Law and Society Commons^™

The Demonization Of America's Economic Engine, Ediberto Roman

William & Mary Journal of Race, Gender, and Social Justice

In a 2013 book entitled Those Damned Immigrants: America’s Hysteria Over Undocumented Immigration, I warned of a conservative political trend that I believed would lead to an all-out assault on undocumented immigrants. This trend occurred despite the fact that these immigrants are critical economic boons to our economy.

On his first day in office in 2025, President Trump made the book’s warnings prophetic. That day, President Trump issued a series of executive orders, including 10 focused on limiting entry into the United States and questioning many who previously entered the United States legally. These orders include, 1) enhanced deportation …

Look What You Made Me Do, Russell M. Gold

Washington and Lee Law Review

We have understood for centuries that crime is both the product of social forces and individual choice. We know now that crime is affected by economic deprivation, addiction, trauma, and mental health issues. But American criminal legal processes hide this reality by coercing defendants into expressing a profoundly simple narrative: crime is solely individual choice to do wrong. This coerced narrative finds defendants during a plea colloquy standing up in court saying that they are pleading guilty because they are guilty and for no other reason. A defendant who goes off-script to tell the judge that they have been repeatedly …

Fairer Public Benefit In Copyright Law, Amanda Levendowski Tepski

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

In 1966, a court considered expressly whether a secondary use of copyrighted works served a public benefit. While public benefit has become a subfactor of the fair use doctrine, it remains undefined, uncodified, and undertheorized. Courts often invoked public benefit in pivotal cases involving novel technologies, from home video recorders to digital libraries to algorithms--but they did not need to. After the recent Supreme Court decision in Google v. Oracle, however, public benefit is unavoidable: The Court stated that “we must take into account the public benefits the copying will likely produce.” A qualitative analysis of key public benefit cases …

Drive-By Mediation And Other Opportunistic Distortions Of Process, Nancy A. Welsh

Faculty Scholarship

Many states in the United States, along with many nations, have implemented special benefits and privileges to encourage parties’ use of mediation to assist their communication, negotiation, and ultimate resolution of disputes. This is despite how loosely mediation is defined. This Article discusses how vague definitions, paired with special benefits and privileges, are incentivizing both the opportunistic distortion of mediation and the use of mediation for improper purposes. In Texas, for example, judges are extraordinarily limited in their ability to disapprove parents’ mediated child custody agreements—even if there is reason to worry that an agreement is contrary to the best …

The Gamification Of Banking, Colleen Baker, Christopher K. Odinet

Faculty Scholarship

Gamification is coming to banking. This phenomenon is already gain-ing ground in advertising, healthcare, manufacturing, and, more recently, with the GameStop and AMC meme stock saga in securities trading. The idea behind gamification is to make transactions seem fun, playful, and even casino-like in order to elicit habit-forming, addictive-like effects with consumers. This Article argues that the rise of financial technology (“fintech”) firms and their ever-growing business relationships with incumbent financial institutions has created the necessary conditions for gamification to take hold in the banking sector. In order to explore this observation, we undertake a study of current examples of …

The Sec Proposed Cybersecurity Infrastructure Rules And New Disclosure Requirements, Neal F. Newman, Lawrence J. Trautman, Brian Elzweig

Faculty Scholarship

In addition to regulation of securities market issuers, the Securities & Exchange Commission (SEC) is also responsible for regulation of those entities that provide the networks, either electronic or physical, that enable the functioning of our securities markets. On February 9, 2022, the Commission published a Release for Cybersecurity Risk Management for Investment Advisers, Registered Investment Companies, and Business Development Companies containing proposals that, if adopted, would establish a new cybersecurity incident reporting and disclosure regime and require registered investment advisers (“advisers”) and investment companies (“funds”) to implement policies and procedures designed to address cyber risks. The comment period for …

Traditional And Computational Canons, Eric H. Martinez

Faculty Scholarship

As part of the rise of modern textualism, dictionaries and linguistic canons have become a ubiquitous part of legal interpretation. One longstanding question is whether judges citing these tools sincerely attempt to follow the meaning of a text, or if their invocation is merely window-dressing for a preferred outcome. The practical significance of this question extends across all major doctrinal areas, and with the Supreme Court’s overturning of Chevron deference, its importance is only to grow, as courts are now instructed to use every tool at their disposal to resolve ambiguity when interpreting a law. This Article is the first …

The Crime Of Being Immoral, Randy D. Gordon

Faculty Scholarship

Despite a general abhorrence of retrospective laws as a matter of legal theory and Constitutional dictate, US. courts continue-in es sence-to create new crimes by injecting fazzy moral considerations into determinations under the federal fraud statutes. They do so by deeming a failure to act with "moral uprightness" sufficient to consti tute criminal fraud. Under such an amorphous standard, the unwitting find themselves in a legal bind, even though their conduct may not in volve any of the traditional elements of common-law fraud. This Article traces the roots of novel fraud theories with tools drawn from legal theory, linguistics, and …

Buried Burdens: Contaminated Lands And The Unfinished Business Of The Alaska Native Claims Settlement Act, Yuwen Huyan

Cardozo Journal of Equal Rights & Social Justice

No abstract provided.

Misuse Of Financial Services For The Sexual Exploitation Of Children: A Socio-Legal Study In Indonesia, Ahmad Sofian

The Indonesian Journal of Socio-Legal Studies

This paper discusses children in the online space who are entrapped in interactions across various social media applications and digital platforms and became victims of sexual exploitation practices and how this sexual exploitation is facilitated by the availability of diverse financial service providers that allow for transactions between perpetrators and victims as well as distributors and producers. In view of ongoing efforts by the Indonesian government to formulate more relevant and effective regulations for child protection, this study is crucial for our understanding of the realities of sexual exploitation in the context of children’s use of social media and may …

The Right To "Be Whole": A Jewish Religious Liberty Argument For Gender Affirming Care For Minors, Sarah Weiner

Cardozo Journal of Equal Rights & Social Justice

No abstract provided.

From Matrimony To Autonomy: Divorce As A Fundamental Right, Karin Carmit Yefet

Cardozo Law Review

Liberal divorce is under assault. Yet this development—one that arguably may shape the everyday life of Americans more profoundly than nearly any other domain of state law—has elicited surprisingly little scholarly inquiry. Because divorce has long fallen within the province of states and hewed to the whim of state legislatures, restrictions on divorce have rarely inspired constitutional analysis. As a result, the constitutional architecture necessary to conceptualize—let alone resolve—the question of how divorce law intersects with fundamental rights remains strikingly wanting. Indeed, one of the enduring puzzles of constitutional scholarship is the diametrically opposed treatment of marriage and divorce. While …

The Sports Parent's Predicament, Katharine B. Silbaugh

Faculty Scholarship

Youth sport enjoys a favored status in American culture, encouraged by policymakers and local communities, pursued by parents, and remembered through rose-colored lenses by adults. Most lawyers are familiar with Justice Harry Blackmun’s ode to the magical qualities of baseball in Flood v. Kuhn, in which he took the liberty of running through his own memories of scores of baseball legends.¹ Congress and presidents want children to continue in sport.² Many in the health field argue that sport is important because exercise is important, and sport is treated as the natural manifestation of exercise.³ An enormous number—perhaps …

The Deferential Asian American: Low Racial Status And The Invisibility Of Asian Americans In Leadership And The American Narrative, Reginald Oh

St. John's Law Review

(Excerpt)

This Article will proceed in five parts. First, an important caveat. When the Article refers to Asian Americans, it refers to all Asian American subgroups except for South Asian Americans, because South Asian Americans are not perceived to be deferential in the same way as other Asian American subgroups. Consequently, their experience with leadership is unique among Asian Americans, and much of the analysis in this Article does not apply to them.

With that caveat, Part I will discuss the invisibility of Asian Americans generally, but particularly in leadership positions. Part II will discuss the concept of social status …

Scotus Term Preview, Floersheimer Center For Constitutional Democracy, Wilfred U. Codrington Iii, Kate Levine, Alexander Reinert

2025–2026 Flyers

No abstract provided.

Vol. 69, No. 06 (September 29, 2025)

Indiana Law Annotated

No abstract provided.

Rights In The Eyes Of The Beholder: The Lived Hierarchy Of Rights In India's Democracy, Sehar Abdullah, Keerthana Satheesh, Prashant Narang

Socio-Legal Review

This paper examines how citizens in India perceive and prioritise fundamental rights, with particular attention to the six freedoms under Article 19(1) and the property right. While the freedoms of Article 19(1) remain central to democratic citizenship, the Forty-Fourth Constitutional Amendment of 1978 reclassified the right to property as a constitutional right under Article 300A. This shift prompts an important question: Does the diminished constitutional rank of property correspond to its place in popular hierarchies of rights? Our in-depth interviews with 26 respondents, whose livelihoods make them especially sensitive to changes in both categories of rights, reveal that citizens continue …

Vol. 69, No. 05 (September 22, 2025)

Indiana Law Annotated

No abstract provided.

Fighting For Fairness Where It's Needed Most 09-22-2025, Jane Govednik

Life of the Law School (1993- )

No abstract provided.

Navigating Beyond The Workplace: Examining The Need For Ada-Mandated Workplace Travel Accommodations, Ryan Black

St. Mary's Law Journal

No abstract provided.