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Prefatory Matter

Richmond Public Interest Law Review

No abstract provided.

Table Of Contents

Richmond Public Interest Law Review

No abstract provided.

Letter From The Editor, Nick Kaye

Richmond Public Interest Law Review

No abstract provided.

An Analysis Of Charity Care Policy In Virginia And Recommendations For The Future, Victoria Richardson

Richmond Public Interest Law Review

Virginia’s uninsured rate has dropped significantly since Medicaid expansion, but statewide gaps in coverage remain, especially among communities of color and for those transitioning from Medicaid to Medicare at age sixty-five. Accordingly, greater utilization of charity care is necessary to prevent the most vulnerable Virginians from experiencing crippling medical debt—debt they may by unable to pay due to limited resources.

Unfortunately, charity care requirements for providers suffer from a lack of clarity and accountability at both the state and federal level. This article surveys the current laws and regulations that govern charity care in Virginia and highlights problems that prevent …

New Dominion, Old Tricks: A Review Of Virginia's 2024 General Assembly Session, Ryan Pokorny, Tucker Weiser

Richmond Public Interest Law Review

The 2024 General Assembly session followed a transformative election cycle. Democrats regained full control of the General Assembly after two years of split legislative power, thwarting Governor Glenn Youngkin’s efforts to secure a Republican trifecta. Redistricting drove unprecedented turnover, with more than one-third of lawmakers joining their respective chambers as newcomers in 2024. The remade General Assembly was the youngest in recent memory and the most diverse in Virginia history. These changes brought uncertainty and promises of cooperation, but the session soon descended into familiar partisan polarization. Governor Youngkin vetoed a record number of bills, while Democrats voted down many …

The General Assembly's Consideration Of The Data Center Industry's Growth In Virginia, L. Preston Bryant Jr.

Richmond Public Interest Law Review

Virginia has a decades-long history with the data center industry’s growth and development, which has been critical to the nation’s—and world’s—increasingly digital economy. The industry also has brought extraordinary benefits to state and local economies, including hundreds of billions of dollars in capital investments and tax revenues as well as tens of thousands of jobs. Yet this historic success, according to many, comes at a high cost to local communities. Data center facilities can be imposing and take up a lot of land; they require a significant amount of additional energy generation and often more transmission infrastructure; and they use …

The State Of Record Clearance In The Commonwealth Of Virginia, Rob Poggenklass

Richmond Public Interest Law Review

One in three American adults has a criminal record, which can create significant barriers to finding suitable employment and housing. In Virginia, even arrest records are public and can last a lifetime unless someone navigates the complex process of expungement. For people with criminal convictions, the outlook has been even more bleak—Virginia is one of just a handful of states where no relief is available for conviction records.

But this is all about to change. On July 1, 2025, a record sealing law passed by the General Assembly in 2021 and signed by the previous governor, Ralph Northam, will take …

Reconsidering Griswold: Amid Post-Dobbs Threats To Reproductive Freedom, Youngkin Vetoes The Virginia Right To Contraception Act, Katie Baker, Christopher Fleming

Richmond Public Interest Law Review

In its 2022 decision in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, the United States Supreme Court found that there is no constitutional right to an abortion, overturning nearly fifty years of precedent set by Roe v. Wade.

In his concurrence in Dobbs, Justice Clarence Thomas wrote that the Court “should reconsider” its past decision in Griswold v. Connecticut. The 1965 case found that married people have a constitutional right to contraception, which Eisenstadt v. Baird extended to unmarried individuals in 1972.

In response to Thomas’ words and to growing threats to reproductive freedom post-Dobbs, …

The General Assembly Must Act To Protect Victims Of Sexual Abuse Following The Supreme Court Of Virginia's Recent And Significant Circumscription Of Vicarious Liability, Mark D. Dix, Robert C.T. Reed

Richmond Public Interest Law Review

Few doctrines are as ingrained in the American civil justice system as that of vicarious liability: holding a principal liable for an agent’s tortious conduct. Public policy, further bolstered now by modern economic theory, provides the foundation for this doctrine. With respect to a principal’s liability for an agent’s intentional tort, the modern view has been to hold a principal just as liable for such an act as a negligent one. Virginia had largely been in step with this trend. However, beginning in 2018, the Supreme Court of Virginia reversed the Commonwealth’s course, particularly with respect to cases of sexual …

A Review Of Virginia's 2024 Economic Development Legislation And The Legacy Of The Commonwealth's Economic Policies, Margaret C. Rockwell

Richmond Public Interest Law Review

In 2024, CNBC designated Virginia as the nation’s “Top State for Business,” marking a record sixth win for the Commonwealth in receiving this annual designation. CNBC’s annual rankings measure states’ success in creating friendly, supportive environments for businesses and workers by analyzing ten key categories of competitiveness. Numerous sources substantiate the Commonwealth’s recent achievements across these categories, with notable accomplishments in education, wage growth, infrastructure, and commerce and trade. In light of Virginia’s most recent win, this article examines the initiatives that have successfully advanced economic development in Virginia over many years.

This article introduces key economic development initiatives through …

Common Law Sovereign Immunity And The Maine Tort Claims Act: A Rose By Another Name, R. Michael Martin

Maine Law Review

On October 12, 1976, the Maine Supreme Judicial Court allowed a Bath homeowner to sue the city for damage to her property resulting from the city's negligence. The case was Davies v. City of Bath and its significance was twofold. First, for decades before the Davies decision the Maine Supreme Judicial Court had routinely refused to consider such suits because of the doctrine of sovereign immunity. Fifteen years before Davies the court had expressed dissatisfaction with the doctrine, but until 1976 had repeatedly refused to abrogate it. Second, the Davies decision was significant because the Maine Legislature, under the guiding …

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 …

Selecting Lower Court Judges In The Senate Lame Duck Session, Carl W. Tobias

Richmond Public Interest Law Review

When Congress reconvened in November, Donald Trump had won a second term in the White House and Republicans had secured a majority in the upper chamber. The federal judiciary thus became a salient point of contention in the Senate lame duck session. During Trump’s initial four years as chief executive, he and the Republican chamber majority rejected or substantially deemphasized longstanding requirements and customs of judicial selection to fill all the levels of the federal courts with young, highly conservative jurists, including thirteen whom they seated after Trump had lost the 2020 election to President Joe Biden. These phenomena threatened …

Data Scraping For Generative Ai—To What Extent?, Jae Yeon Cecilia Kim

Brooklyn Journal of Corporate, Financial & Commercial Law

Generative AI platforms are developed by scraping data from other platforms. This raises complex copyright infringement issues that are yet to be resolved. Courts have attempted to address these problems using the fair use doctrine, which evaluates four factors to determine whether a use infringes on copyright: (1) the purpose and character of the use, (2) the nature of the use, (3) the amount and substantiality of the copyrighted work’s use, and (4) the impact of the use on the market for the original work. Despite efforts to apply this long-established doctrine, challenges persist, including difficulties in identifying the copyright …

A Call For Statutory Reform: Online Marketplaces That Profit From Product Sales Should Be Held Strictly Liable As Sellers, Mark Anderson

Brooklyn Journal of Corporate, Financial & Commercial Law

Today, Americans purchase roughly 16% of all consumer goods through online marketplaces such as Amazon. While traditional brick-and-mortar retailers that sell defective products are strictly liable for harm caused by those products, online marketplace retailers, which serve analogous roles in defective product sales, can often evade liability entirely. Amazon, for instance, is immune from liability for product defects in more than 60% of sales conducted on its website in almost every state. This Note explains why online marketplaces that profit from defective product sales should be strictly liable for harm those products cause, and why courts often refuse to hold …

I Ain't Afraid Of No Ghost…Kitchen! A New Realm Of Consumer Protection After The Inform Consumers Act, Johanna Silva

Brooklyn Journal of Corporate, Financial & Commercial Law

The effects of the COVID-19 pandemic were pervasive, sparing none from its impact. However, the restaurant industry bore an even greater change and a heavier burden than most. At the height of the pandemic, some 110,000 restaurants shut down. QR codes replaced paper menus, street parking transformed into outdoor dining sheds, and Friday night dinners at the “great spot on the corner” became takeout orders from the couch. Reopening was an unpredictable gamble for restaurant owners, fraught with tiered plans and inconsistent regulations on safe and unsafe dining practices. The desperate search for creative solutions to stay in business propelled …

A New Governance Framework In Cross-Border Tax Policymaking, Tamir Shanan, Doron Narotzki, Noam Zamir

Brooklyn Journal of Corporate, Financial & Commercial Law

The first tax treaty can probably be traced to the end of the 19th century: the treaty between the Swiss Federal Council (on behalf of the Canton of Vaud) and Great Britain. However, most tax scholars refer to the period following World War I, including the work of the League of Nations, as the formative period in which the international tax regime was founded. In the 1920s, the League of Nations formed a committee of four renowned economists that was asked to formulate a set of rules that would assist states in allocating taxing rights of cross-border income and gains …

Tax As Hybrid Law: Borrowing And Convergences, Henry Ordower

All Faculty Scholarship

[This article argues that tax is a hybrid of civil and common law, public and private law, and is cross-disciplinary. It observes that tax law has become an all-purpose tool for legislators. It seeks to demonstrate how the U.S., a common law jurisdiction, has turned to civil law models for taxation while civil law jurisdictions and the European Union have sought common law models to combat tax avoidance. The ubiquity of tax and its public law influence on private law transactions, its cross disciplinary nature, and its deployment as a legislative tool to manage the economy make it a candidate …

Clemency For The Common Good: An Argument To Release Incarcerated Persons In The General Public Interest, Deborah M. Ahrens

Brooklyn Law Review

During the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, we were reminded of several terrible truths about the modern mass incarceration state: namely, that it collects vulnerable people, places them in conditions where they are unable to protect themselves against many forms of ordinary and extraordinary risks, incubates suffering amongst them, and then spreads that suffering to surrounding communities. The ghastly consequences of these realities during the COVID pandemic led to piecemeal efforts to release moderate numbers of incarcerated people for public policy reasons largely unrelated to the kinds of individualized factors that have traditionally motivated most acts of clemency. This Article …

Mandatory Public Service Summer Stipend Meetings, Cardozo Center For Public Service Law

2024–2025 Flyers

Session 1: November 18, 1pm; room 424

Session 2: November 20, 1pm; room 424

Session 3: November 22, 1:30pm; room 423

"Legally Magic" Words: An Empirical Study Of The Accessibility Of Fifth Amendment Rights, Roseanna Sommers, Kate Weisburd

Northwestern University Law Review

Fifth Amendment case law (including Miranda v. Arizona) requires that individuals assert their right to counsel or silence using “explicit,” “clear,” and “unambiguous” statements—or, as some dissenting judges have lamented, using “legally magic” words. Through a survey of 1,718 members of the U.S. public, we investigate what ordinary people believe it takes to assert the right to counsel and the right to silence. We then compare their perceptions against prevailing legal standards governing invocation.

With respect to the right to counsel, the survey results indicate that members of the public have a uniformly lower threshold for invocation than do …

Taxation's Limits, Luís C. Calderón Gómez

Northwestern University Law Review

Countless pages have been devoted to the question of why everyone should pay tax, yet its opposite has gone largely unnoticed: why should some people and organizations not pay tax? Our tax system exempts from ordinary income taxation a wide and diverse array of people and organizations engaged in significant economic activity—from parents providing childcare services for their family to consular activities and charities operating animal shelters—seemingly without a convincing explanation. Perhaps because of the dizzying diversity of tax-exempt activities, scholars and policymakers have avoided comprehensively or coherently justifying our exemption regimes.

This Article develops a novel normative theory that …

The Public/Private Rights Critics, Ann Woolhandler, Michael G. Collins

Notre Dame Law Review

In Adjudication in the Political Branches, Professor Caleb Nelson provided an influential account of when federal adjudication might take place outside of the Article III courts. The ability of Congress to place adjudicative matters outside of Article III courts largely depended on whether the matter might be considered one of public or private rights. Nelson also traced changes over time that undermined the coherence of the traditional public/private right distinction, and recommended returning to the traditional model. Later writers have attempted either to qualify or refute the existence of the public/private-rights framework by studying particular areas of law that …

A Republic Of Spending, Jonathan S. Gould

Michigan Law Review

Large-scale spending measures make up many of Congress’s most important recent contributions to national policymaking. Congress has appropriated trillions of dollars to respond to emergencies, fight climate change, expand social safety net programs, spur technological innovation, and strengthen national infrastructure. While the contemporary Congress’s failure to enact landmark regulatory statutes causes many to characterize it as dysfunctional, Congress in fact remains quite active—its policymaking energy is simply concentrated in the spending domain.

Congress’s use of spending rather than regulatory legislation as its primary way of shaping national policy marks a significant shift in American governance. This Article examines the causes …

The Role Of The Attorney And The Attorney Client Relationship: The Keys To Improved Public Perception Of Attorneys And The Lexus, Jeanne Marie Zokovitch Paben

Tennessee Journal of Law and Policy

No abstract provided.

National Public Defense Symposium: Achieving The Promise Of The Sixth Amendment: Non-Capital And Capital Defense Services, Laurie Robinson

Tennessee Journal of Law and Policy

No abstract provided.

Retroactive Application Of Statutes: Protection Of Reliance Interests, Gene A. Maguire

Maine Law Review

Courts commonly use the term "retroactive" in two senses. On the one hand, it refers broadly to the fact that all new laws to some extent apply to a state of affairs created by past events. The term, on the other hand, embodies a time-honored historical antipathy to laws that disrupt settled expectations. The common law upholds the principle that the citizenry should be able to make everyday decisions with reasonable certainty of the legal consequences of their actions. This principle is based on fundamental notions of fairness and justice. It is well established, however, that the legislature may enact …

Disparity And The Need For Sentencing Guidelines In Maine: A Proposal For Enhanced Appellate Review, Daniel E. Wathen

Maine Law Review

Perhaps in no other field of judicial endeavor is diversity and variety more apparent than when a sentencing judge considers the circumstances presented by a defendant convicted of a criminal offense. In each case, the sentencing judge confronts an individual who has no exact counterpart in any defendant previously appearing before the court for sentencing. The sentence imposed is primarily a matter of judicial discretion and is based upon consideration of the nature of the offense, the circumstances surrounding the commission of the offense, and the circumstances of the defendant. The sentencing judge formulates a specific sentence within broad statutory …

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

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 …