During Trial, Deirdre M. Smith

Maine Law Review

For most deaf people, interactions with the hearing community in the absence of interpretation or technological assistance consist of communications that are, at most, only partly comprehensible. Criminal proceedings, with the defendant's liberty interest directly at stake, are occasions in which the need for deaf people to have a full understanding of what is said and done around them is most urgent. Ironically, the legal “right to interpretation” has not been clearly defined in either statutory or case law. Although the federal and state constitutions do not provide a separate or lesser set of rights for deaf defendants, their situation …

Prisoners Of Fate: The Challenges Of Creating Change For Children Of Incarcerated Parents, Amy B. Cyphert

Maryland Law Review

Children of incarcerated parents, the invisible victims of mass incarceration, suffer tremendous physical, psychological, educational, and financial burdens—detrimental consequences that can continue even long after a parent has been released. Although these children are blameless, policy makers, judges, and prison officials in charge of visitation policies have largely overlooked them. The United States Sentencing Commission Guidelines Manual explicitly instructs judges to ignore children when fashioning their parents’ sentences, and judges have largely hewed to this policy, even in the wake of the 2005 United States v. Booker decision that made those Guidelines merely advisory, not mandatory. Although some scholars have …

Digital Expungement, Eldar Haber

Maryland Law Review

No abstract provided.

Stopping Terrorism At Its Source: Conceptual Flaws Of The Deterrence-Based Counterterrorism Regime And Committing To A Preemptive Causal Model, Mark D. Kielsgard, Tam Hey Juan Julian

Journal of Law and Policy

This Article analyzes the psycho-social causes of terrorism, conceptual failures of deterrence, and sketches a coherent bi-furcated model of counterterrorism under a policy-oriented framework with the role of relevant domestic and international actors, methodologies, and the identification of prototypical societal insecurity drivers. It argues that there is a lacuna in counterterrorism policy that has failed to bridge the gap between the different social sciences and law leading to a failure to develop a fundamentally inclusive and coherent counterterrorism model which strikes at the heart of terror recruitment. It calls for a causal model that applies the multi-disciplinary efforts of all …

Headscarf Bans, Equal Treatment, And Minority Integration In The Workplace, Elizabeth A. Clark

Notre Dame Law Review Reflection

Andrea Pin’s Essay on the Achbita and Bougnaoui cases effectively highlights the significance of the cases and the singularity of the rulings, as well as the tension they create with other European Union norms and policies. The European Court of Justice’s (ECJ) rulings in these cases are also in tension with the court’s own discrimination law and exacerbate the pressing European question, particularly significant in light of the recent migration crisis, of how best to incorporate ethnic and religious minorities into a society.

Islam And Religious Freedom: The Experience Of Religious Majorities And Minorities, Brett G. Scharffs

Notre Dame Law Review Reflection

It seems likely that change in Islam will be affected both by outside and internal sources, as was the case for the Catholic Church and its journey to Dignitatis Humanae. However, one thing the Catholic experience suggests is that meaningful and profound change does not simply come from outside pressures; it comes from authentic and sincere evaluation and interpretation by insiders of a religious tradition of that tradition itself. Thus, if Islam is going to come to embrace religious freedom as an important value, this will be the result, significantly if not primarily, of Muslims interpreting their own sacred …

A Review Of Various Actions By The Federal Bureau Of Investigation And Department Of Justice In Advance Of The 2016 Election, Office Of The Inspector General, U.S. Department Of Justice

United States Department of Justice: Publications

The Department of Justice (Department) Office of the Inspector General (OIG) undertook this review of various actions by the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) and Department in connection with the investigation into the use of a private email server by former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton. Clinton served as Secretary of State from January 21, 2009, until February 1, 2013, and during that time used private email servers hosting the @clintonemail.com domain to conduct official Department of State (State Department) business. In 2014, in response to a request from the State Department to Clinton for “copies of any Federal records …

Fiction In The Code: Reading Legislation As Literature, Thomas J. Mcsweeney

Georgia State University Law Review

One of the major branches of the field of law and literature is often described as “law as literature.” Scholars of law as literature examine the law using the tools of literary analysis. The scholarship in this subfield is dominated by the discussion of narrative texts: confessions, victim-impact statements, and, above all, the judicial opinion. This article will argue that we can use some of the same tools to help us understand non-narrative texts, such as law codes and statutes.

Genres create expectations. We do not expect a law code to be literary. Indeed, we tend to dissociate the law …

Whose Sperm Is It Anyways In The Wild, Wild West Of The Fertility Industry?, Tatiana E. Posada

Georgia State University Law Review

Imagine a couple that is unable to conceive a child naturally. Luckily, they had the money and resources available to them to conceive a child through assisted reproductive technology (ART), so they decided to start their family through the use of intrauterine insemination. They selected a sperm bank and began the arduous process of selecting a sperm donor who fit the desired traits and characteristics for their child. The sperm bank matched them with an anonymous donor, Donor 9623, and assured the couple that the donor was “a healthy male with an IQ of 160, a bachelor’s of science in …

A (Thigh) Gap In The Law: Addressing Egregious Digital Manipulation Of Celebrity Images, Jessica L. Williams-Vickery

Georgia State University Law Review

In 2012, world-renowned supermodel Coco Rocha agreed to be photographed for the cover of one of Elle’s magazine publications, Elle Brazil. Rocha posed for the pictures in a dress with significant cutouts, covered only by a sheer layer of skin-toned fabric. In keeping with her firm policy of no full or partial nudity, Rocha wore a bodysuit underneath the dress to limit her exposure. When Elle published the magazine, the final product shocked Rocha; the magazine had altered the image to remove her bodysuit, giving the impression Rocha had shown more skin than she in fact had. Rocha took to …

Big Brother Is Watching: When Should Georgia Get Involved In Issues Of Family Privacy To Protect Children’S Liberties?, Michelle Wilco

Georgia State University Law Review

Alecia Faith Pennington (Faith) did not officially exist until she was nineteen. Faith’s conservative, religious parents, Lisa and James, raised their nine children on the family farm just outside Kerrville, Texas, and kept their family as self-sufficient and separate from the rest of the world as possible.

The family was very insular; the parents home schooled all of the children, and the family rarely left their home, with the rare exception of going to church. Lisa and James also prohibited their children from using the Internet until they were eighteen, at which point they were only allowed limited access to …

The Maternal Dilemma, Noya Rimalt

Cornell Law Review

When enacting the FMLA and setting a minimum standard of family leave for all eligible employees, Congress was particularly cautious about attacking the stereotype that all women are responsible for family caregiving. As Justice Rehnquist explained in Nevada v. Hibbs, the goal was to encourage men to assume more caretaking responsibilities at home, thus reducing employers' incentives to discriminate against women by basing hiring and promotion decisions on the stereotype of women as mothers. Indeed, the likely contribution of the gender- neutral parental leave legislation to the promotion of gender equality in the division of care-work at home, hence to …

Errors In Misdemeanor Adjudication, Samuel R. Gross

Articles

Millions of defendants are convicted of misdemeanors in the United States each year but almost none obtain exonerations, primarily because ordinarily exoneration is far too costly and time consuming to pursue for anything less than years of imprisonment. The National Registry of Exonerations lists all known exonerations in the United States since 1989 — 2,145 cases, as of the end of 2017; only 85 are misdemeanors, 4%. In all but one of these misdemeanor exonerations the defendants were convicted of crimes that never happened; by comparison, more than three-quarters of felony exonerees were convicted of actual crimes that other people …

Restraining Forced Marriage, Lisa V. Martin

Nevada Law Journal

No abstract provided.

Dead Canaries In The Coal Mines: The Symbolic Assailant Revisited, Jeannine Bell

Georgia State University Law Review

The well-publicized deaths of several African-Americans—Tamir Rice, Philando Castile, and Alton Sterling among others—at the hands of police stem from tragic interactions predicated upon well-understood practices analyzed by police scholars since the 1950s. The symbolic assailant, a construct created by police scholar Jerome Skolnick in the mid-1960s to identify persons whose behavior and characteristics the police view as threatening, is especially relevant to contemporary policing. This Article explores the societal roots of the creation of a Black symbolic assailant in contemporary American policing.

The construction of African-American men as symbolic assailants is one of the most important factors characterizing police …

Reforming Regenerative Medicine Regulation, Sarah Duranske

Georgia State University Law Review

Regenerative medicine is defined as the branch of medicine that develops methods to regrow, repair, or replace damaged or diseased cells or tissues. It includes a variety of approaches, such as transplanting cells to promote healing, editing genes in cells to attack cancer, and even building organs from biological materials. Regulating regenerative medicine therapies is no easy task. Finding a balance between competing interests–enabling timely access for needy patients while simultaneously ensuring a positive benefit/risk profile and promoting the development of beneficial innovations–is hard enough at any given point in time. But add in constantly advancing scientific knowledge and increasing …

No Child Left Behind Bars: Suspending Willful Defiance To Disassemble The School-To-Prison Pipeline, Danielle Dankner

Loyola of Los Angeles Law Review

With the criminalization of school discipline and the subsequent increased involvement between students and the juvenile justice system, a path from school to prison became entrenched. Public schools across the nation continued to increase their reliance on punitive disciplinary measures to punish a range of behaviors. Through these measures, schools began to perceive pushed out students as problematic, despite the lack of evidence supporting the efficacy of such policies. Due to school disciplinarians’ implicit bias when enforcing exclusionary policies, students of color and students with disabilities are most at risk. In the hopes of alleviating the devastating effects of the …

From Marriage Equality To Amazon: Marek Bute, Rwu Class Of 2005 (May 2018), Roger Williams University School Of Law

Life of the Law School (1993- )

No abstract provided.

Rhode Island's Top Lawyer: Peter Kilmartin, Rwu Class Of 1998 5-2018, Roger Williams University School Of Law

Life of the Law School (1993- )

No abstract provided.

International Courts Improve Public Deliberation, Shai Dothan

Michigan Journal of International Law

The paper starts with the effects of international courts on the broader public and narrows down to their influence on a small elite of lawyers. Part I suggests that international courts captivate the public imagination, allowing citizens to articulate their rights. Part II demonstrates how governments, parliaments, and national courts around the world interact with international courts in ways that improve public deliberation. Part III studies the global elite of lawyers that work in conjunction with international courts to shape policy. Part IV concludes by arguing that the dialogue fostered between international courts and democratic bodies does, in fact, lead …

Prisoner's Dilemma—Exhausted Without A Place Of Rest(Itution): Why The Prison Litigation Reform Act's Exhaustion Requirement Needs To Be Amended, Ryan Lefkowitz

The Scholar: St. Mary's Law Review on Race and Social Justice

The Prison Litigation Reform Act (PLRA) passed in 1996 in an effort to curb litigation from prisoners. The exhaustion requirement of the PLRA requires prisoners to fully exhaust any administrative remedies available to them before filing a lawsuit concerning any aspect of prison life. If a prisoner fails to do so, the lawsuit is subject to dismissal. The exhaustion requirement applies to all types of prisoner lawsuits, from claims filed for general prison conditions to excessive force and civil rights violations. It has been consistently and aggressively applied by the courts, blocking prisoners’ lawsuits from ever going to trial. Attempts …