Judges Commons^™

Outbound Investment Restrictions And International Law’S Challenge, Harlan Grant Cohen

Seattle University Law Review

The Outbound Investment Rule, restricting U.S. investment in certain Chinese advanced technology sectors, has largely been portrayed as an incremental measure, a modest extension to fill loopholes in the existing investment screening regime. But while perhaps the logical next step in the securitization of the economy, the Outbound Investment Rule actually reflects a momentous shift in the relationship between governments and business, one playing out in the United States and around the world and worth attention. Unlike traditional investment screening, the Outbound Investment Rule operates like a sanctions regime, designed not to protect the U.S. economy, but to hamper the …

Resilient Dispute Resolution Systems For International Energy Conflicts, Guillermo J. Garcia Sanchez

Seattle University Law Review

Energy-related conflicts are on the rise, spanning diverse issues such as the impacts of rare mineral mining on local communities, the impacts of sanctions on energy investments due to the Russia-Ukraine war, and the impacts of expanded subsidies on the electric vehicle and solar panel industries. Increasingly, companies, communities, and governments are clashing over the challenges of pursuing disparate and sometimes competing energy policies. This Article argues that dispute resolution mechanisms in the energy investment sector must be fundamentally rethought. Traditional semi-adjudicatory models, which focus on winners and losers, fail to accommodate the complex and multifaceted nature of contemporary energy …

Restricting Data Flows Is A Sign Of Weakness, Nikolas Guggenberger

Seattle University Law Review

There has been a seismic shift in American attitudes toward the free flow of data across borders.  In less than a decade, the United States has transitioned from condemning barriers to digital trade to constructing a digital fortress of its own. It passed legislation requiring TikTok’s parent company to divest its U.S. operations or face a nationwide ban affecting 170 million U.S. users, citing national security concerns about its ties to China and the potential for data surveillance and content manipulation. Upon legal challenge by TikTok on First Amendment grounds, the Supreme Court affirmed the ban’s constitutionality. Recent federal legislation …

Product Nationality And Corporate Identity, Trang (Mae) Nguyen

Seattle University Law Review

Global supply chains have long depended on a deceptively technical device: the attribution of a “nationality” to goods. A trade law principle, rules of origin assign products an “economic passport” that governs how they are treated at the border, including what markets they may enter and which tariff rates apply. In recent years, however, product nationality has taken on a new and far more ambitious role. As U.S. trade policy increasingly intersects with national security and human rights policy, policymakers rely on nationality-based measures to police supply chain linkages, curb geopolitical issues, and discipline firms for their links to forced …

Global Supply Chain Resilience In Emerging Technologies: A Case Study Of Bitcoin Mining, Kishanthi Parella, Carla L. Reyes

Seattle University Law Review

The United States has put into motion bold plans in critical and emerging technologies to bolster its national and economic security.  For example, the federal government created a national bitcoin strategic reserve and a stockpile of other cryptocurrency; while several states have committed to or are considering similar goals.  However, the security of these reserves is dependent on two types of supply chains within the Bitcoin mining industry: analogue supply chains, relating to the physical components needed for Bitcoin mining, and data supply chains, relating to the complex and layered logistical network of actors that create input into the software …

Volume 49 Masthead

Seattle University Law Review

Volume 49 Masthead

A Comparative Study Of Chinese And American Approaches To Shaping International Outer Space Law And Norms, Ariel G. Silverman

Seattle University Law Review

This article explores convergences and divergencies in the United States and PRC’s responses to the stalemate in the United Nations over the future of outer space resource governance. I do so by systematically analyzing these leading space-faring nations’ policy-positions and tactics deployed to shape norms around three substantive areas of outer space resource governance: rights of ownership and scope of utilization of space resources, mechanization of the “benefits sharing” principle, and the rights and responsibilities of the private sector. I theorize that these leading space-faring nations have adopted divergent approaches due to their differing historical relationships with international law and …

Table Of Contents

Seattle University Law Review

Table of Contents

Third-Party Funding: Balancing Transparency, National Security, And Access To Justice, Victoria Shannon Sahani

Seattle University Law Review

Many lawmakers who have recently become aware of the multi-billion-dollar global third-party funding industry are raising new national security concerns that further complicate preexisting, longstanding debates about transparency, disclosure, access to justice, and the best way to regulate third-party funding. In response, this Article briefly asserts three main points relating to the question of how best to regulate third-party funding. First, this Article explains the third-party funding industry, including its global regulatory landscape and how it serves three distinct populations: consumers, businesses, and law firms. Second, this Article explains that third-party funding is one tool that can help expand access …

The Field Of International Business Transactions Law, Kathleen Claussen

Seattle University Law Review

This Article studies the evolution of the scholarly subfield referred to as the law of “international business transactions” (IBT). It reviews data on academic articles, courses, textbooks and other signifiers of the growth of this research area. Beginning around 1960, scholars began to use the term “international business transactions” and by the 1980s, several law schools were offering a course by that title. A handful of dedicated textbooks soon followed. These data reflect a gradual increase in research on the topic of IBT, particularly in the United States, but also considerable diversity of subject matters covered by those works. The …

Kim Gyeong-Seok And The Origins Of Northeast Asia’S Corporate Accountability Movement For War And Colonialism, Timothy Webster

Seattle University Law Review

For the past three decades, a transnational reparations movement has unfolded across Northeast Asia. Hundreds of victims—assisted by attorneys, academics, and activists—seek remedies from Japan for various atrocities committed during World War II, colonialism, and other historical injustices.  They press their claims in street protests, legislative hearings, dramatic performances, and other fora.  The “comfort women” are the best known of these claimants; their global redress campaign ex-tends from noisy protests outside of Japan’s embassy in Seoul, to mute statues in raucous boroughs of Berlin.  More obscure, though larger in number, were the roughly one million Koreans who performed forced labor …

Navigating Compliance In A Geopolitical Era: The Case Of Chinese Multinationals In The United States, Ji Li

Seattle University Law Review

This Article examines how Chinese multinational companies (MNCs) approach compliance in the United States amid deepening geo-political rivalry and intensified regulatory scrutiny. Drawing on original survey data, this Article maps variations in compliance structures, staffing, and governance mechanisms across Chinese firms and identifies key determinants such as industry-specific regulatory intensity, listing status, and organizational imprinting from headquarters. The analysis employs a dual institutional framework to explain how compliance systems emerge from the interplay between host-state regulatory demands and home-state institutional legacies, producing hybrid structures that blend local adaptation with headquarters-driven replication. Findings reveal that while certain compliance features—such as committee …

Law And The (Re)Production Of Class Hierarchies In Egypt, Ahmad Abdelnaby

Theses and Dissertations

This thesis investigates how Egypt’s legal system, structurally tilted toward the elite and constitutive of inequality, has interacted with the country’s entrenched culture of class-based discrimination to produce a legal culture uniquely comfortable with hierarchy. It contends that class-based discrimination in Egypt has evolved from a social prejudice into a juridical condition, one in which the law does not merely mirror inequality but actively constructs and rationalizes it. By examining the intersection between legal structure and Egypt’s entrenched moral order of class-based discrimination, the study reveals a legal culture that no longer hides its hierarchies behind the veil of neutrality …

The Indeterminacy Of Customary International Law, Mohamed Diaa Tawfik

Theses and Dissertations

This thesis explores the judicial formation of customary international law and examines how international courts oscillate between interpretive and law-making functions. It analyzes key theoretical frameworks—including Kelsen’s Pure Theory of Law, Dworkin’s Law as Integrity, Kennedy’s radical indeterminacy, and Koskenniemi’s Descending-Ascending Approach—to understand how courts assert and shape customary norms beyond mere state practice and opinio juris. The work concludes that the International Court of Justice and other tribunals increasingly act as de facto lawmakers under the guise of interpretation, advocating the indeterminacy they try to avoid.

The Business Bankruptcy “Big 3” And The Unanticipated Benefits Of Subchapter V, Marshall V. Ringwood

BYU Law Review

The liberal bankruptcy venue rules in the United States have their defenders and advocates. Subchapter V of the Bankruptcy Code came into effect in 2020, justified as a bipartisan solution to a longstanding problem in corporate bankruptcy where restructuring under Chapter 11 was prohibitively expensive for small-business debtors. On June 21, 2024, Subchapter V’s extended debt limit of $7,500,000 in liabilities reverted back to a statutorily defined $3,024,725. In addition to the justifications offered by organizations such as the American Bankruptcy Institute (ABI) for both Subchapter V, generally, and a permanent increase to its debt limit, I argue that Subchapter …

The Untold Story Of 150 Years Of Women In State Judiciaries, Elizabeth D. Katz

UF Law Faculty Publications

A focus on the U.S. Constitution and federal judges has obscured a longer and more complex history of women serving on state benches — and how state constitutions mattered in their rise.

Finding Luis: A Creative Nonfiction Account Of Law & Society, Jason M. Leggett

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This essay explores the contradictions in legal theory and human experience through creative nonfiction. Its main purpose is to argue that a truly just society requires acknowledging the profound influence of individual narratives on the law. This is supported by blending personal narratives, critical analysis, and philosophical inquiry to reveal the gap between codified law and lived realities for marginalized individuals. This unique Legal Poetics methodology employs a series of six vignettes, such as the author's and Luis's shared experiences with traumatic brain injury and the denial of justice, as data. By integrating autoethnography, law as narrative, and performativity theories, …

Specialization And The Permanence Of Federal Bankruptcy Law, Rafael I. Pardo

BYU Law Review

Traditional historical accounts posit that federal bankruptcy specialization in the United States first developed under the system established by the Bankruptcy Act of 1898. That view assumes that the structural and temporal conditions necessary to foster specialization did not exist under the nation’s earlier federal bankruptcy systems—those created by the Bankruptcy Acts of 1800, 1841, and 1867. This Article theorizes that federal bankruptcy specialization very likely occurred under the pre-1898 systems and marshals evidence to that effect, primarily focusing on the Bankruptcy Act of 1841 (the 1841 Act). That statute marked a critical turning point in federal bankruptcy law, shifting …

Reflections On Judicial Supervision Of Prosecutorial Powers, Benjamin Joshua Ong

Research Collection Yong Pung How School Of Law

The courts occasionally claim that the limits to the power to prosecute are different from the limits to other executive powers. They say that prosecutorial decisions are subject to judicial review on a reduced set of grounds compared to other executive decisions. I have previously argued that this approach is wrong, and aim to elaborate on the argument in this blog post. The focus will be on the laws of the UK and of Singapore, but it is hoped that the reflections here will be of some use in other common-law jurisdictions as well.

The Bankruptcy Judge And The Generalist Tradition, Alexander Gouzoules

BYU Law Review

The prevailing academic consensus is that bankruptcy judges are specialists presiding over specialized courts. This Article contends that this description is incomplete and, in some respects, inaccurate. Drawing on scholarly models of judicial specialization and historical surveys of the field, this Article contends that bankruptcy judges reflect a hybrid design choice: procedural specialization combined with substantive generalism. This model delivers many of the observed benefits of judicial specialization (including efficiency and technical competence) while preserving the cross-pollination of ideas and other benefits associated with the generalist tradition of American judging.

This Article also reflects on contemporary developments—most notably the rise …