Law and Society Commons^™

Grounding Suicide Terrorism In Death Anxiety And Consumer Capitalism, James M. Donovan

Law Faculty Scholarly Articles

This article examines an influential theory on suicide attacker motivations, the Significance Quest Theory, and suggests that this death anxiety approach can be improved by shifting its focus toward the related, but more comprehensive, Terror Management Theory. The theoretical productivity of this realignment is tested by examining the relationship between suicide attacks and one of the variables thought to trigger the underlying anxieties: the local pressures from global consumer capitalism. After describing the relationship between death anxiety and suicide terrorism generally, this article concludes by applying these insights to the ethnographic context of Egypt.

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 …

Social Services And Mutual Aid In Times Of Covid-19 And Beyond: A Brief Critique, Dana Neacsu

Law Faculty Publications

May 19, 2021, marked a crucial point in the United States’ fight against the COVID-19 pandemic: sixty percent of U.S. adults had been vaccinated. Since then, Americans have witnessed the beginning of the end of the COVID-19 pandemic, but its long-term effects are here to stay. Ironically, some are unexpectedly welcome. Among the lasting positive changes is an augmented sense of individual involvement in community well-being. This multifaceted phenomenon has given rise to #BLM allyship and heightened interest in mutual aid networks. In the legal realm, it has manifested with law students, their educators, lawyers, and the American Bar Association …

The Biopolitics Of Maskless Police, India Thusi

Articles by Maurer Faculty

Despite the recent movement against police violence, police officers have been endangering their communities by engaging in a new form of violence— policing while refusing to wear facial coverings to prevent the spread of COVID-19. Many states advise people to wear masks and to socially distance when in public spaces. However, police officers have frequently failed to comply with these guidelines as they interact with the public to enforce these COVID-19 laws. Police enforcement of COVID-19 laws is problematic for two reasons: (1) it provides a method for pathologizing marginalized communities as biological threats; (2) it creates a racialized pathway …

Antiracism, Reflection, And Professional Identity, Andrew King-Ries, Monte Mills, Eduardo R.C. Capulong

Faculty Law Review Articles

Intent on more systematically developing the emerging professional identities of law students, the professional identity formation movement is recasting how we think about legal education. Notably, however, the movement overlooks the structural racism imbedded in American law and legal education. While current models of professional development value diversity and cross-cultural competence, they do not adequately prepare the next generation of legal professionals to engage in the sustained work of interrupting and overthrowing race and racism in the legal profession and system. This article argues that antiracism is essential to the profession’s responsibility to serve justice and therefore key to legal …

Race In America 2021: A Time To Embrace Beauharnais V. Illinois?, Steven A. Ramirez

Faculty Publications & Other Works

Hate crimes and racially motivated violence spiked in the United States over the past few years. Our foreign adversaries seek to inflame racial divisions in our nation and turn American against American. This now forms a major threat to our national security and domestic tranquility. Indeed, in light of the attempted insurrection of January 6, 2021, the costs of our festering racial hierarchy now threaten our constitutional republic. The soaring costs of the American racial hierarchy now demands aggressive legal response. This Essay demonstrates that the process of racial formation undergirding the hierarchy relies upon group libel to propagate racial …

Reframing The Monuments: How To Address Confederate Statues In The United States, Jillian Fitzpatrick

Journal of Civil Rights and Economic Development

(Excerpt)

This Note was written between September 2018 and March 2019 as part of St. John’s University School of Law’s two-semester Perspectives on Justice class. At the time that this Note was written, there was a growing urgency to address the Confederate monuments around the United States, but little had been done by states or the federal government. At the time, many states, including Virginia, had in place Heritage Protection Acts which made the removal or relocation of such monuments punishable under criminal law, thus tying the hands of the localities where the monuments were located. However, in just two …

Finding Parity Through Preclusion: Novel Mental Health Parity Solutions At The State Level, Ryan D. Kingshill

Dickinson Law Review (2017-Present)

Recently, the federal government has taken numerous steps to promote the equal treatment (also known as parity) of mental and physical health issues. The two most impactful actions are the Mental Health Parity and Addiction Act of 2008 and the Affordable Care Act. These acts focus on the traditional avenue for parity change—insurance regulation. While these acts have improved parity, major gaps in coverage and treatment between mental health/substance use disorder treatment and medical/surgical treatment persist. ERISA Preemption, evasive insurer behavior, lack of enforcement, and lack of consumer education continue to plague patients and healthcare professionals. On its own, federal …

The Carbon Price Equivalent: A Metric For Comparing Climate Change Mitigation Efforts Across Jurisdictions, Gabriel Weil

Dickinson Law Review (2017-Present)

Climate change presents a global commons problem: Emissions reductions on the scale needed to meet global targets do not pass a domestic cost-benefit test in most countries. To give national governments ample incentive to pursue deep decarbonization, mutual interstate coercion will be necessary. Many proposed tools of coercive climate diplomacy would require a onedimensional metric for comparing the stringency of climate change mitigation policy packages across jurisdictions. This article proposes and defends such a metric: the carbon price equivalent. There is substantial variation in the set of climate change mitigation policy instruments implemented by different countries. Nonetheless, the consequences of …

The People's Court: On The Intellectual Origins Of American Judicial Power, Ian C. Bartrum

Dickinson Law Review (2017-Present)

This article enters into the modern debate between “consti- tutional departmentalists”—who contend that the executive and legislative branches share constitutional interpretive authority with the courts—and what are sometimes called “judicial supremacists.” After exploring the relevant history of political ideas, I join the modern minority of voices in the latter camp.

This is an intellectual history of two evolving political ideas—popular sovereignty and the separation of powers—which merged in the making of American judicial power, and I argue we can only understand the structural function of judicial review by bringing these ideas together into an integrated whole. Or, put another way, …

Achieving Better Care In Pennsylvania By Allowing Pharmacists To Practice Pharmacy, Travis Murray

Dickinson Law Review (2017-Present)

Traditionally, state legislatures implemented Prescription Drug Monitoring Programs (“PDMPs”) to assist prescribers, pharmacists, and law enforcement in identifying patients likely to misuse, abuse, or divert controlled substances. PDMP databases contain a catalog of a patient’s recent controlled substances that pharmacies have filled, including the date, location, the quantity of medication filled, and the prescribing health care provider. Prescribers in Pennsylvania have a duty to query the PDMP before prescribing controlled substances in most clinical settings. Pharmacists have a similar duty in Pennsylvania to dispense safe and effective medication therapy to patients and to screen patients for potential signs of misuse, …

The Corruption Of Copyright And Returning It To Its Original Purposes, Michelle M. Wu

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

Since its inception, Copyright has had two purposes: the private interest of the author in being paid for her work and the public interest served by the dissemination of these works. Within the last two decades, though, some industries have systematically undermined both of those interests, redirecting the benefits of copyright towards themselves instead of the intended beneficiaries. This paper looks at the book, music, and entertainment industries, examines how copyright has been used to suppress the uses it was intended to foster, and explores ongoing and proposed avenues for course correction.

L X A=W On The Weight Of Legal Norms, Peter Gabel

University of Colorado Law Review

No abstract provided.

Sex, Crime, And Serostatus, Courtney Cross

Scholarly Works

The HIV crisis in the United States is far from over. The confluence of widespread opioid usage, high rates of HIV infection, and rapidly shrinking rural medical infrastructure has created a public health powder keg across the American South. Yet few states have responded to this grim reality by expanding social and medical services. Instead, criminalizing the behavior of people with HIV remains an overused and counterproductive tool for addressing this crisis-especially in the South, where HIV-specific criminal laws are enforced with the most frequency.

People living with HIV are subject to arrest, prosecution, and lengthy prison sentences if they …

School “Safety” Measures Jump Constitutional Guardrails, Maryam Ahranjani

Scholarly Works

In the wake of George Floyd's murder and efforts to achieve racial justice through systemic reform, this Article argues that widespread "security" measures in public schools, including embedded law enforcement officers, jump constitutional guardrails. These measures must be rethought in light of their negative impact on all children and in favor of more effective-and constitutionally compliant-alternatives to promote school safety. The Black Lives Matter, #DefundthePolice, #abolishthepolice, and #DefundSchoolPolice movements shine a timely and bright spotlight on how the prisonization of public schools leads to the mistreatment of children, particularly children with disabilities, boys, Black and brown children, and low-income children. …

Massive Resistance--The Remix: Anti-Black Policymaking And The Poisoning Of U.S. Public Education, Janel George

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

What is occurring today in state legislatures and school boards around the country—under the guise of conservative attacks on Critical Race Theory—is merely a remix of the same song of white supremacy in public education. This nation has witnessed the impact of legislative campaigns designed to undermine educational opportunity for Black students before. This article applies a Critical Race Theory approach to analyze the role of law and policy in replicating racial inequality in education. This article asserts that policymakers seeking to preserve white supremacy in education have invoked three primary legislative tactics over the years: (1) denying; (2) defunding; …

America’S Presidential Crisis Of Legitimacy: How The Electoral College Became Obsolete And How We Can Fix It, Julia Rose Foodman

Scripps Senior Theses

The goal of this thesis is to critique the current American Presidential electoral system, the Electoral College, and to show what an alternative could potentially mean for the American people. This paper seeks to answer the following questions: What are the main arguments for the Electoral College, why are they troubling, and how can we mend American Presidential elections for the greater purposes of political equality, democracy, and freedom? To do so, core arguments made by conservative pundits in favor of the Electoral College are outlined in order to bring attention to their logical, political, and moral inconsistencies. The inequalities …

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

Bargaining Justice: Negotiating Law In An Indian Bazaar, Andy Rotman

Seattle University Law Review

This Symposium Article details the bazaars in the city of Banaras and explains why it is an especially good test case for considering the topic at hand: Corporate Capitalism and the City of God. The article explores how Banaras challenges normative views of “corporate capitalism,” both in terms of how it is practiced in the city and the rules that govern it. It further focuses on the legal system that is mobilized to guide commercial exchange and daily life in the bazaars of Banaras, this legal system’s relationship to the city’s courts and police, and the relationship between these two …