Legal Writing and Research Commons^™

Maximizing The Educational Choice Wave By Rethinking State And Local Regulations, Shaka Mitchell

Belmont Law Review

This Article will first survey the flurry of education choice activity in 2023, touching on several of the factors that drove legislation. Next, it will examine both the dispositional and practical impediments to choice reforms. This Article concludes with recommendations for modernizing local and state policy to best achieve the goals of recently enacted educational programs.

Taking Our Position: Repairing The Breach In The Pipeline To The Legal Profession By Transforming The Impact Of Bias Against Black Girls In Student Discipline, Hon. Tiffany W. Brewer

Belmont Law Review

This Article implores the legal profession to intervene in promoting accountability in remediating implicit bias and discrimination in school discipline decisions disproportionately impacting Black girls’ educational outcomes, given their significant impact in disrupting the pipeline to the legal profession. The lack of accountability for disparate school discipline policies has resulted in little progress in decreasing the school-to-prison pipeline for Black girls. As a result, failures to eradicate implicit bias and discrimination in educational systems threaten the pipeline of future Black women law students, lawyers, and judges. This Article contends that if the bias in current school discipline policies toward Black …

Learning Together: Modern Developments In Education Law, Angie Sanders, Jordyn Conley, Lauren Bush

Belmont Law Review

Panel Discussion from legal practitioners discussing the various challenges and processes of working in the field of education law.

The Great "White" Way: Reconsidering Comprehensive Color-Conscious Casting Plans Through Affirmative Action, Commercial Speech, And Statutory Amendment, Jacob Franklin Greene

Belmont Law Review

This Note discusses the theatrical casting process from publishing a breakdown through audition day type outs and how this process exposes productions, theater companies, and Actor’s Equity Association (“AEA”) to potential liability. Part I provides a background on Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, 42 U.S.C. § 2000e, and 42 U.S.C. § 1981, as these are the federal antidiscrimination laws under which a lawsuit is most likely to arise. Part II explores the language of breakdowns, defines the concept of theatrical typing, and discusses the two predominant methods the theater industry frequently utilizes in casting shows. Likewise, …

The Forgotten Animals Who Feed The Nation: Why The Ppia Is Not Effective At Protecting The Welfare Of Poultry Farmed In The U.S., Jacqueline Woodruff

Belmont Law Review

The article "The Forgotten Animals Who Feed the Nation: Why the PPIA Is Not Effective at Protecting the Welfare of Poultry Farmed in the U.S." by Jacqueline Woodruff argues that the current U.S. Poultry Products Inspection Act (PPIA) is insufficient in ensuring humane slaughter practices for poultry. Woodruff critiques the USDA's reliance on "Good Commercial Practices" (GCP) and points out that these standards lack a clear definition of "humane" and do not mandate the stunning of poultry before slaughter. The author suggests that including poultry under the Humane Methods of Slaughter Act (HMSA) or amending the PPIA to include more …

Once Upon A Fape: Contrasting The Fabled Hope Of Idea With Present-Day Pandemic Realities, Jenny Rodriguez-Fee

Belmont Law Review

Much like Hansel and Gretel in the widely known fairytale, children around the world have experienced trauma, loss, and profound impact to their physical, social, and emotional well-being due to the pandemic. Also, like Hansel and Gretel, students with unique needs have lacked the guidance, support, and prioritization by the adults who are meant to protect them. For some students, this failure to support by those adults charged with their education has been occurring for decades. For many, they were left alone in the woods in March 2020, the start of the Covid-19 pandemic. Forced to isolate from teachers and …

Ensuring Just Compensation: Imposing A Reasonable Time Limit On Payment Of Money Judgments Under The Fifth Amendment, Paul Mackey

Dickinson Law Review (2017-Present)

The government’s use of eminent domain power to take private property for public use remains a controversial and fast-moving area of law. The Fifth Amendment was ratified as a check on the state’s use of eminent domain power by requiring just compensation after a taking. There is great variation among the states regarding the requirements of just compensation in an eminent domain claim. Some states are unwilling to provide any compensation at all, while others ensure full compensation. Property owners whose land has been taken face a dilemma when, after winning a money judgment in state court, they are unable …

Introducing Law Students To Transactional Practice: From Using Precedent To Closing The Deal, Ben Fernandez

UF Law Faculty Publications

My name is Ben Fernandez. I teach contract drafting at the University of Florida, Levin College of Law, and I'm going to talk about introducing students to transactional practice from using precedents to closing the deal. Basically, what I'm going to describe is things I do to supplement Tina Stark's Drafting Contracts: How and Why Lawyers Do What They Do. I'm going to give you a whole bunch of, I hope, useful, teaching ideas on how to do that.

Contract Drafting Classes Need To Devote More Consideration To The Law Applicable To "Boilerplate" Clauses, Ben Fernandez

UF Law Faculty Publications

The law applicable to “boilerplate” provisions is often given little attention in contract drafting classes because textbooks focus too much on the textbook author’s opinion of the best words to use for various contract provisions and how to format each clause (e.g., whether to use “shall” or “will” or “must” for a covenant or obligation, whether to write numbers numerically or in words (or both), whether to use “on or about” instead of “within” for a time period, whether to bold or underline definitions, or put them in quotes, etc.). Students need to learn to draft clearly and unambiguously; and …

Materiality In The Long Now: Navigating The Intersection Of Decision-Making, Time, And Strategy, Daniel M. Labovitz, Alexander Kontoleon

Dickinson Law Review (2017-Present)

Existing formulations of materiality in the federal securities laws contain an inherent limitation because they don’t adequately account for how risks and opportunities change over time. This can mislead investors looking to understand how well a company is poised to avoid long-dated risks and take advantage of evolving opportunities because those risks and opportunities don’t neatly fit into the rubric of “likelihood of occurrence times magnitude of harm equals materiality.” This is because the likelihood of any long-dated risk occurring within a short reporting time frame will always approach zero, which means the traditional model of materiality will always classify …

Keeping Your Eye On The Esg Sustainable Development Ball, Richard J. Sobelsohn

Dickinson Law Review (2017-Present)

Environmental, Social, and Governance (“ESG”) mandates were originally aspirational sound-bites, but now they have become a part of many companies’ mandates. Most recently with some backlash against ESG directives, most organizations are still complying with their original goals, because the economic arguments for having an ESG protocol is still valid. This article discusses what ESG is, how it relates to different types of companies, and most importantly, what legal issues pertain to it.

This Article examines how ESG guidelines pertain to different types of entities, and how these protocols affect everything from contract drafting, construction of a property, operations and …

A Bill Of Thirst: How Congress Can Support Interstate Water Markets, Jakob Haws

Dickinson Law Review (2017-Present)

Addressing modern-day water scarcity will likely require legal mechanisms to facilitate efficient water transfers between states. One such mechanism is a water market. Water markets promote more efficient water consumption and abound within states, but generally do not exist between states. This absence stems from protectionist state laws and from interstate water compact provisions which govern and allocate shared water sources. While useful in many regards, interstate water compacts often impose unnecessary legal obstacles against innovative drought-mitigating measures—including interstate water markets. The most serious of these obstacles is the fact that states cannot revise interstate water compacts without (1) obtaining …

Book Review—Environmental, Social, Governance: The Professional’S Guide To The Law And Practice Of Esg, William J. Donohue

Dickinson Law Review (2017-Present)

No abstract provided.

Cleaning Up Space Junk: Applying The Models Of U.S. Domestic Environmental Law To Regulate The Creation Of Orbital Debris By Private Actors, Sara Henry

Dickinson Law Review (2017-Present)

The commercial space flight industry has grown rapidly in recent decades, and Congress has implemented a “learning period” to prevent heavy regulations on the industry. This learning period has led to the proliferation of orbital debris in space. The learning period is set to lapse in 2024, and now is the proper time to implement regulations to mitigate the creation of more debris. These regulations should be modeled after federal environmental law, including simplifying the current permit system and setting up a trust fund to finance research into active debris removal.

Luck Of The Draw Iii: Using Al To Extract Data About Decision-Making In Federal Court Stays Of Removal, Sean Rehaag

Articles & Book Chapters

This article examines decision-making in Federal Court of Canada immigration law applications for stays of removal, focusing on how the rates at which stays are granted depend on which justice decides the case. The article deploys a form of computational natural language processing, using a large-language model machine learning process (GPT-3) to extract data from online Federal Court dockets. The article reviews patterns in outcomes in thousands of stay of removal applications identified through this process and reveals a wide range in stay grant rates across many justices. The article argues that the Federal Court should take measures to encourage …

Generative Ai Large Language Models And Researching The Law, Paul D. Callister

Faculty Works

The article discusses the transformative impact of generative AI large language models (LLMs) on legal research. Callister explores how these AI models, despite their current imperfections, are poised to shift the cognitive (or trusted) authority within the legal profession. He attributes this shift to the ease with which AI processes vast amounts of legal information and the anthropomorphic design of LLMs, which fosters trust among users. Callister introduces the concept of Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG), explaining how AI platforms integrate legal texts into their responses, enhancing their reliability over purely generative models. Through various examples, he demonstrates the strengths and limitations …

The Complicit Canon Of Criminal Law: A Critical Survey Of Syllabi, Casebooks, And Supplemental Materials, Robin Peterson

University of Michigan Journal of Law Reform

This Note analyzes the learning objectives, casebook readings, and supplemental sources that thirteen criminal law professors assigned over fifteen years and argues that the current approach to teaching criminal law is complicit in perpetuating the injustices of the American criminal legal system because it fails to adequately interrogate the carceral state and does not prepare students to become ethical practitioners or policymakers of criminal law. This paper calls for a fundamental rethinking of the purpose of teaching criminal law and recommends a reform orientation, which could be implemented through a variety of course structures.

On The Genealogy Of Intimate Digital Harm, Aziz Z. Huq

Michigan Law Review

A review of The Fight for Privacy: Protecting Dignity, Identity, and Love in the Digital Age. By Danielle Keats Citron.

The Art Of The Review, Don Herzog

Michigan Law Review

What’s a book review for?

You might think it’s to supply a summary of the book. Time is short. We’re drowning in stuff to read; it’s hard to keep up even if you dutifully apply the seat of your pants to the seat of your chair and read very fast. Courts are constantly publishing new opinions. And—even though you’re used to this familiar feature of American law, you should still notice how startling it is—they’re also publishing unpublished opinions, with indefensible rules about whether or how they count as precedents lawyers can cite. Legislatures are publishing floor debates, not to …

Orders Without Law, Thomas P. Schmidt

Michigan Law Review

A review of The Shadow Docket: How the Supreme Court Uses Stealth Rulings to Amass Power and Undermine the Republic. By Stephen Vladeck.