Legal Ethics and Professional Responsibility Commons^™

Autonomous Weapons Systems And The Procedural Accounta- Bility Gap, Afonso Seixas-Nunes

Brooklyn Journal of International Law

The development and well-established principles of Internationla Humanitarian Law have been progressively establishing limits to the means and methods of warfare. Those principles and rules are necessarily applicable to future autonomous weapon systems (AWS), but questions regarding liability for violations of IHL caused by AWS have been looming the international debate. This article has two parts. The first part aims to identify a technical dimension of AWS that has been neglected by international lawyers: States responsibility for IHL violations caused by errors in AWS’ software. This article argues that “errors” can neither be identified with “malfunctions” nor attributed to human …

Title 42, Asylum, And Politicising Public Health, Michael Ulrich, Sondra S. Crosby

Faculty Scholarship

President Biden has continued the controversial immigration policy of the Trump era known as Title 42, which has caused harm and suffering to scores of asylum seekers under the guise of public health.1 The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) ordered the policy in March 2020 with the stated purpose of limiting the spread of the coronavirus into the U.S.; though, CDC and public health officials have admitted this policy has no scientific basis and there is no evidence it has protected the public.2,3 Instead, the impetus behind the policy appears to be a desire to keep out or …

Racism As A Human Rights Risk: Reconsidering The Corporate 'Responsibility To Respect' Rights, Erika George

Faculty Scholarship

Darnella Frazer, a teenage witness to a fatal police encounter, used social media to share her cell phone video footage capturing a white police officer casually kneeling on the neck of a handcuffed Black man named George Floyd for nearly nine minutes. Her video rapidly went viral, sparking civil unrest across the United States (US) and protests around the world.¹ Independent experts of the Special Procedures of the United Nations Human Rights Council came together to issue a joint statement condemning 'systemic racism' and 'state sponsored racial violence' in the US.² George Floyd was not the first unarmed …

Getting Away With Murder: How California State Law Determined Recovery In First Roundup Cancer Case Johnson V. Monsato Co., Eliza L. Quattlebaum

Villanova Environmental Law Journal (1991 - )

No abstract provided.

Out Of Sight, Out Of Mind: Analyzing Inhumane Practices In Mississippi’S Correctional Institutions Due To Overcrowding, Understaffing, And Diminished Funding, Ariel A. Williams

Honors Theses

The purpose of this research is to examine the political, social, and economic factors which have led to inhumane conditions in Mississippi’s correctional facilities. Several methods were employed, including a comparison of the historical and current methods of funding, staffing, and rehabilitating prisoners based on literature reviews. State-sponsored reports from various departments and the legislature were analyzed to provide insight into budgetary restrictions and political will to allocate funds. Statistical surveys and data were reviewed to determine how overcrowding and understaffing negatively affect administrative capacity and prisoners’ mental and physical well-being. Ultimately, it may be concluded that Mississippi has high …

Learning From The Past: Using Korematsu And Other Japanese Internment Cases To Provide Protections Against Immigration Detentions, Caleb Ward

Arkansas Law Review

One of the darkest periods in modern United States history is reoccurring with mixed public approval. During World War II, the United States government enacted executive orders creating a curfew, proscribing living areas, and forcing the exclusion and detention of all Japanese descendants from the West Coast. The United States justified these grievous freedom and equality violations through an increased need for national security “because we [were] at war with [Japan].” However, this perceived increased need for national security came from a fraudulent assessment showing any Japanese-American could be planning espionage or sabotage of the United States. After the war, …

Reckoning: A Dialogue About Racism, Antiracists, And Business & Human Rights, Erika George, Jena Martin, Tara Van Ho

Faculty Scholarship

Video of George Floyd's death sparked global demonstrations and prompted individuals, communities and institutions to grapple with their own roles in embedding and perpetuating racist structures. The raison d'être of Business and Human Rights (BHR) is to tackle structural corporate impediments to the universal realization of human rights. Yet, racism, one of the most obvious of such barriers, has been a blind spot for BHR. While the field has contended with gender inequality, there have only been tokenistic nods to intersectional harms caused by business activities. The failure to address racism seriously undermines both the promise of BHR generally and …

Neither “Post-War” Nor Post-Pregnancy Paranoia: How America’S War On Drugs Continues To Perpetuate Disparate Incarceration Outcomes For Pregnant, Substance-Involved Offenders, Becca S. Zimmerman

Pitzer Senior Theses

This thesis investigates the unique interactions between pregnancy, substance involvement, and race as they relate to the War on Drugs and the hyper-incarceration of women. Using ordinary least square regression analyses and data from the Bureau of Justice Statistics’ 2016 Survey of Prison Inmates, I examine if (and how) pregnancy status, drug use, race, and their interactions influence two length of incarceration outcomes: sentence length and amount of time spent in jail between arrest and imprisonment. The results collectively indicate that pregnancy decreases length of incarceration outcomes for those offenders who are not substance-involved but not evenhandedly -- benefitting white …

No, The Firing Squad Is Not Better Than Lethal Injection: A Response To Stephanie Moran’S A Modest Proposal, Michael Conklin

Seattle University Law Review

In the article A Modest Proposal: The Federal Government Should Use Firing Squads to Execute Federal Death Row Inmates, Stephanie Moran argues that the firing squad is the only execution method that meets the requirements of the Eighth Amendment. In order to make her case, Moran unjustifiably overstates the negative aspects of lethal injection while understating the negative aspects of firing squads. The entire piece is predicated upon assumptions that are not only unsupported by the evidence but often directly refuted by the evidence. This Essay critically analyzes Moran’s claims regarding the alleged advantages of the firing squad over …

Table Of Contents, Seattle University Law Review

Seattle University Law Review

Table of Contents

Mental Illness And Professional Regulation: The Duty To Report A Fellow Lawyer To The Society, Andrew Flavelle Martin

Articles, Book Chapters, & Popular Press

Lawyers have a largely overlooked duty to report other lawyers to the law society in a range of circumstances. This duty contemplates mental illness, explicitly or implicitly, as a reportable condition and thus engages issues of stigma and discrimination. This article analyzes this reporting duty with a focus on its implications for lawyers with disabilities. The article begins by examining the history and text of the rule and considering several legal problems it presents. It then canvasses law societies’ duties to their members with disabilities under human rights law and analyzes how the duty to report interacts with human rights …

Dispute Settlement Under The African Continental Free Trade Area Agreement: A Preliminary Assessment, Olabisi D. Akinkugbe

Articles, Book Chapters, & Popular Press

The African Continental Free Trade Area Agreement (AfCFTA) will add a new dispute settlement system to the plethora of judicial mechanisms designed to resolve trade disputes in Africa. Against the discontent of Member States and limited impact the existing highly legalized trade dispute settlement mechanisms have had on regional economic integration in Africa, this paper undertakes a preliminary assessment of the AfCFTA Dispute Settlement Mechanism (DSM). In particular, the paper situates the AfCFTA-DSM in the overall discontent and unsupportive practices of African States with highly legalized dispute settlement systems and similar WTO-Styled DSMs among other shortcomings. Notwithstanding the transplantation of …

Enough Is As Good As A Feast, Noah C. Chauvin

Seattle University Law Review

Ipse Dixit, the podcast on legal scholarship, provides a valuable service to the legal community and particularly to the legal academy. The podcast’s hosts skillfully interview guests about their legal and law-related scholarship, helping those guests communicate their ideas clearly and concisely. In this review essay, I argue that Ipse Dixit has made a major contribution to legal scholarship by demonstrating in its interview episodes that law review articles are neither the only nor the best way of communicating scholarly ideas. This contribution should be considered “scholarship,” because one of the primary goals of scholarship is to communicate new ideas.

Table Of Contents, Seattle University Law Review

Seattle University Law Review

Table of Contents

Authority And The Globalisation Of Inclusion And Exclusion: Author Meets Readers, Hand Lindahl, Christine Bell Prof, Friedrich Kratochwil, Hans-W. Micklitz, Carlos Thiebaut, Bert Van Roermund

Indiana Journal of Global Legal Studies

Authority is written against the background of intense resistance to globalization processes by a range of political movements and grassroots organizations. These processes are complex and have a variety of dimensions. One of these is the emergence of global legal orders, which I define, in a rough and ready manner, as relatively autonomous legal orders that claim or aspire to claim global validity for themselves. They too-most obviously the World Trade Organization (WTO)-are the butt of resistance. Whatever its forms and aspirations, resistance to globalization is fueled by their peculiar dynamic. Indeed, emergent global legal orders spawn massive exclusion when …

Complicity In The Perversion Of Justice: The Role Of Lawyers In Eroding The Rule Of Law In The Third Reich, Cynthia Fountaine

St. Mary's Journal on Legal Malpractice & Ethics

A fundamental tenet of the legal profession is that lawyers and judges are uniquely responsible—individually and collectively—for protecting the Rule of Law. This Article considers the failings of the legal profession in living up to that responsibility during Germany’s Third Reich. The incremental steps used by the Nazis to gain control of the German legal system—beginning as early as 1920 when the Nazi Party adopted a party platform that included a plan for a new legal system—turned the legal system on its head and destroyed the Rule of Law. By failing to uphold the integrity and independence of the profession, …

Food In Prison: An Eighth Amendment Violation Or Permissible Punishment?, Natasha M. Clark

Honors Thesis

This piece analyzes aspects such as; Eighth Amendment provisions, penology, case law, privatization and monopoly, and food law, that play into the constitutionality of privatized prisons using food as punishment. Prisoners have protection from excessive bail and fines and from cruel and unusual punishment, as per the 8^th Amendment; however, deprivations such as restricted diets and harm caused by them is only a valid violation if the prisoner can prove deliberate indifference. Privatization of the prison industry has led to reduced quality, choice, and diversity in areas such as food, which comes at a detrimental cost to prisoners. Serving …

Public Defenders' Offices In Brazil: Access To Justice, Courts, And Public Defenders, Alexandre Dos Santos Cunha

Indiana Journal of Global Legal Studies

This essay discusses the impact of public defenders' offices in promoting equality through the enforcement of the right to access to justice in Brazil. To achieve this goal, this note is divided into two parts.

Part I presents the Brazilian public defenders' offices, their history, institutional design, rights, and prerogatives. Part II discusses the role played by public defenders in the enforcement of the right to access to justice in Brazil, as well as the relations established between public defenders and courts. The Conclusion attempts to assess the sustainability of the Brazilian model, in order to determine if there is …

The Mandarins Of The Law: Pro Bono Legal Work From A Comparative Perspective, Daniel Bonilla Maldonado

Indiana Journal of Global Legal Studies

In Part I, I present the elements that form the standard global concept of pro bono work. Pro bono work is a global phenomenon defined by, and based on, a transnational discourse. In the first section of Part I, I argue that this transnational discourse conceptualizes pro bono work as a set of institutionalized free legal services that lawyers voluntarily provide to people with few financial resources or to protect the public interest. In the three following sections, I specify and analyze the concepts of subject, time, and space that this understanding of pro bono work creates, to present the …

Access To Justice And Legal Clinics: Developing A Reflective Lawyering Space Some Insights From The Italian Experience, Marzia Barbera, Venera Protopapa

Indiana Journal of Global Legal Studies

This paper first provides a brief description of the genesis of legal clinics in Italy, and highlights the motivations and expectations lying behind the emergence of the legal clinic movement in this context. Second, the paper gives a brief description of the institutional context of legal aid in Italy, and assesses its effectiveness in terms of granting legal assistance to those unable to afford a lawyer. The third and fourth parts then offer an account of court enforcement mechanisms that aim to ensure effective access to justice. Part three gives this account through the lens of court enforcement of the …

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.

Stepping Into The Shoes Of The Department Of Justice: The Unusual, Necessary, And Hopeful Path The Illinois Attorney General Took To Require Police Reform In Chicago, Lisa Madigan, Cara Hendrickson, Karyn L. Bass Ehler

Northwestern Journal of Law & Social Policy

No abstract provided.

The Chumash Heritage National Marine Sanctuary: An Exploration Of Changing The Discourse On Conservation, Arielle Ben-Hur

Pitzer Senior Theses

In 2015, the Northern Chumash Tribal Council submitted a National Marine Sanctuary Nomination to establish the Chumash Heritage National Marine Sanctuary– a means by which to ensure the protection of one of the most culturally and biologically diverse coastlines in the world. On October 5, 2015, John Armor of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) responded to the nomination, adding it to the inventory of areas NOAA may consider in the future for national marine sanctuary designation.

In my thesis, I explore how the nomination of the Chumash Heritage National Marine Sanctuary acts as a platform from which Traditional …

On The Proposed Legalization Of Commercial Surrogacy: I Thought We Had Abolished The Sale Of Human Beings, Phyllis Chesler

Dignity: A Journal of Analysis of Exploitation and Violence

No abstract provided.

Confession Obsession: How To Protect Minors In Interrogations, Cindy Chau

Journal of Race, Gender, and Ethnicity

No abstract provided.

Ethical Testing In The Real World: Evaluating Physical Testing Of Adversarial Machine Learning, Kendra Albert, Maggie Delano, Jonathon Penney, Afsaneh Ragot, Ram Shankar Siva Kumar

Articles, Book Chapters, & Popular Press

This paper critically assesses the adequacy and representativeness of physical domain testing for various adversarial machine learning (ML) attacks against computer vision systems involving human subjects. Many papers that deploy such attacks characterize themselves as “real world.” Despite this framing, however, we found the physical or real-world testing conducted was minimal, provided few details about testing subjects and was often conducted as an afterthought or demonstration. Adversarial ML research without representative trials or testing is an ethical, scientific, and health/safety issue that can cause real harms. We introduce the problem and our methodology, and then critique the physical domain testing …

Table Of Contents, Seattle University Law Review

Seattle University Law Review

Table of Contents

Personality Disruption As Mental Torture: The Cia, Interrogational Abuse, And The U.S. Torture Act, David Luban, Katherine S. Newell

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

This Article is a contribution to the torture debate. It argues that the abusive interrogation tactics used by the United States in what was then called the “global war on terrorism” are, unequivocally, torture under U.S. law. To some readers, this might sound like déjà vu all over again. Hasn’t this issue been picked over for nearly fifteen years? It has, but we think the legal analysis we offer has been mostly overlooked. We argue that the basic character of the CIA’s interrogation of so-called “high-value detainees” has been misunderstood: both lawyers and commentators have placed far too much emphasis …

Ethics And Methods Of Human Rights Work: Exploring Both Theoretical And Practical Approaches, Shayna Plaut, Maritza Felices Luna, Christina Clark Kazak, Neil Bilotta, Lara Rosenoff Gauvin

Biennial Conference: The Social Practice of Human Rights

This workshop will explore both theoretical and practical approaches to methodologies and ethics as it relates to human rights work.

The goal of the workshop is to create a dynamic space that encourages participants to share and learn from our own experiences navigating the messiness of human rights ethics and methods. We specifically address formal education and systems and structures so that we may all design, do and teach research and practice related to human rights in a more critical and sustainable manner. We recognize the tensions of creating research, programs and advocacy that is seen as “legitimate” to educational …

The Virtue Of Vulnerability: Mindfulness And Well-Being In Law Schools And The Legal Profession, Nathalie Martin

Faculty Scholarship

This article examines the role of vulnerability in transforming individual relationships, particularly the attorney-client relationship. In this essay, Martin argues that broadening our expressions can improve our client relations and decrease the likelihood that when that inevitable mistake occurs, we will be sued for it. Also, based upon virtue ethics, that practicing vulnerability is also virtuous and thus worthwhile in and of itself.

This essay starts by describing the traits people look for in lawyers as well as evidence that clients often feel that their lawyers are less than human. Then examines how legal education contributes to this problem by …