State and Local Government Law Commons^™

Oil, Gas, And Mineral Law, Austin W. Brister, Michael G. Szymanski

SMU Annual Texas Survey

This article is a survey of the relevant developments in oil, gas, and mineral law from December 1, 2019, through November 30, 2020. The article focuses on law likely to be influential to Texas practitioners.

Civil Procedure: Pretrial & Trial, Amanda Sotak, Don Colleluori, Andrew C. Whitaker

SMU Annual Texas Survey

This article is a survey of the relevant developments in civil procedure law from December 1, 2019, through November 30, 2020. The article focuses on law likely to be influential to Texas practitioners.

Front Matter

SMU Annual Texas Survey

No abstract provided.

The City's Second Amendment, David Fagundes, Darrell A.H. Miller

Faculty Articles

Cities are increasingly common sites of contestation over the scope and meaning of the Second Amendment. Some municipalities have announced their opposition to firearm restrictions by declaring themselves Second Amendment sanctuaries. Others have sought to curtail gun violence by passing restrictive local regulations. Still others have responded to police violence by moving to demilitarize, disarm, or even disband their police forces. The burgeoning post-Heller legal literature, though, has largely overlooked the relationship between cities, collective arms bearing, and the Second Amendment. In sum, to what extent do cities themselves have a right to keep and bear arms? This Article …

Slapps Across America, Jack Toscano

Touro Law Review

The Supreme Court’s landmark decision in New York Times v. Sullivan was meant to protect our fundamental right to free speech from defamation lawsuits. However, Strategic Lawsuits Against Public Participation, known as SLAPPS, continue to chill free speech through weak but expensive to defend defamation lawsuits. In response to SLAPPs many states have passed anti-SLAPP statutes that are meant to identify SLAPPs, quickly dismiss SLAPPS, and punish plaintiffs who bring SLAPPs. A difficult issue for federal courts throughout the country is whether these state anti-SLAPP statutes should apply in federal courts. This Note examines the Supreme Court opinions in Shady …

The Democracy Principle In State Constitutions, Jessica Bulman-Pozen, Miriam Seifter

Faculty Scholarship

In recent years, antidemocratic behavior has rippled across the nation. Lame-duck state legislatures have stripped popularly elected governors of their powers; extreme partisan gerrymanders have warped representative institutions; state officials have nullified popularly adopted initiatives. The federal constitution offers few resources to address these problems, and ballot-box solutions cannot work when antidemocratic actions undermine elections themselves. Commentators increasingly decry the rule of the many by the few.

This Article argues that a vital response has been neglected. State constitutions embody a deep commitment to democracy. Unlike the federal constitution, they were drafted – and have been repeatedly rewritten and amended …

Preemption: The Continuing Challenge, Richard Briffault

Faculty Scholarship

The decade of the 2010s witnessed the emergence and rapid spread of aggressive state preemption of local government actions. This “new preemption” consists of intentional, extensive, and sometimes punitive state efforts to block local action across a wide range of domains—from firearms regulation to the treatment of immigrants, workplace equity to environmental protection, the scope of anti-discrimination laws to the regulation of the sharing economy. This new preemption has roots going back to the turn of this century, and began to build decades ago, but it took off most dramatically after the Republican takeover of many state governments in 2010, …

Legislative Redistricting In The Time Of Covid, Norman R. Williams

Lewis & Clark Law Review

Due to the COVID pandemic, the U.S. Census Bureau was unable to provide 2020 census data to Oregon in time for the Legislature to engage in redistricting during the 2021 session, as required by the Oregon Constitution. As a result of this delay, the Oregon Legislature asked the Oregon Supreme Court to push back the constitutionally imposed deadlines for redistricting—a request which the Court agreed to in part. This Essay examines the Court’s power to revise constitutionally prescribed deadlines and the extent to which any districting plan must be based on federal census data.

Parents And The Interstate Compact On The Placement Of Children: A Flexible Approach, Alex Jones

Lewis & Clark Law Review

Before an Oregon court can send a child across the Columbia River to live with a Washington foster parent, the authorities on the Washington side must first approve the move. Unless and until that happens, the child stays in Oregon. But what if the Washington “foster” parent is the child’s biological father? The Interstate Compact on the Placement of Children (ICPC) imposes conditions on the sending of children across state lines to live with foster parents or potential adoptive parents. Courts in different states have long disagreed over whether those conditions ever apply to the placement of children with their …

Private Confederate Monuments, Jessica Owley, Jess Phelps, Sean W. Hughes

Lewis & Clark Law Review

As public Confederate monuments finally begin to come down across the na- tion, we are seeing an emergence of Confederate monuments on private lands. The number of private Confederate monuments is increasing both with the construction of new monuments and, more significantly, the relocation of monuments from public land. This Article explains why private Confederate monuments are likely to be the next battleground over these controversial and troubling statues. Through ten detailed examples, we show how private Con- federate monuments emerge and how communities are responding to them. The challenges related to monuments on private land are different than those …

State-Local Litigation Conflicts, Margaret H. Lemos

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

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 …

The Cyan Decision And Its Impact On State-Level Securities Class Actions, B. John Torabi

Fordham Journal of Corporate & Financial Law

The Supreme Court’s decision in Cyan, Inc. v. Beaver County Employees Retirement Fund^† preserved the Securities Act of 1933’s bar on removing securities class actions brought in state court to federal court. The unanimous ruling cut against a nearly quarter-century long trend of pushing securities class action litigation to the federal courts. Cyan was resolved purely through statutory interpretation, leaving many of the underlying policy questions to be resolved by state courts and in future rulings.

This Note examines the intention of the drafters of the Securities Act of 1933 in designing a disclosure-focused regulatory scheme with a private …

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 …

Assertion And Hearsay, Richard Lloret

Dickinson Law Review (2017-Present)

This article explores the characteristics and functions of assertion and considers how the term influences the definition of hearsay under Federal Rule of Evidence 801. Rule 801(a) defines hearsay by limiting it to words and conduct intended as an assertion, but the rule does not define the term assertion. Courts and legal scholars have focused relatively little attention on the nature and definition of assertion. That is unfortunate, because assertion is a robust concept that has been the subject of intense philosophic study over recent decades. Assertion is not a mere cypher standing in for whatever speech or conduct one …

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, …

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