Legal Profession Commons^™

Taxing Creativity, Xuan-Thao Nguyen, Jeffrey A. Maine

Tennessee Law Review

The recent sell offs of song catalogs by Bob Dylan, Stevie Nicks, Neil Young, and Mick Fleetwood for extraordinarily large sums of money raise questions about the law on creativity. While patent and copyright laws encourage a wide array of creative endeavors, tax laws

governing monetization of creative works do not. The Songwriters Capital Gains Equity Act, in particular, solidifies creativity exceptionalism, exacerbates tax inequities among creators, and perpetuates racial disparities in the tax Code. This Article asserts that the law must encourage creativity from all creators. It is time to eliminate tax exceptionalism for musical compositions or expand its …

How Do You Solve A Problem Like Sb8? Flagrantly Unconstitutional Laws, Procedural Scheming, And The Need For Pre-Enforcement Offensive Litigation, Kimberley Harris

Tennessee Law Review

Reproductive rights are facing multiple existential threats. While the Supreme Court has overturned the constitutional right to pre- viability elective abortions in Dobbs v. Jackson Women's Health Organization, in Texas the ability to obtain a pre-viability abortion vanished almost ten months earlier. With the enactment of S.B. 8, the so-called "Texas Heartbeat Act," abortions after approximately the sixth week of pregnancy, including those that result from rape or incest, were banned months before the Court ruled in Dobbs. Despite being clearly unconstitutional under the then-existing precedent of Roe v. Wade and Planned Parenthood of Southeastern Pennsylvania v. Casey, the Texas …

The Present Public Meaning Approach To Constitutional Interpretation, Michael L. Smith

Tennessee Law Review

Originalists often respond to critics by claiming that originalism is worth pursuing because there are no feasible alternatives. The thinking goes that even the most scathing critiques of originalism fall flat if critics fail to propose a preferable alternative to originalism. After all, it takes a theory to beat a theory. This Article proposes such a theory. While most variations of originalism require that the Constitution be interpreted based on its original public meaning, this Article proposes that the Constitution should instead be interpreted based on its present public meaning. This alternative has attracted surprisingly little discussion in the originalist …

Workplace Harasser Liability: Assailing Moral Hazards And Rehabilitating The Individualist Approach, Ryan H. Nelson

Tennessee Law Review

The focus of recent workplace harassment scholarship has been on irreproachable workplaces. Without detracting from that literature, this Article seeks to rehabilitate the individualist approach as a worthy supplement to institutional liability. It explicates, contextualizes, and outlines solutions to the moral hazards that would shelter workplace harassers from the risks of individual harasser liability if such liability ever comes to pass, thereby reclaiming the deterrent potential of the individualist approach. This Article begins by exploring how, without additional law reform, individual harasser liability would fail to optimally deter workplace harassment in two regards. First, it presents and analyzes original empirical …

Teaching Theranos, Priya Baskaran

Tennessee Law Review

The story of Theranos and disgraced CEO Elizabeth Holmes highlights numerous missed opportunities for effective intervention by corporate counsel. In particular, the lawyers at Theranos served as weak gate-keepers who were easily steamrolled by a power-drunk entrepreneur. The dominant business law pedagogy contributes to this problem by emphasizing litigation mitigation as the primary function of corporate lawyers. This framing improperly minimizes the role and influence of transactional attorneys to the detriment of all involved. Law Professors can change this narrative through much needed pedagogical innovation. Currently, any innovation in business law courses centers on the incorporation of drafting and other …

How Rhetoric Reveals Judicial Motives In Employment Discrimination Cases, Susan E. Provenzano

Tennessee Law Review

Employment discrimination plaintiffs tend to lose on summary judgment. In these cases, judges are acting like juries and undermining anti-discrimination legislation while paying lip service to the law and the judicial role. How and why are courts doing this? Legal scholars blame bad doctrine and biased judging. But neither one tells the full story. The tell is in the opinions' strategic use of language, which shows how the court, as an institution, "sized up" the case and the motives of key actors the parties, the lawmakers, other courts, and the court itself. Conducting the first-ever rhetorical analysis of this problem, …

The Rulification Of General Personal Jurisdiction And The Search For The Exceptional Case, Judy M. Cornett

Tennessee Law Review

No abstract provided.

Trauma As Inclusion, Raquel Aldana, Patrick M. Koga, Thomas O'Donnell, Alea Skwara, Caroline Perris

Tennessee Law Review

This article brings together a historian and law, public health, psychiatry, psychology, and neuroscience faculty and researchers to document how trauma is understood across disciplines and how it has developed in U.S. immigration law largely to exclude but increasingly to include migrants whose lives have been uprooted or otherwise impacted by borders. Our aim is to document and assess the progress and the gaps in immigration law's embrace and understanding of trauma through metrics that include the science of trauma, compassion, and fairness. This analysis is made urgent by the travesty we are witnessing of borders completely shut to desperate …

Subject Index

Tennessee Law Review

No abstract provided.

The Multi-Level Marketing Pandemic, Christopher Bradley, Hannah E. Oates

Tennessee Law Review

Among the societal effects of the COVID-19 pandemic has been a sharp rise in the activities of multi-level marketing companies (MLMs). MLMs are business enterprises in which participants seek not only to sell products to friends, family, and social media contacts, but also to recruit them as MLM participants, with the promise of "building their own business from home."

False promises often pervade MLM sales pitches. Evidence shows that few participants see even a dollar of profit from their MLM work; the vast majority of recruits quickly abandon their MLM dreams and lose their investments. Yet the pitch has become …

Bostock: An Inevitable Guarantee Of Heightened Scrutiny For Sexual Orientation And Transgender Classifications, Kaleb Byars

Tennessee Law Review

In June 2020, the Supreme Court decided Bostock v. Clayton County. In Bostock, the Court held that discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation and transgender status per se constitutes discrimination "because of sex" for purposes of Title VIL But Bostock inspires the question of whether its holding and reasoning apply in other contexts, including the Equal Protection Clause context. While the Supreme Court has held intermediate scrutiny applies to sex classifications analyzed under the Equal Protection Clause, the Court has yet to elucidate the level of scrutiny that applies to LGBTQ classifications. Meanwhile, state and federal courts have developed …

Author Index

Tennessee Law Review

No abstract provided.

Ready Lawyer One: Lawyering In The Metaverse, Michael D. Murray

Law Faculty Popular Media

No abstract provided.

Lawmaking Without Law: How Over Reliance On Economics Fails Financial Regulation (And What To Do About It), Steven L. Schwarcz, Theodore L. Leonhardt

American University Law Review

This Article examines a fundamental failure of process in lawmaking: the overreliance of lawmakers on economists and economic scholarship when designing and implementing financial regulation, to the virtual exclusion of lawyers and legal scholarship. This overreliance leads to regulation that often is based on theoretical models and assumptions that are poorly informed by experience and may not withstand real-world testing. The Article examines how to improve financial regulation by better integrating legal scholarship and lawyerly insights into the lawmaking process. Among other things, that will require law professors to gain the attention, and earn the respect, of lawmakers by writing …

Educating Robot-Proof Attorneys, Tammy Oltz

Faculty Scholarship

Technology, particularly that powered by Artificial Intelligence (AI), is disrupting the legal profession. In the coming years, lawyers who do not understand technology will face both ethical and professional risks. This year, the duty of technological competence marks its tenth anniversary. While lawyers are still learning what the duty means and what it will mean in the future, one thing is certain: those who ignore it could find themselves at risk of being on the wrong side of an ethics violation.

However, even without that regulatory obligation, lawyers who continue to ignore the current technological revolution put themselves at risk …

Subversive Legal Education:Reformist Steps Towardabolitionist Visions, Christina John, Russell G. Pearce, Aundray Jermaine Archer, Sarah Medina Camiscoli, Aron Pines, Maryam Salmanova, Vira Tarnavska

Fordham Law Review

Exclusivity in legal education divides traditional scholars, students, and impacted communities most disproportionately harmed by the legal education system. While traditional legal scholars tend to embrace traditional legal education, organic jurists—those who are historically excluded from legal education and those who educate themselves and their communities about their legal rights and realities—often reject the inaccessibility of legal education and its power. This Essay joins a team of community legal writers to imagine a set of principles for subversive legal education. Together, we—formerly incarcerated pro se litigants, paralegals for intergenerational movement lawyering initiatives, first-generation law students and lawyers, persons with years …

Table Of Contents, Seattle University Law Review

Seattle University Law Review

Table of Contents

Foreword, Seattle University Law Review

Seattle University Law Review

Foreward

Keynote Address, Justin Hansford

Seattle University Law Review

Keynote Address by Justin Hansford

Putting The Bar Exam On Constitutional Notice: Cut Scores, Race & Ethnicity, And The Public Good, Scott Johns

Seattle University Law Review

Nothing to see here. Season in and season out, bar examiners, experts, supreme courts, and bar associations seem nonplussed, trapped by what they see as the facts, namely, that the bar exam has no possible weaknesses, at least when it comes to alternative licensure mechanisms, that the bar exam is not to blame for disparate racial impacts that spring from administration of this ritualistic process, and that there are no viable alternatives in the harsh cold world of determining minimal competency for the noble purpose of protecting the public from legal harms. All a lie, of course.

But rather than …