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Volume 49 Masthead

Seattle University Law Review

Volume 49 Masthead

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 …

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 …

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 …

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 …

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 …

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 …

Collaborative Nullification: Bending Or Ignoring The Law To Free The Over-Punished, David A. Singleton

Arkansas Law Review

The United States accounts for about 25% of the world’s prisoners but only about 5% of its population. It has the fifth- highest imprisonment rate—higher than China and Russia—with people of color disproportionately impacted. This racialized mass incarceration, and the lack of political will to meaningfully address it, demands bold remedies. Certainly, sentencing reform for low-level, non-violent offenders is needed, but contrary to popular belief, these offenders are not driving mass incarceration. Instead, the problem largely results from increasingly long sentences for violent offenders.

This article proposes that the option, which I call “collaborative nullification,” can provide the over-punished needed …

Navigating Radical Indeterminacy In The Struggle For A Global Collective Consciousness: The Question Of Eco-Justice And Law Or Universalize The Pluriverse: A Manifesto, More Or Less, Omar Auf

Theses and Dissertations

The processes of interpretation, communication, and re-interpretation leads to the emergence of an approximated collective consciousness, for which it may be struggled and contested by hegemonic. The dominant forces of this contest, capitalism and nationalism, lead to an interdivided world: one that possesses the tools to empathize with each other but is instead leading people to keep their heads down and focus on surviving their own contexts, perceived as existing within different historical times on the same timeline. This leads to legal and justice systems that fail their claim to universality and/or impartiality. Incorporating an ecological lens to justice within …

Supreme Court Decision: Skrmetti And The Future Of Trans Rights, Floersheimer Center For Constitutional Democracy, Zalman Rothschild, Jessica Clarke, Ben Eidelson, Katie Eyer, Kate Redburn

2025–2026 Flyers

No abstract provided.

Ethics Of Artificial Intelligence For Lawyers: That Is The Sound Of Inevitability: Legislatures And Regulators Step In, Cliff Mckinney

Arkansas Law Notes

In The Matrix, the evil artificial intelligence entity, Agent Smith, corners the human hero, Neo, on the subway tracks. Agent Smith says, “You hear that Mr. Anderson? . . . That is the sound of inevitability. . . .” And if there is one thing that is inevitable, it is that regulations will quickly develop around the way that we interact with and utilize artificial intelligence.

No matter how innovative or disruptive artificial intelligence may be, lawmakers and regulators will not allow it to operate unchecked. Congress recently elected not to impose a moratorium on state regulation, and California has …

Valentine Act And Sherman Act: Separate And Distinct Antitrust Regimes, Thomas J. Collin

Cleveland State Law Review

The Ohio Supreme Court has held that the Valentine Act was patterned after the Sherman Act and should be interpreted in light of federal court interpretations of the Sherman Act. The Court was wrong, and its error persists. With the exception of a private right of action provision and a borrowed definition, nothing in the Valentine Act was derived from the Sherman Act. The holding ignores text and legislative history and has foreclosed development of any independent jurisprudence for a statute intended by the General Assembly to address grave antitrust abuses. This Article analyzes the Court’s error, details the origins …

The Free Content Illusion, Jonathan M. Barnett

Georgia Journal of Law & Technology

Conventional scholarly wisdom tends to discount the importance of copyright as a tool for delivering remuneration to the artists that sustain the digital creative ecosystem or as an enabling mechanism that facilitates the licensing, distribution, and financing transactions that constitute the economic infrastructure of the media and entertainment industries. This position runs counter to the evolution of digital content markets, which have experienced renewed investment and growth concurrently with the development of technological tools that have enabled content owners to correct for the “copyright deficit,” regulate access, and extract payment from platforms and users. This result conforms to standard economic …

Skrmetti And The Problem Of Incidental Intent, Martin J. Katz

Sturm College of Law: Faculty Scholarship

The modern Supreme Court has defined “discriminatory intent” as a strict-liability concept. It does not matter why the government sorts people by a protected characteristic, such as race or sex; it matters only that the government does sort people by such a characteristic. This principle is the key holding of affirmative-action cases, such as Students for Fair Admissions, Inc. v. President & Fellows of Harvard College. Yet, in the recent case United States v. Skrmetti, the Court seemed to focus not on the question of whether the government sorted people by sex (it did), but on the question …

When Antitrust Meets Labour: Exemption And Enforcement Under Article 101 Tfeu, Giulia Mangiafico

Yearbook of Antitrust and Regulatory Studies

Labour rights protection has recently emerged as one of the key objectives of antitrust law, alongside sustainability and privacy. The application and enforcement of competition rules differ significantly between the workers’ and employers’ sides of the market, a distinction that is particularly visible in cases concerning remuneration. Wage-setting may fall within the scope of Article 101 TFEU where it results from coordination between undertakings; whether competition law applies therefore depends on how wages are fixed. While employer cartels that suppress pay are treated as restrictive agreements, collective bargaining arrangements are assessed under a markedly different analytical framework. This article examines …

Disinterestedness In Bankruptcy Cases: Does It Really Matter?, Michelle M. Harner

BYU Law Review

The title of this Essay asks whether disinterestedness (of professionals) in bankruptcy cases really matters. Spoiler alert: Yes, it really does.

(Re)Individualizing Criminal Law, Itay Ravid

Faculty Publications

Criminal law purports to care about the individual culpability of those committing crimes. Individual mental states or defenses based on one’s beliefs are considered foundational to moral responsibility and criminal conviction. The expansion of algorithmic risk assessment tools in the criminal legal system, however, threatens these principles, changing the criminal law subject from an autonomous individual to merely a predicted object. This Article argues that risk assessment tools—now functioning as gatekeepers at both the entry and exit stages of the criminal process, from predictive policing to compassionate release eligibility—have shifted the criminal system away from its foundation in individual culpability. …

The Federalism Canons As Ordinary Interpretation, Anthony J. Bellia Jr., Bradford R. Clark

Northwestern University Law Review

Scholars remain generally skeptical of substantive canons of statutory interpretation even as courts continue to employ such canons in important cases. Unlike semantic canons, which help judges discern the best meaning of statutory text in context, substantive canons provide tiebreakers when the text is unclear or require special clarity in order for the text to perform certain functions. Among the substantive canons, the so-called “federalism canons” have been singled out for special scrutiny. The federalism canons are a family of canons that require courts to avoid interpreting an act of Congress to divest states of certain sovereign rights or powers—including …

The Establishment That Time Forgot: The Historical Understanding Of Religious Offenses And Their Unconstitutionality In Modern Law, Benjamin J. Citow

Northwestern University Law Review

This Note argues that religious offenses, meaning laws which penalize conduct for religious purposes, should be barred by the Establishment Clause of the Constitution, as the Clause was interpreted in Kennedy v. Bremerton School District. This is because Kennedy interpreted the Establishment Clause to prohibit each of the several types of laws which early Americans associated with religious establishment—the historical practice wherein early states would adopt a religion as the state religion and pass various types of laws for its support. And religious offenses, this Note argues, were amongst the types of laws which early Americans so associated with …