Legal Education Commons^™

A Commitment To The Whole Athlete: Embracing The Role Of Cannabinoids In Collegiate Athletics, Kelli Rodriguez Currie

Seattle University Law Review

Cannabinoids can be a highly effective way for athletes to combat various kinds of pain associated with intense training. Derivatives of cannabis, such as marijuana, have been used for centuries as a form of pain relief. Part I of this Article discusses how cannabinoids are used in sports medicine. Part II discusses the different approaches to marijuana and cannabidiol use across sports leagues. Part III highlights the inconsistencies between the NCAA’s approach to testing for substance abuse and its investment in student-athletes’ well-being. Part IV discusses how the NCAA must focus on student-athlete health. Finally, Part V concludes that the …

Tiptoeing Through The Landmines: The Evolution Of States’ Legal Ethics Authority Regarding Representing Cannabis Clients, Karen E. Boxx

Seattle University Law Review

Despite the continued federal classification of cannabis as an illegal drug, states have legalized the possession, use, production, and sale of cannabis. In order to do so, the states have created complex regulatory schemes to control and monitor the cannabis industry and satisfy the federal government concerns, such as use by minors and organized crime involvement. First, this Article presents the ethical dilemma of cannabis lawyering. Second, this Article describes the history, evolution, and current status of the various states’ pronouncements on a lawyer’s ethical duties with respect to the business and use of cannabis that may be legal under …

Unfair-But-Not-Deceptive: Confronting The Ambiguity In Washington State’S Consumer Protection Act, Emily Beale

Seattle University Law Review

This Comment will argue that Washington state courts must promulgate a new, workable definition of “unfair-but-not-deceptive” under Washington’s Consumer Protection Act. Washington courts have acknowledged that a business act or practice can be unfair but not deceptive, but a simple recognition does not fulfill the liberal intentions of the Consumer Protection Act. By continuously declining to define unfair- but-not-deceptive, Washington courts have left consumers vulnerable and without recourse. This Comment will highlight the approaches developed by the federal government and other state governments on how to confront the ambiguity of unfair-but-not-deceptive and will propose a concrete definition for the term.

Revisiting The Enforceability Of Online Contracts: The Need For Unambiguous Assent To Inconspicuous Terms, Tom Mozingo

Seattle University Law Review

In determining the enforceability of online contracts, namely those formed from the use of smartphone applications, courts typically look to whether the contract terms were reasonably conspicuous or communicated to the consumer. With the rise of “browse-wrap” contracts, where terms are not directly communicated to the consumer or where the consumer is not required to click the equivalent of an “I agree” button clearly manifesting assent to the terms, courts have inconsistently applied the reasonable communicativeness standard to the detriment of consumers and application developers alike. This Comment will explore the development of browse-wrap contracting jurisprudence and the need to …

In Memory Of Professor James E. Bond, Janet Ainsworth

Seattle University Law Review

Janet Ainsworth, Professor of Law at Seattle University School of Law: In Memory of Professor James E. Bond.

"Inciting A Riot": Silent Sentinels, Group Protests, And Prisoners' Petition And Associational Rights, Nicole B. Godfrey

Seattle University Law Review

This Article argues for increased legal protections for prisoners who choose to engage in group protest to shed light on the conditions of their incarceration. A companion piece to a similar article that focused on prisoner free speech rights, this Article uses the acts of protest utilized by the Silent Sentinels to examine why prisoners’ rights to petition and association should be strengthened. By strengthening these rights, the Article argues that we will advance the values enshrined by the First Amendment’s Petition Clause while simultaneously advancing the rights of the incarcerated millions with little to no political power.

The Article …

Black Women And Girls And The Twenty-Sixth Amendment: Constitutional Connections, Activist Intersections, And The First Wave Youth Suffrage Movement, Mae C. Quinn

Seattle University Law Review

On this 100th anniversary of the Nineteenth Amendment—and on the cusp of the fiftieth anniversary of the Twenty-sixth Amendment—this article seeks to expand the voting rights canon. It complicates our understanding of voting rights history in the United States, adding layers to the history of federal constitutional enfranchisement and encouraging a more intersectional telling of our suffrage story in the days ahead.

Thus, this work not only seeks to acknowledge the Twenty-sixth Amendment as important constitutional content, as was the goal of the article I wrote with my law student colleagues for a conference held at the University of Akron …

Does The Woman Suffrage Amendment Protect The Voting Rights Of Men?, Steve Kolbert

Seattle University Law Review

This Article—part of the Seattle University Law Review’s symposium on the centennial of the ratification of the Woman Suffrage Amendment—examines that open possibility. Concluding that the Nineteenth Amendment does protect men’s voting rights, this Article explores why and how that protection empowers Congress to address felon disenfranchisement and military voting. This Article also examines the advantages of using Nineteenth Amendment enforcement legislation compared to legislation enacted under other constitutional provisions.

Part I discusses the unique barriers to voting faced by voters with criminal convictions (Section I.A) and voters in the armed forces (Section I.B). This Part also explains how existing …

The Internet Never Forgets: A Federal Solution To The Dissemination Of Nonconsensual Pornography, Alexis Santiago

Seattle University Law Review

As technology evolves, new outlets for interpersonal conflict and crime evolve with it. The law is notorious for its inability to keep pace with this evolution. This Comment focuses on one area that the law urgently needs to regulate—the dissemination of “revenge porn,” otherwise known as nonconsensual pornography. Currently, no federal law exists in the U.S. that criminalizes the dissemination of nonconsensual pornography. Most U.S. states have criminalized the offense, but with vastly different degrees of severity, resulting in legal inconsistencies and jurisdictional conflicts. This Comment proposes a federal solution to the dissemination of nonconsensual pornography that carefully balances the …

Attorney–Client Privilege In Bad Faith Insurance Claims: The Cedell Presumption And A Necessary National Resolution, Klien Hilliard

Seattle University Law Review

Attorney–client privilege is one of the most important aspects of our legal system. It is one of the oldest privileges in American law and is codified both at the national and state level. Applying to both individual persons and corporations, this expanded privilege covers a wide breadth of clients. However, this broad privilege can sometimes become blurred in relationships between the corporation and the individuals it serves. Specifically, insurance companies and those they cover have complex relationships, as the insurer possesses a quasi-fiduciary relationship in relation to the insured. This type of relationship requires that the insurer act in good …

Washington’S Young Offenders: O’Dell Demands A Change To Sentencing Guidelines, Erika Vranizan

Seattle University Law Review

This Note argues that the O’Dell decision was a watershed moment for criminal justice reform. It argues that the reasoning in O’Dell should be seized upon by the legislature to take action to remediate instances in which defendants are legal adults but do not possess the cognitive characteristics of an adult sufficient to justify adult punishment. Given both the scientific impossibility of identifying a precise age at which characteristics of youthfulness end and adulthood begins and the Court’s repeated recognition that these very factors impact culpability, the current approach to sentencing young offenders aged eighteen to twenty-five as adults simply …

Say “No” To Discrimination, “Yes” To Accommodation: Why States Should Prohibit Discrimination Of Workers Who Use Cannabis For Medical Purposes, Anne Marie Lofaso, Lakyn D. Cecil

Seattle University Law Review

This Article addresses the question of how the law should treat medical cannabis in the employment context. Using Colorado as a primary example, we argue that states such as Colorado should amend their constitutions and legislate to provide employment protections for employees who are registered medical cannabis cardholders or registered caregivers.

Part I briefly traces the legal regulation of cannabis from an unregulated medicine known as cannabis to a highly regulated illicit substance known as marijuana under the Controlled Substances Act. Our travail through this history reveals, unsurprisingly, an increasing demonization of cannabis throughout the twentieth century. That socio-legal demonization …

A Dangerous Inheritance: A Child’S Digital Identity, Kate Hamming

Seattle University Law Review

This Comment begins with one family’s story of its experience with social media that many others can relate to in today’s ever-growing world of technology and the Internet. Technology has made it possible for a person’s online presence to grow exponentially through continuous sharing by other Internet users. This ability to communicate and share information amongst family, friends, and strangers all over the world, while beneficial in some regard, comes with its privacy downfalls. The risks to privacy are elevated when children’s information is being revealed, which often stems from a child’s own parents conduct online. Parents all over the …

Thin Separability: An Answer To Star Athletica, Angelo Marchesini

Seattle University Law Review

Courts have consistently struggled to adopt a test that appropriately interprets the Copyright Act’s language protecting works of art incorporated into useful articles. The analysis that allows protections of these works of art is called “separability,” and it has been an ambiguous area of copyright law since its inception. In essence, this analysis gives copyright protection to a work of art incorporated into a useful article as long as the work of art is “separate” from the utilitarian aspects of the useful article. The Supreme Court was positioned to end the uncertainty surrounding the separability analysis in its recent decision, …

Table Of Contents, Seattle University Law Review

Seattle University Law Review

Table of Contents

Table Of Contents, Seattle University Law Review

Seattle University Law Review

No abstract provided.

Table Of Contents, Seattle University Law Review

Seattle University Law Review

No abstract provided.

Law By Non-Lawyers: The Limit To Limited License Legal Technicians Increasing Access To Justice, Rebecca M. Donaldson

Seattle University Law Review

For the first time in the American legal profession, non-lawyers can openly, independently, ethically, and legally engage in activities recognized by bar associations as the practice of law. In 2012, the Washington Supreme Court passed Admission and Practice Rule 28 (APR 28), establishing the profession’s first paraprofessional licensing scheme that allows non-lawyers to give legal advice. The process authorizes qualified non-lawyers to provide legal advice without the supervision of a lawyer. Washington’s Supreme Court intends for Limited License Legal Technicians, or “LLLTs” as they are known, to increase access to justice by responding to the unmet civil legal needs of …

De-Grading Assessment: Rejecting Rubrics In Favor Of Authentic Analysis, Deborah L. Borman

Seattle University Law Review

Assigning grades is the least joyful duty of the law professor. In the current climate of legal education, law professors struggle with issues such as increased class size, providing “practice-ready” graduates, streamlining assignments, and accountability in assessment. In an effort to ease the burden of grading written legal analyses, individual professors or law school writing programs or both may develop articulated rubrics to assess students’ written work. Rubrics are classification tools that allow us to articulate our judgment of a written work. Rubrics may be as extensive as twenty categories and subcategories or may be limited to only a few …

Limited License Legal Technicians: Non-Lawyers Get Access To The Legal Profession, But Clients Won’T Get Access To Justice, Julian Aprile

Seattle University Law Review

Washington Limited License Legal Technicians (LLLTs) are non-lawyers who will supposedly help to close “the wide and ever-growing gap in necessary legal and law related services for low and moderate income persons.” However, LLLTs will not close the access to justice gap because “[t]here are no protections . . . to ensure that legal technicians will actually provide services to the poor, as opposed to selling their services to those who can most afford them,” and LLLTs are “not going to have the competency to actually do for the poor what needs to be done.”

Additionally, the modifications of the …

Notes On The Difficulty Of Studying The Corporation, Marina Welker

Seattle University Law Review

In the award-winning documentary The Corporation, public intellectuals and activists characterize corporations as “externalizing machines,” “doom machines,” “persons with no moral conscience,” and “monsters trying to devour as much profit as possible at anyone’s expense.” In other footage, people on the street personify corporations: “General Electric: a kind old man with lots of stories;” “Nike: young, energetic;” “Microsoft: aggressive;” “McDonald’s: young, outgoing, enthusiastic;” “Monsanto: immaculately dressed;” “Disney: goofy;” “The Body Shop: deceptive.” The documentary, like screenwriter and legal scholar Joel Bakan’s book The Corporation: The Pathological Pursuit of Profit and Power, imparts dissonant messages about corporations. On the one hand, …

Academic Freedom And Professorial Speech In The Post-Garcetti World, Oren R. Griffin

Seattle University Law Review

Academic freedom, a coveted feature of higher education, is the concept that faculty should be free to perform their essential functions as professors and scholars without the threat of retaliation or undue administrative influence. The central mission of an academic institution, teach-ing and research, is well served by academic freedom that allows the faculty to conduct its work in the absence of censorship or coercion. In support of this proposition, courts have long held that academic freedom is a special concern of the First Amendment, granting professors and faculty members cherished protections regarding academic speech. In Garcetti v. Ceballos, the …

True North: Navigating For The Transfer Of Learning In Legal Education, Tonya Kowalski

Seattle University Law Review

As lifelong learners, we all know the feelings of discomfort and bewilderment that can come from being asked to apply existing skills in a completely new situation. As legal educators, we have also experienced the frustration that comes from watching our students struggle to identify and transfer skills from one learning environment to another. For example, a first-semester law student who learns to analogize case law to a fact pattern in a legal writing problem typically will not see the deeper applications for those skills in a law school essay exam several weeks later. Similarly, when law students learn how …

Property 101: Is Property A Thing Or A Bundle?, Eric R. Claeys

Seattle University Law Review

This Review Essay has two aims. My more immediate aim is to assess where Merrill and Smith's contribution fits in the market for first-year Property casebooks. In short, Property: Principles and Policies represents an important advance in property pedagogy. By focusing thematically on exclusion's efficiency, Merrill and Smith have captured many important features of property overlooked by other casebooks. My longer-range aim is to advance the reclamation project Merrill and Smith have begun, by clarifying further the work that exclusivity does in property law. Property: Principles and Policies brings contemporary scholarship a long way toward appreciating the virtues of exclusivity, …

Deaning For Whom? Means And Ends In Legal Education, Hon. Kristin Booth Glen

Seattle University Law Review

I was an accidental dean. Law school deanship, or any kind of administration, was something that had never occurred to me. But after almost thirty happy and rewarding years as a constitutional litigator, state trial and appellate judge, and frequent law school professor, my dear friend, W. Haywood Burns, asked me to apply for the deanship at City University of New York School of Law (CUNY). Any request from Haywood was a good enough reason for complying. When, to my surprise, I was selected, I had to confront the more profound question of why I should become a law school …

Succeeding In The Candidate Pool: Resources Available For Persons Interested In Becoming A Law School Dean, David A. Brennan

Seattle University Law Review

This presentation covers three areas that fall under my supervision as Deputy Director of the Association of American Law Schools (AALS). First, I will discuss the two Deans Databanks that I administer, which relate directly to increasing diversity among the ranks of law school deans in America: the Women Deans Databank and the Minority Deans Databank. In particular, I will address how these two databanks reflect the core values of the AALS and how the databanks function in the deanship process. Second, I will discuss the Law Deanship Manual, an AALS publication that addresses nearly every aspect of what it …

Selected Commentary, Seattle University Law Review

Seattle University Law Review

First, why become a dean? This is the million-dollar question. It is a critically important question to ask yourself. To adequately answer that question, you must ask some related ones: What are the rewards and challenges of deaning? When is the right time--professionally and personally--for me to be a dean? These are as much personal as professional queries.

Knowing Which Deanship Is The Right One, R. Lawrence Dessem

Seattle University Law Review

In order to maximize the chance of a good fit between the dean candidate and law school, the candidate should (1) carefully plan her law school dean search; (2) conduct thorough discovery concerning schools of potential interest during the search process; (3) be candid and open during the interview process; and (4) take time to thoughtfully consider any offers received. Each of these steps in the dean search process will now be considered.

Leading Change In Legal Education: Good News For Diversity, Antoinette Sedillo Lopez

Seattle University Law Review

Two recent influential books on legal education, Educating Lawyers and Best Practices for Legal Education, come to similar conclusions about the problems with many legal education programs today. Many other suggestions for improvement in legal education programs are also similar. A major point made in both books is the need to train lawyers in their roles and skills as professionals. The books both contemplate a move from the current model of large classes taught through modified Socratic dialogue to a sequenced set of courses and experiences that build on basic legal analytical skill and provide opportunities for real life and …

How To Write, Edit, And Review Persuasive Briefs: Seven Guidelines From One Judge And Two Lawyers, Judge Stephen J. Dwyer, Leonard J. Feldman, Ryan Mcbride

Seattle University Law Review

The ability to write and recognize a persuasive brief is important to lawyers throughout their careers. Junior attorneys are often responsible for initially writing a brief. Senior attorneys often review those briefs and either rewrite or edit them (as circumstances require). In-house counsel may then review the briefs once more, providing additional edits and comments and addressing concerns. Wherever you happen to be in your career, it is important to know how to write, rewrite, edit, recognize, and review an effective brief. This Article offers a number of guidelines for crafting such briefs and provides a number of practical pointers …