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Over the past few years, 'fashion law' has emerged as a vibrant field of inquiry. The legal and policy issues affecting the fashion sector have been investigated with increasing intensity, while a growing number of private practice lawyers and in-house counsel regard themselves as practising fashion law. But what is fashion law? And what are the specific legal challenges facing the fashion sector, as well as related solutions? The Handbook of Fashion Law seeks to answer these questions by bringing together multiple voices, approaches, and jurisdictions.Its contributions are organized into four thematic areas. Part I considers the legal infrastructure or the fashion and luxury industries, addressing issues related to intellectual property (IP) as well as the demands of the circular economy, protection of cultural heritage, and freedom of expression and information. Part II maps the IP dimensions of fashion by reviewing the application of design rights, copyright, trademarks, geographical indications, plant variety rights, and trade secrets. Part III analyses specific contractual issues arising in the fashion sector. It examines the application of principles and rules found in regulatory frameworks, including those governing advertising, competition, consumer, and tax laws. Finally, Part IV dissects and evaluates the role of new and emerging technologies in the fashion sector from a legal perspective. It considers concepts such as ecommerce, 3D printing, counterfeiting, artificial intelligence, non-fungible tokens (NFTs), the metaverse, gaming, and wearable technology.The Handbook of Fashion Law offers readers a multidisciplinary and multijurisdictional understanding of legal challenges facing the fashion sector. Bringing together a diverse range of experts, its contributions offer readers an in-depth, critical, and strategic understanding of the fashion industry's legal intricacies.

Most people believe a trial is simply a matter of the laws and facts of a case. The general idea is that both sides enter into the courtroom and are given a chance to present their facts to a judge and jury. These facts are then analyzed in relation to federal and state laws that relate to the case. However, there is a lot more to trials than meets the eye. Underneath the laws and regulations, legal jargon, and terminology, as well as the presentation of witnesses and evidence is an even more complicated mind game being played by everyone involved with the trial. While research is being performed to uncover and understand the plethora of factors that influence court proceedings, my research will focus specifically on prosecuting attorneys and whether certain types of background information affect their success in Court of Appeals Cases. This study collects information on the gender, years of legal experience, past job experience, law school tier, and the appointment or election of Ohio’s 88 county prosecutors; then compares this data to the success rate of county prosecutors in Appeals cases utilizing ANOVA tests. Although the results revealed that none of the variables significantly influence a prosecutor’s success, the lack of a significant impact itself is an important finding.

Youth aging out of the foster care system face several adverse outcomes, including homelessness and incarceration. Extant research has used aggregate data and two primary research modalities, cluster and regression analysis, to establish associations between individual youth characteristics, their experiences while in care, and adverse outcomes. Missing from literature are multilevel studies examining outcomes within a legal framework. To date, no studies have examined the effect of state laws on the outcomes of youth aging out of care. This study examines the effect of two categories of state laws, those governing entry into the system and those governing exit from the system. Data from the National Youth in Transition Database (NYTD) and Adoption and Foster Care Analysis and Reporting System (AFCARS) were linked and used in the multilevel analysis in this study to examine whether state laws authorizing the placement of delinquent youth into the custody of a child welfare agency and federally approved laws extending foster care to the age of 21 affected the outcomes of homelessness and incarceration at age 19 while controlling for individual and state level factors. The findings support the inclusion of state laws governing entry into and exit from the child welfare system as well as other state contextual factors such as the model of child welfare administration and state financial variables. Additionally, individual-level factors such as gender, race/ethnicity, reason for removal, and specific risk factors identified at age 17 were significant predictors of outcomes at age 19. This study supports the use of multilevel modeling and the inclusion of state laws, state contextual factors, and individual-level factors to examine outcomes of youth aging out of care.

For centuries, courts have been called upon to distinguish between law and fact. That distinction played a key role in recent Supreme Court decisions on two critical components of appellate review. Dupree v. Younger considered an important question regarding what a party must do at trial to preserve an issue for appellate review. And Google LLC v. Oracle America, Inc. addressed how to select and apply the standard of appellate review--specifically, whether and how the appellate court must show deference to particular decisions made at the trial level. Both decisions were partially right. Dupree correctly focused on whether certain early rulings are unreviewable on appeal because they are "overcome" by proceedings at trial. Google properly recognized that an appellate court must defer to the jury as to underlying findings jurors may have made in reaching the ultimate verdict. But both decisions went awry in concluding that the appellate court could further increase its review power simply by characterizing certain issues as "legal" rather than "factual." A close analysis of the Dupree and Google decisions themselves--and a sound understanding of the structure of appellate decision-making--reveals that the labels of law and fact are ill-suited to assessing questions of issue preservation and appellate deference. This Article details those shortcomings and argues for a more coherent approach to both questions. Rather than characterizing the "issue" being appealed, courts should focus on the decisional "outcome" for that issue. Regarding issue preservation, courts should inquire whether the outcome of a pretrial ruling had conclusively resolved an issue such that there is no need for a further decision on that issue at trial. If so, that ruling may be appealed regardless of whether the party took additional steps at trial to reassert its position. With respect to appellate deference, what matters is the analytical outcome reached by the appellate court in conducting its review. The appellate court can always articulate generalizable principles independently when those principles are part of its decisional analysis. But where it would merely impose a different ultimate result than the trial judge or jury, reversal should require heightened justification.

We present conservative estimates for the marginal value of public funds (MVPF) associated with providing Medicaid to inmates exiting prison. The MVPF measures the ratio between a policy's social benefits and its governmental costs. Our MVPF estimates suggest that every additional $1 the government spends on providing inmates exiting prison with Medicaid coverage can result in social benefits ranging between $3.45 and $10.62. A large proportion of the benefits we consider stems from the reduced future criminal involvement among former inmates who receive Medicaid. Employing a difference-in-differences approach, we find that Medicaid expansions reduce the average number of times a released inmate is reimprisoned within 1 year by approximately 11.5%. By combining this estimate with key values reported elsewhere (e.g., victimization costs, data on victimization and incarceration), we quantify specific benefits arising from the policy. These encompass diminished criminal harm due to lower reoffense rates, direct benefits to former inmates through Medicaid coverage, increased employment opportunities, and reduced loss of liberty resulting from fewer future reimprisonments. Net-costs consist of the cost of providing Medicaid net of changes in the governmental cost of imprisonment, changes in the tax revenue due to increased employment, and changes in spending on other public assistance programs. We interpret our estimates as conservative since we deliberately err on the side of under-estimating benefits and over-estimating costs when data on specific items are imprecise or incomplete. Our findings align closely with others in the sparse literature investigating the crime-related welfare impacts of Medicaid access, underscoring the substantial indirect benefits public health insurance programs can offer through crime reduction, in addition to their direct health-related advantages.

The purpose of this phenomenological study was to understand the lived experiences of Black female victims of IPV concerning mandatory arrest and how they perceive the outcomes and effects of the arrest on either partner involved. The findings revealed that Black women had mixed experiences with mandatory arrest; those with Black abusers reported positive experiences with this law, and those with White abusers experienced negative encounters. Eight out of twenty-three mandatory arrest states were identified as problematic states by Black women due to measures of poor police performance. Outcomes suggest that Black women with White abusers experience unique barriers associated with historical stereotypes and treatment of Black people, which in turn contribute to contemporary policing practices. The findings indicated that the effects of mandatory arrest may initially cause unintended outcomes for Black women. However, positive outcomes are attached to the law if the abuser remains incarcerated and the victim is allowed to move on with their life. These findings suggest that mandatory arrest can effectively protect Black women if the criminal justice response (police response, conviction, and incarceration) is effective. This research contributes to the current knowledge base and provides broader scholarship on Black female IPV, the implications of historical views and stereotypes of Black women contribute to discriminatory/racist practices adopted in police departments that downplay or ignore the voices of Black female victims, and the implications towards improving equality in policing practices and quality DV education among Black people.

Deference to administrative agencies’ interpretations of ambiguous statutory provisions has been a hallmark of administrative law and regulatory policy for the past forty years. The Supreme Court recently upended that settled allocation of power between agencies and courts, granting interpretive primacy to courts even where statutes essentially require policy choices. However, questions remain about precisely how courts will exercise this policymaking authority that agencies used to exercise, as well as about the multiple “offramps” from this nondeferential standard that the Court left open. Rather than a new era of nondeference, it is just as likely we are embarking on a new era of deference — different in some respects from the regime that preceded it, but still ultimately respectful of agencies’ superior ability to responsibly and legitimately develop policy.

The recently concluded WIPO Treaty on Intellectual Property, Genetic Resources and Associated Traditional Knowledge mandates disclosure requirements in patent applications, thereby creating an obligation to attribute the use of genetic resources and traditional knowledge. The WIPO member countries thus have an opportunity to modify their national patent laws, so that they can effectively control genetic resources and traditional knowledge. This article examines the choices that the biodiversity-rich countries have when designing their national legal systems to implement the treaty.

The purpose of this study is to complete the first phase of development of the MDMA, a scale that will measure decision-making abilities among youth and young adults aged 5-30. While the scale can be used in a variety of settings, its specific goal is for use in juvenile transfer cases. There are currently no standardized assessments related to the Kent criteria, and the goal of this scale is to support objective determinations by judges and attorneys. For this study, the Delphi Method was used to gather expert opinions on the relevancy of each scale item. The researcher began by identifying experts and inviting them to participate in the survey. Next, the researcher employed two rounds of surveys using a Likert scale, along with qualitative feedback opportunities for each subscale. Following each of the two rounds of data collection, the researcher determined relevancy by identifying which items had at least 70% consensus with no more than 15% disagreement. This study extended the available literature and processes used in juvenile transfer cases in the following ways: (a) identify the dimensions within the construct of “decision-making;” (b) determine the optimal method of measuring these dimensions; (c) create scale items that measure each of the identified dimensions and connect them to the Kent criteria; and (d) summarize uses for this scale. Limitations of the study, directions for future research, and implications for practitioners are discussed.

This Article considers three related questions. First, is a person “seized” under the Fourth Amendment when law enforcement restricts a person’s movements in their home and limits their ability to leave or go about their business? Second, does the answer to this seizure inquiry turn on the person’s citizenship status? And third, how do lawyers ensure that courts discard bad law? This last question is not a qualitative assessment— with good and bad law being tied to one’s legal ideology. Rather, certain legal holdings, dating back over half a century, have been whittled away if not entirely eroded. When this happens, how do lawyers ensure that judges do not rely on outdated law that has not been directly overruled? Worse still, how do lawyers ensure that judges avoid dicta from such cases when the entire case should be jettisoned for being at odds with current legal doctrine? This Article proceeds in four parts. Part I restates the opening hypothetical by explaining how ICE officers are legally permitted to issue, without judicial oversight, administrative arrest warrants. This statutory authority should, nonetheless, be evaluated using Fourth Amendment doctrine that limits exceptions to judicial warrants when law enforcement acts in, or just outside, the home. Part II introduces Abel v. United States to explain how arrests for alleged immigration violations could occur prior to Katz. Part III provides an overview of how modern Fourth Amendment doctrine has eroded Abel and justifies its outright reversal. Part IV concludes by asserting that all law enforcement officers, including ICE, should be bound by traditional Fourth Amendment doctrine when conducting seizures in, or just outside, the home. The Fourth Amendment protects all people, not just citizens. And its text should be given the full effect the Framers drafted and intended. For this reason, the Supreme Court should take an opportunity to explicitly overrule Abel.

The Major Questions Doctrine (“MQD”) is the newest textualist interpretive canon, and it has driven consequential Supreme Court decisions concerning vaccine mandates, environmental regulation, and student loan relief. But the new MQD is a canon in search of legitimization. Critics allege that the MQD displaces the Court’s conventional textual analysis with judicial policymaking. Textualists have now responded that the MQD is a linguistic canon, consistent with textualism. Justice Barrett recently argued in Biden v. Nebraska that the MQD is grounded in ordinary people’s understanding of language and law, and scholarship contends that the MQD reflects ordinary people’s understanding of textual clarity in “high stakes” situations. Both linguistic arguments rely heavily on “common sense” examples from philosophy and everyday situations. This Article tests whether these examples really are common sense to ordinary Americans. We present the first empirical studies of the central examples offered by advocates of the MQD, and the results undermine the argument that the MQD is a linguistic canon. Even worse for proponents of the MQD, we show that the interpretive arguments used to legitimize the MQD as a linguistic canon threaten both textualism and the Supreme Court’s growing anti-administrative project.

The purpose of this research is to examine the existing cyberharassment laws around the world and identify common themes that can enhance protections for the more than 50% of American adults who have experienced cyberharassment in their lifetimes. Dealing with the practical limitations of examining every country’s law and the intent to benefit Americans, this qualitative analysis dissects the cyberharassment laws of two countries from each continent selected using criteria that allow for cross-examination with U.S. cyberharassment laws. The criteria used for selection incorporate population, power, influence, and unique regulatory factors not currently present in other countries. Through the evaluation of scholarly research and existing cyberharassment legislation, the coding system used in this analysis grew to include four categories of codes: Initiation, Factors Required by Law, Penalties, and Cyber-specific. By exploring these various approaches to solving the crisis of cyberharassment, this study works to explore additional considerations for online platforms that may revolutionize the way Americans interact with social media and ever-advancing technology. Included in this discussion are the unique factors that the United States specifically must consider when attempting to address cybercrimes like cyberharassment, including the First Amendment and American judiciary, corporate sovereignty, and cyber liberties, among others.

This research explores what effect having a court appointed counsel as opposed to private counsel has for a defendant being granted pretrial release. To investigate the influence further, data was collected from a non-random sample population from a Midwestern mid-sized city (2024). The primary variables in this study include counsel type, race, gender, initial bond type, release type, court appearance, number of days incarcerated, and whether defendants get re- arrested while their case is pending. It was concluded that there was a relationship between type of counsel and factors such as race and number of days incarcerated, but no significant relationship with gender, initial bond type, release from incarceration, court appearance, and remaining arrest free.

For the first century of its existence, colonial Puritanism in New England embraced anti-Catholicism. It first emerged out of anti-Catholic efforts to continue the Reformation in England, by removing Catholic rituals, symbols, ideas, and people from the English church, state, and society. Through the processes of migration and settlement-building in the unique contexts of the New England borderlands, their once “English” anti-Catholicism evolved and became “Americanized.” Puritans felt this new “Americanized” anti-Catholicism on an everyday basis, making colonial Puritan anti-Catholicism more intense than its English counterpart. Embracing an anti-Catholic “errand” into the New England borderlands, a region filled with new people and geography that was far from the reaches of the English state, colonial Puritans experimented with and crafted their religious, political, and social institutions, practices, and identities on anti-Catholicism. Catholics became “the Other,” imagined as violent and oppressive tyrants, plotters, murderers, and even the anti-Christ, from which colonial Puritans defined their community in opposition. Constant conflict with Indigenous peoples, New France, and “popery” raised anxieties and fears over the very survival of Puritan communities. As a result, New Englanders passed stranger laws—regulations, oaths, and other means to control the presence of alien peoples—to restrict Catholic “strangers” within their colonies. By exploring the relationship between the colonies of New England and Ireland, it becomes clear that the English language of civility and violence, which was employed in New England against both Indigenous peoples and Catholics, originated within the process of Irish colonization. This language was thus tied to that colonization’s virulent anti-Catholicism, which was then transported to New England.

To provide context on the role of clerks, this article briefly discusses the influence of judicial clerks and the value of disclosing the identity of judicial clerks. After outlining data currently available on clerks and calls for more transparency related to clerks, the article discusses how the lack of information on clerks can be addressed through simple disclosure of clerks’ names on the web pages of federal courts and state appellate courts. It also examines possible consequences associated with making such information publicly available and how disclosing clerks’ identities can promote transparency and public confidence in the judiciary while preserving judges’ autonomy in selecting their clerks.

Conventional wisdom suggests that allowing offenders to choose alternative punishments to a previously existing punishment cannot enhance deterrence, because offenders can simply select the least costly option available. After reviewing the deterrence research literature, we argue that punishment menus may encourage individuals to focus more on how they construe the wrongdoing and view the ethical gravity of their actions. We experimentally test whether people may perceive punishment menus as more deterrent than stand-alone sanctions available within the same menu. Our results suggest that this is possible, and that changes in people’s perceptions are often mediated by the mindset (e.g., calculative, ethical) they adopt to evaluate punishment schemes as well as their impressions of the seriousness of the illegal act.

Economists have identified important adaptations that immigrant workers have made to weather economic crises. During times of economic contraction, immigrant workers have moved across industries or geographical locations, downshifted to part-time work, and accepted lower wages to stay employed. Evidence from the Great Recession (2007–2009) shows the benefits of that economic resilience: immigrant workers were more likely than native-born workers to remain continuously employed, to have shorter periods of unemployment when they lost their jobs, and to regain jobs more quickly in the recovery period. Of course, these adaptations had significant personal costs for immigrant workers and their families, but in times of increased job competition, their resilience enabled them to keep jobs and crucial sources of income and had important, positive spillover effects for native-born workers. Our research, however, shows important limits to that immigrant resilience. In our analysis of Current Population Survey (“CPS”) data during COVID-19, immigrant workers had worse employment outcomes than native-born workers. Looking at the restaurant industry as a case study, we found that immigrant workers were more likely to lose their jobs, keep only low-paying jobs within restaurants, or drop out of the labor market entirely, as compared to native-born workers. The sharply contrasting experiences of immigrant workers during these two crises can be explained by the nearly simultaneous and complete shutdowns that states imposed across the country during the pandemic. These shutdowns undercut any mobility and flexibility advantages that immigrant workers might otherwise have had and threatened immigrants’ already precarious economic positions. As we look to the real possibility of future pandemics, these limits on immigrant resilience counsel for increasing immigrant access to aid programs at both the federal and state levels to benefit both immigrant workers and the larger economy that relies heavily on immigrant productivity.

What is the purpose of evidence law? The answer might seem intuitive. Evidence law exists, of course, to foster verdict accuracy, legitimacy, and efficiency. But these kindred aims often come into conflict. Policy tradeoffs are inescapable in evidence law, meaning that an evidentiary regime must clarify how its normative objectives cohere. Do accuracy, legitimacy, and efficiency work together on equal footing, such that the goal of a code is to maximize each objective to the extent possible? Or does one of evidence law’s aims take precedence over the rest? And if one goal takes priority, what is the role of the subordinate policy objectives?These questions loom over all of evidence law. They establish order for an evidentiary regime and serve as the north star for its substantive contents. Yet these are the very questions that the Federal Rules of Evidence simply ignore. The code fails to elucidate a normative equilibrium among its policy pursuits. And the resulting incoherence has predictable costs. The Federal Rules emphasize verdict accuracy with one set of rules, only to undermine accuracy with another. The code prioritizes legitimacy at certain junctures, but risks substantial illegitimacy elsewhere. The Federal Rules increasingly prove empirically unsound and culturally problematic, yet garner no urgent response from rulemakers. Taken together, the collective incoherence has caused the Federal Rules to chronically underachieve their policy goals.This Article therefore seeks to remedy evidence law’s faulty conceptual foundation. It introduces two optimization frameworks that bring order to evidence law, cohering our evidentiary regime’s policy objectives and bringing existential clarity to the field. Even beyond those theoretical benefits, the optimization models also provide a roadmap for extensive tangible improvements. The models leave no stone unturned as they channel evidence law to its optimum, excising underperforming rules and aligning the Federal Rules with modern cultural norms and scientific understandings. And ultimately, that substantial reform is both the product, and the promise, of a coherent evidentiary regime.

This thesis argues for an interdisciplinary examination of the origins and subsequent appearance of the Wassermann blood test, the first test developed for detecting syphilis, in eugenics initiatives and medicolegal mandates. When this seemingly impartial medical tool intersected with preexisting social and cultural biases regarding syphilis its story became one of blood purity initiatives for the preservation and proliferation of white normativity. Reframing the Wassermann as more than a passive medical tool highlights how ostensibly impartial medical processes can produce institutional violence in masculinized spaces of control. While the Wassermann offered a source of hope for protecting against syphilitic infection, in application, the serodiagnostic tool served as a source of scientific validation when misapplied as a quantifiable method for justifying medicolegal interventions in the 20th century US. This examination traces the bioethical legacy of the Wassermann from its 1906 development in Berlin to its appearance in eugenics-based legal mandates in the US. Through an analysis of scientific publications and court records at archives across the East Coast this paper centers those who didn’t benefit from the Wassermann and investigates how scientific authority derived from an imperfect diagnostic test was harnessed to reproduce and reinforce the sociocultural biases that linger today.

We consider a previously neglected cost of whistle-blower awards: employers may base their hiring decisions, on the margin, not on the productivity of an employee but rather on the probability that the employee will become a whistle-blower. We develop a three-stage model to examine how productivity losses due to distortions at the hiring stage influence optimal whistle-blower rewards. We characterize optimal rewards for whistle-blowing, and show that when rewards can be chosen according to either the benefits of the employer from offending or the productivity of the worker being hired, productivity-based rewards are superior to benefit-based rewards.

How can educational leaders ensure that LGBTQ students feel safe, welcome, and enjoy access to the same educational experiences as their peers amid a volatile political climate? Learning from the lived experiences of educational leaders in Florida, North Carolina, and Texas, we can provide safe and equitable experiences for LGBTQ students. This narrative inquiry study suggests leadership considerations to provide care and equity for LGBTQ students. The study was conducted with interviews as conversations which is a relational research methodology (Clandinin, 2013). Participants were invited based on serving as educational leaders in building or district administrative positions. Relational pedagogy is the theoretical basis of the analysis and informs recommendations to support LGBTQ students. For that reason, Connelly and Clandinin’s coding and analytical tools were used to find patterns affirming relational pedagogy and patterns negating relational pedagogy. Findings indicate that educational leaders have managed to keep the wellbeing of students as their focus amid a very difficult situation. There are challenges in being able to support students. There are factors negating relational pedagogy, but there are also factors that affirm relational pedagogy. These positive factors can inform how educational leaders in other states with passed and proposed anti-LGBTQ legislation can ensure that students feel safe, welcome, and enjoy equitable educational experiences.

In the summer of 2020, after the murder of George Floyd, the national conversation around police reform intensified and was part of a conversation with students at Texas A&M University School of Law. Students wanted more discussion and teaching about police, police misconduct, police reform, and defunding the police. Following those discussions, I created a simulation on local level police reform that, as of this writing, I have used twice in my negotiation class. Simulations are helpful teaching tools in a variety of settings, including law schools. Simulations can be particularly useful to help students discuss difficult topics in different ways by putting students in roles that demand that they go beyond their own views and that they put themselves in the shoes of others. I wanted an exercise that would help students to discuss police reform, police funding, and the issues of race that are wrapped up in these topics in a different way. In this short essay, I will explain the simulation, how I have used it in class, how it can be used to stimulate discussion around police reform, and some of the lessons I have learned in terms of how to conduct and organize this simulation.

The evolution of rights following Obergefell is not over. Creative 303 LLC marked a new phase in the ongoing legal challenges over the rights and ceremonies attending same-sex marriage. This Essay addresses the anticipated limits of 303 Creative LLC. The Essay proceeds in three parts. First, how does 303 Creative LLC impact government employees? What rights, if any, should government employees be able to raise in light of 303 Creative LLC? Second, what does 303 Creative LLC mean for private marketplace vendors engaging in expressive commerce? Vendors, particularly wedding vendors, often create unique items for weddings. Will the law focus on the unique nature of the product being sold, the unique nature of same-sex weddings,19 or simply the product being characterized as expressive commerce? And third, how far ranging will 303 Creative LLC’s free speech protections truly be? Will those with deeply held racial or national origin convictions be permitted to raise similar objections under the First Amendment? Or is same-sex marriage sui generis such that society, and our courts, will accept same-sex couples being relegated to a second-class status in the public marketplace, particularly when it comes to same-sex weddings? Unlike Henny-Penny, this author does not believe the sky is falling. 303 Creative LLC does allow limited discrimination against same-sex couples in the marketplace. This discrimination is permitted despite being in violation of state anti-discrimination laws that increasingly protect sexual orientation and same-sex couples. But the decision will hopefully be narrowly drawn and equally applied. If a vendor selling expressive commerce does not want to serve others, that rule must be equally applicable regardless of the race, gender, religion, or national origin of the person being denied service. The results could get messy. But the law—and the right of free speech to refuse to serve others—must be equally applied. And this mandate, the equal application requirement, will ultimately limit the reach of 303 Creative LLC to ensure a narrow definition of expressive commerce. Society cannot afford to return to an era of segregated services.20 Neither the Court nor Congress will allow that to happen.

The role of the UN Security Council in settling disputes among States has sometimes been depicted as quasi-judicial in nature since the Council may base its decisions on violations of law even though it is neither a court nor a formal dispute resolution body. Indeed, the political as distinct from judicial nature of the Council is typically emphasised in explaining the relationship between the Council and the International Court of Justice as the UN’s principal judicial organ. The Council has addressed climate change since 2007 and has inter alia included climate considerations into the mandates of peace missions. This chapter breaks new ground in analysing the Council as a dispute resolution body in its own right. The five-stage journey of litigation devised by the editors facilitates consideration of how the Council’s response to climate insecurity may continue to evolve in coming years.

From cryptocurrencies to non-fungible tokens, blockchain technology has been widely discussed among policymakers, commentators and mainstream media. Although the discussion of cryptoassets has slowed down in the past three years, blockchain technology remains important and has the potential to revolutionize the operation of the intellectual property system—the copyright system, in particular.This chapter explores the possibility for copyright offices to harness blockchain technology to improve their operation and to advance the future development of the copyright system at both the domestic and international levels. It begins by identifying the benefits provided by blockchain technology. It further discusses the challenges posed by greater deployment of this technology in copyright offices. This chapter then identifies the different policy or technological choices confronting these offices. It concludes by providing suggestions on how to advance development and discussion of this emerging technology.

In Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health, Justice Samuel Alito relied on adoption as part of the justification for holding that abortion is not constitutionally protected: “States have increasingly adopted ‘safe haven’ laws, which generally allow women to drop off babies anonymously; and that a woman who puts her newborn up for adoption today has little reason to fear that the baby will not find a suitable home.” Using adoption as an adequate substitute for abortion is a long-standing strategy for the antiabortion movement; but it is often embraced by pro-choice advocates as well. This position is supportable only if the realities of adoption are ignored in favor of mythologized notions of adoption as morally superior to abortion.This piece explores the ambiguities in adoption, considering the issues of racism, patriarchy and poverty that drive children into the adoption system. It also discusses the history and philosophy literature that links adoption and abortion, and how those who favor access to abortion have ceded the morality issue to those who are antiabortion. The piece also examines the psychosocial literature about birth parents and adoptees that reveals the experiences of these members of the adoption triad, and uncovers the false premise that adoption compares favorably to abortion because it causes no harm. Overall, this piece critiques the ways in which adoption is sanitized to erase issues of gender, race and class, so as to present adoption as superior to abortion and thus justify ending abortion access.

A disturbingly high percentage of our students continue to be unwell. In the most recent and comprehensive survey of law student well-being in 2021, almost 70% of law students responded that, in the past twelve months, they believed they needed to seek help for emotional or mental health problems. Embedded screening tools in the survey suggested that 34% of respondents were clinically depressed and 54% suffered from clinical anxiety. 44% of respondents reported being drunk in the past thirty days, 33% had engaged in binge drinking in the preceding two weeks, and 38% had smoked marijuana in the past twelve months. Over 80% of law students responded that they had suffered at least one traumatic event in their lives, with 70% reporting more than one such event. Nearly 16% of law students said they had thoughts of self-harm in the past twelve months, and 11% reported serious thoughts of killing themselves in the last year. These numbers are troubling and above national averages. And for most of these categories, the percentage of students reporting mental health challenges or problematic behaviors has increased since the last comprehensive study of law students in 2014.

Humanity is heavily dependent on transboundary groundwater resources and aquifers for its freshwater. As a result, policymakers, groundwater managers, water law professionals, and the public must become more aware about this critical resource to ensure its sustainable use into the future. This book reviews the handful of treaties and informal arrangements implemented by various nations around the world for the assessment, use, allocation, and protection of cross-border groundwater and aquifers. It also identifies international legal trends, practices, and priorities emerging from these instruments, identifies gaps and shortcomings in the emerging legal regime, and offers recommendations for further development of the law.

As the only agency charged with enforcing the Immigration Reform and Control Act’s antidiscrimination provisions, the Immigrant and Employee Rights (“IER”) section of the Department of Justice’s Civil Rights Division plays an important role in protecting worker rights. Yet over the past decade, IER has moved from worker protection to immigration enforcement: a phenomenon this Article terms “immigration enforcement creep.” This observation is based on ten years of data collected from IER’s settlement agreements, complaints filed, and telephone interventions. The data show that rather than protect noncitizen workers from unlawful discrimination, IER has moved its focus to enforcing immigration laws against employers who hire workers on temporary work visas. IER’s enforcement choices lead to underenforcement of the antidiscrimination provisions Congress charged it with enforcing. This Article ultimately concludes that this immigration enforcement creep goes against IER’s role as a worker protection agency and suggests principles of equitable enforcement that should guide its exercise of authority instead.

With some frequency, parties agree to the particular words used in a contract they sign, only to later disagree as to the meaning of those words and their legal effect. That is, they each assent to something, but that “something” is something different for each of them. In this Article, I first categorize and trace the sources of recurring points of disagreement as a matter of language and linguistics. Then, I look at the consequences of a dispute that leads a fact finder to conclude that the parties genuinely did not agree to the same thing, which is to say that the meaning of the words they chose is indeterminant in the milieu of their “contract.” Finally, I situate the discussion in the context of dispute resolution and the procedural consequences of a finding that, in words or effect, “there was no agreement.”

Thirty-five states have enacted critical race theory bans at the level of elementary and secondary public education, and seven states have extended these to the university level. One way to resist these attempts to repress a healthy democracy by whitewashing history is through a pedagogy of antiracism, including literary works. The question of what that would look like involves questions of cultural appropriation, which occurs when one takes from another culture, such as a writer creating a narrative about a character outside of the writer’s cultural identity. This Article considers the story of Ota Benga, brought from the Congo to the United States to be exhibited at the 1904 St. Louis World’s Fair as a pygmy, and in 1906 at the Bronx Zoo. In addition to discussing Benga’s physical appropriation for the purpose of demonstrating scientific views about the racial superiority of whites, this Article considers literature about Benga and the literary canon in general, in order to explore the complicated question of when does a cultural appropriation harm the insider or marginalized community, such that the work should be deemed a failure and excluded from the literary canon. Literary works that succeed in depicting another culture are important and effective tools for a pedagogy of antiracism because they offer empathic portrayals and social critiques of racism.

This thesis examines the consequences of executive agencies' response to the increasing use of the major questions doctrine in the U.S. court system. To do so, it examines how the Environmental Protection Agency responded to the Supreme Court's rulings in Whitman v. American Trucking Associations Inc. and Michigan v. EPA. After assessing their compliance with the major questions doctrine in these cases, the thesis discusses how the continued use of the doctrine throughout the federal judiciary could impact executive branch policymaking and expand the power of the courts in the policymaking process.

This thesis critically examines the fate of administrative governance, focusing on the Supreme Court's jurisprudence on legislative delegation to the executive branch. The strengthening Major Questions Doctrine (MQD) inspires this examination, a recent legal principle that negates delegations of economically or politically significant regulatory power when Congress does not speak clearly enough to satisfy the Court. The MQD exemplifies the tension between rigid adherence to the separation of powers and the practical governance demands of an ever-changing society.

On December 8, 1987, the United States and Russia signed the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty. Since then, it has been a common misconception that this solidified the end of the Cold War and the Nuclear Arms Race. To this day, nuclear installations are plaguing bordering countries within the European Union. As a result, severe transnational issues become evident as transnational crime groups grow and technological advancements of terrorist groups continue to gain ground within the nuclear power threshold. Furthermore, countries within the Asian Peninsula and the Middle East continue to demonstrate nuclear prowess via mass media attention as a sense of glorification and societal threat. Since the 1987 Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty, four reviews of internal and external nuclear policies including the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty and the Nuclear Posture Review have been completed by the United States. The purpose of each review is to assess nuclear threats and deploy policy initiatives to prevent adversary actions. The primary focus of this study was to establish a comprehensive qualitative analysis of the movement and illegal proliferation of nuclear material. The study highlights the dangers of the proliferation of both nuclear material and nuclear weapons by organized crime syndicates and terrorist groups and correlates their effect to important United States assets. This was completed through a comprehensive document analysis of missing nuclear material in conjunction with confiscated material found to be distributed by these groups. The results of this study provide the Department of Homeland Security resources in preventing nuclear proliferation by internal and external groups in an effort to assure the protection of United States critical infrastructure and key resources.

While major advancements have been achieved in many fields utilizing artificial intelligence for a variety of tasks, some specialized areas remain difficult to tackle. The legal domain is one such area. It is often said that legal language is a dialect of English and one that requires a Law degree to be fluent in. In this work we examined parallels between software engineering and legal drafting to develop definitions for contract smells, quick indications for potential issues with legal contracts. We created an auto labelled dataset of these contracts smells using engineered prompts and demonstrated how even a small set of human labels can significantly improve auto labelling results with few shots techniques. We demonstrated using bi-directional deep learning models that these contract smells can indeed be successfully detected automatically with high accuracy after further fine tuning BERT as well as LegalBert. This work underscores the feasibility of applying advanced NLP techniques to automate aspects of legal contract review and provides a strong foundation to further develop models for this purpose.

The increasing investor and stakeholder interest in the climate change risks of firms has prompted regulatory bodies like the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) in the US to propose mandatory climate-related disclosures. As the regulations are still under development, I analyze how the fundamental concept of materiality in reporting impacts the quality of disclosures. I create the first comprehensive index of corporate climate exposure to physical, regulatory, and stakeholder risks, and demonstrate that larger companies tend to underreport sustainability information under the current definition of materiality. I, then, show that the resulting blindspots have significant consequences as evidenced by the surge in climate litigation cases in the US. After analyzing the disclosure frameworks of the European Union (EU) and the most prominent non-governmental bodies, I conclude that while the SEC proposal is a step in the right direction, it could benefit from aligning more closely with the EU's double materiality principle to ensure that climate issues are fully addressed in US corporate disclosures.

The Indian Gaming Regulatory Act (IGRA) of 1988 enabled Native American Tribes to operate high-stakes gambling casinos, leading to 244 Tribes participating in casino gaming by 2022 and generating $40.9 billion in gross gaming revenue. Tribal gaming regulators face the task of examining a range of complex factors to ensure effective regulation, which, while not aimed at profit generation, can have an indirect effect on casino profitability. This relationship underscores the shared practices between Tribal regulatory agencies and casino enterprises. Despite the critical role of these agencies, there is a noticeable gap in academic research on the regulatory practices and performance of Tribal Gaming Regulatory Agencies (TGRAs). This qualitative study investigates the factors influencing TGRA actions and practices, with the goal of supporting high-performance and quality regulatory outcomes. Adopting a qualitative approach, the study uses "Two-Eyed seeing," which combines Indigenous and Western perspectives through interviews with fourteen active Tribal Gaming Regulators (TGRs) across eight U.S. regional districts under the National Indian Gaming Commission's authority. The integration of Western academic research with Tribal regulators' insights aims to offer useful recommendations for TGRs working toward regulatory effectiveness.Keywords: Indigenous, Indian Gaming Regulatory Act, regulatory excellence, Tribal Gaming Regulator (TGR), Tribal Gaming Regulatory Agency (TGRA), Two-Eyed seeing (TES)

Participation in the workforce is a critical success factor in the treatment of an individual with a mental health condition.1 2 However, unemployment rates and the likelihood of involuntary termination are much higher among people with a mental health history relative to the overall rates for the US working-age population. Exploring the roots of managers’ fears in managing employees who have a mental health condition or are suspected of having a mental health condition in the workplace provides a baseline for future research on how to establish the highest likelihood of success in the workplace for an individual with a mental health condition. Understanding the literature on stigma, disability, management in the workplace, and legal-related decisions and articles serves as a foundation for understanding the current state manager experience. An online survey was used to gain insight into the reasons managers express hesitance to address performance issues with employees having a known or perceived mental health history. Responses to the survey revealed that the employment laws intended to protect employees with disabilities may play an inadvertent role in preventing the performance success of employees having a mental health condition. The survey results highlight the critical nature of educational interventions and practical guidance for managers. This thesis explores a manager’s role as a factor unintentionally limiting employment success for employees with a mental health condition. 1 Shazana Shahwan et al., "Employer and Co-worker Perspectives on Hiring and Working with People with Mental Health Conditions," Community Mental Health Journal 58, https://doi.org/10.1007/s10597-021- 00934-2. 2 Henry G. Harder, Shannon L. Wagner, and Joshua A. Rash, Mental Illness in the Workplace: Psychological Disability Management (Burlington, VT: Gower Publishing Company, 2014), Kindle.

Using sexual speech as its focal point, this essay explores the ambiguous legacy of cyber civil liberties and the ascent of alternative paradigms for digital freedom. From its inception, cyberlaw was characterized by a moral panic over sexual speech, pornography, and the protection of children familiar to First Amendment scholars. Important civil libertarian victories recognized that sexual speech and pornography were constitutionally protected from state intervention. The civil libertarian paradigm saw government regulation as the primary threat to free speech online, the marketplace as the more appropriate mechanism for regulating expression, and courts as the rightful arbiters of these disputes.But while civil libertarians successfully rolled back much regulatory intervention to enforce moral codes online, their successes came at a price: the legitimation of private power over speech. Though the civil libertarian tradition would theoretically protect sexual speech, it has in practice shifted the locus of power over speech from public to private hands. The result is a form of “market” ordering that is nominally private but that, in fact, reflects the entrenched power and influence of conservative cultural politics. In turn, this burgeoning private authority has prompted both political and cultural realignments (the “techlash”) and a broader turning away from the civil libertarian approach to speech. Amid attacks on women’s health, privacy, equality, and autonomy, it is tempting to look to online platforms as guardians of these values and defenders of First Amendment traditions. Yet platforms have been—and continue to be—ambivalent defenders of sexual speech. Today, private speech enforcement is far broader than what the state could accomplish through direct regulation. But in a moment of challenge to sexual freedom and equality, cyber civil libertarianism might—with renewed attention to private power—yet find another foothold.

Outlining a wide range of instructional strategies for different student audiences, Teaching International Law presents guidelines and recommendations on best practices for teaching public international law at undergraduate and postgraduate levels, as well as part of law schools and legal training programs.

European regulators, courts, and scholars are currently debating the legality of data processing for personalization purposes. Should businesses require separate consent for processing user data for personalized advertising, especially when offering free services reliant on such ads for revenue? Or is general consent for the contract enough, given personalized advertising’s role in fulfilling contractual obligations? This study investigates whether these legal distinctions reflect differences in people’s willingness to share data with businesses for personalization. Are consumers less willing to share their data for personalized advertising than for personalized services that they clearly contracted for? Does that change if the service is offered for free? Drawing from both the privacy calculus and privacy as contextual integrity theory, the hypothesis posits that individuals would be more inclined to share their data when it is used to personalize the services offered by businesses (e.g., music or news recommendations) rather than for personalized advertising, yet this difference will be smaller when services are offered for free. Using three vignette experiments involving music, shopping, and news services (N = 3,436), the study demonstrates that, contrary to predictions, most individuals are hesitant to share their data for personalization, regardless of whether it’s for advertisements or contracted services. This absence of distinction persists across both paid and free services. The findings strongly support the claim that if the law considers people’s reluctance to share personal data, both personalized advertising and personalized contracted services should require separate consent to data processing from consumers.

High recidivism rates in the United States are a well-known and disturbing problem. In this article, we explain how this problem can be mitigated in a cost-effective manner through reforms that make greater use of humane methods that help inmates rather than using more punitive measures. We focus on Inmate Assistance Programs (IAPs) adopted by many states. Some of these programs provide inmates with valuable skill sets to utilize upon their release while others are geared towards treating mental health and substance use disorder problems. IAPs are likely to reduce recidivism by lowering ex-convicts’ need to resort to crime for income as well as reducing their likelihood of committing crimes impulsively under the influence of substances and mental disturbances. However, those who oppose IAPs quickly point out that they involve significant costs, and may reduce the general deterrence effects of criminal punishment. These objections are based on simple economic theories which suggest that IAPs can reduce general deterrence by providing inmates with benefits that partially off-set the expected costs of punishment. Thus, whether IAPs can be used in a cost-effective manner is an empirical question, whose answer depends on the trade-off between its recidivism reducing effects on the one hand, and its financial and potential general deterrence costs on the other. Here, we provide the first empirical analysis of IAPs’ general deterrence effects after explaining why these effects are likely to be insignificant, or even positive, under a more complete economic theory which accounts for knowledge hurdles; discounting of future outcomes; impulsive behavior; loss aversion; and network effects. Our empirical analysis focuses on the impact of increased welfare benefits provided to certain inmates by states which chose to opt out of the 1996 federal ban under the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act (PRWORA). This act prevented drug offenders from using welfare benefits and food stamps. Using a difference-in-differences design, we find evidence supporting our theory, i.e., no statistically significant negative impact of states’ decisions to opt out of the PRWORA bans on the general deterrence of drug crimes. Subsequently, we build on prior economic theories as well as our empirical observations to explain how the criminal justice reforms that use shorter imprisonment sentences and more frequent use of IAPs can reduce crimes as well as the costs of administering the criminal justice system. The cost savings from reducing sentences for repeat offenders can be used to finance IAPs without significantly affecting deterrence due to the ineffectiveness of lengthy imprisonment sentences. Thus, our analysis suggests IAPs can, in fact, be used in a cost-effective manner to reduce crime, and are valuable and humane tools that policy makers ought to consider as alternatives to punitive measures.

Plausibility pleading requirements articulated by the U.S. Supreme Court in Bell Atlantic Corp. v. Twombly and Ashcroft v. Iqbal continue to confound even well-intentioned courts. But for courts inclined to avoid grappling with modern applications of existing law, they provide ideal camouflage: a way of relying on procedural justifications to ostensibly side-step substantive law decisions—while in effect creating de facto law that robs litigants of their day in court. These negative, unintended consequences of Twombly and Iqbal are vividly illustrated in recent federal litigation brought under the Fair Housing Act involving claims of landlord liability for tenant-on-tenant harassment.This Article demonstrates how plausibility pleading, when improperly applied in cases involving unsettled law, creates substantive law sub silentio with powerful consequences. These decisions, couched as procedural rulings, in fact impose substantive limits on the rights of both the parties and future litigants, insulate courts from potentially critical appellate review, and hinder the development of legal protections. After all, absent explicit splits in authority, the already small likelihood of attracting Supreme Court or congressional attention becomes infinitesimal. In response, this Article recommends a framework for analyzing novel legal claims that promotes the development of a more coherent body of substantive law while limiting judicial time spent on objectively meritless claims. This approach is consistent with the policies underlying the Supreme Court’s adoption of plausibility pleading and, in the specific example we address, with Congress’s broad remedial goals in enacting the Fair Housing Act.

When the Supreme Court declined definitively to block Texas’s S.B. 8, which effectively eliminated pre-enforcement federal remedies for what was then a plainly unconstitutional restriction on abortion rights, a prominent criticism was that the majority would have never tolerated the similar treatment of preferred legal protections—like gun rights. This refrain reemerged when California enacted a copycat regime for firearms regulation. This theme sounds in the deep-rooted idea that judge-made law should adhere to generality and neutrality values requiring doctrines to derive justification from controlling a meaningful class of cases ascertained by objective legal criteria.This Article is about consistency, and inconsistency, in judicial decision-making—and more specifically, about the extent to which federal courts should provide similar opportunities to obtain relief for wrongs to discrete constitutional rights. The Article explores how a commitment to generality and neutrality values can translate into a paradigm promoting transsubstantivity (meaning consistent applicability across separate substantive concerns) for constitutional remedies (meaning rules for implementing and preventing or punishing the violation of constitutional rights)—and how the Supreme Court has deviated from this paradigm. Supported by an array of examples, the Article proposes a novel framework turning on the notion that remedial inconsistency can be transparent, translucent, or opaque given the clarity of doctrinal inconsistency. Prophylactic remedial doctrines (like the Miranda-warning mandate and First Amendment overbreadth) are transparently inconsistent, for instance, because they apply differently to discrete rights on their faces. And indeterminate remedial standards (like the political question doctrine for justiciability and the “plan ofthe Convention” doctrine for state sovereign immunity) are opaquely inconsistent because discerning their variable character requires inductive analysis of actual applications.After these descriptive claims, the Article proceeds to a normative examination of how this framework could help improve judicial approaches to constitutional remedies—while recognizing that nontranssubstantive doctrines are desirable in many circumstances. Courts, for example, should work to make doctrines of opaque and translucent inconsistency more transparent so that appropriate institutional actors can more easily assess, affirm, alter, or abandon them. And judges should consider the risk of introducing unnecessary elements of opaque inconsistency before relying on overdeterminative reasoning to reach otherwise established results. Among additionalcontributions, by providing innovative tools for centering remedial consistency as an important—but not absolute—aspect of constitutional law, this Article offers a potential step toward decreasing perceptions of the Supreme Court’s work as pervasively political, thereby reinforcing its legitimacy at this time of widespread skepticism.

This qualitative dissertation was designed to examine influences which various forms of social capital have on post-secondary degree attainment of first-generation individuals who self-identify as African American men. Additionally, the sample population consisted of Black men who successfully matriculated to earn baccalaureate credentials across differing academic disciplines at a public historically White institution located in the mid-south region of the United States. The research data was extracted from one-on-one, semi-structured interviews using authentic dialogue through open-ended questions. Theoretical paradigms of the study involved a phenomenological approach and an ontological philosophical assumption, integrated with critical theory, critical race theory and social capital theory lenses. The study’s scope was constructed to analyze and interpret the contemporary lived experiences of African American collegiate men, and to extend the existing body of literature within the specified cognate areas. The findings which materialized from analyses of the participants’ data reflected 6 themes regarding the influence of social capital on degree completion of first-generation African American men. They included: (a) resourceful college relationships, (b) co-navigators of success, (c) network benefits, (d) sense of belonging, (e) mutual trust, and (f) race-centric encounters. Aims of the findings from this doctoral study were to provide salient recommendations for researchers within higher education and to underscore vital implications for secondary and post-secondary practitioners, administrators, policymakers, as well as for institutions of higher learning.

This article discusses the importance of the most common persistent identifiers in scholarly communications—the digital object identifier and the ORCID identifier—to legal scholarship. Persistent identifiers help preserve and disseminate academic content and data-driven services that leverage this information standard are now integrated into the publication process. Because legal publishers have not widely adopted persistent identifiers, the legal discipline cannot enjoy the benefits offered by this system. This article looks at barriers to implementing persistent identifiers among legal publishers and provides an anecdotal example of creating a sustainable workflow between the law library and student-run law journals.

As carbon capture and sequestration enter the mainstream, governments and developers grapple with the long-term liability for sequestered carbon. A multi-tiered framework with public–private sharing of risk can help promote the safe and timely deployment of this vital decarbonization technology.

The United States government is experiencing a reputation crisis: after decades of declining public trust, many Americans have lost confidence in the government’s capacity to perform its basic functions. While various explanations have been offered for this worrying trend, these existing accounts overlook a key factor: people are unfamiliar with the institutions that actually do most of the governing—administrative agencies—and they devalue what they cannot easily observe. The “submerged” nature of the administrative state is, we argue, a central reason for declining trust in government. This Article shows that the administrative state is systematically submerged in two ways. First, administrative agencies are constrained in their communications with the public: it is difficult for them to publicize their own accomplishments and successes due to a range of legal, political, and resource constraints. Second, agency actions are frequently opaque: it is difficult for the American public to perceive, comprehend, or trace policy outputs back to government action. Together, these factors have the effect of making Americans less aware of the work that the administrative state does, thereby undermining the public’s trust in government. The Article then argues that it is time to unsubmerge the administrative state. Doing so has the potential to rebuild trust in government by bringing administrators and their expertise to light, revealing the extent of benefits provided by agencies, and bolstering public participation in agency processes. This approach comes with potential perils, including the dangers of propaganda, skewed agency priorities, and backlash, yet these dangers are outweighed by the necessity of bringing the administrative state to light.

In 2016, the U.S. Supreme Court decided Evenwel v. Abbott, a case challenging the use of total population in state legislative apportionment as a violation of the Equal Protection Clause. The plaintiffs sued Texas, alleging that the State impermissibly diluted their voting power because they lived in areas with a high proportion of voting-age citizens. When total population was used to draw district lines, the plaintiffs had to compete with more voters to get their desired electoral outcomes than was true for voters in districts with low proportions of voting-age citizens. The Court rejected the argument, finding that states enjoy the discretion to choose among different population bases, including total population. Since the Evenwel decision, there has been ongoing interest at both the federal and state levels in using alternatives such as citizen voting-age population (CVAP) to apportion representation. So far, the lack of accurate data on citizenship status has stymied these efforts. Even so, the issues in Evenwel deserve more attention than they have received. The choice about how to count when redistricting can have significant ramifications for both partisan power and minority voices. The litigation reveals the ways in which demographic change, especially the rise of immigrant populations, has tested the efficacy of a voting rights jurisprudence that largely focuses on citizens. After describing the lawsuit and its aftermath, this Article turns to CVAP’s potential impact on political representation. The discussion first draws on the work of law professors Joseph Fishkin and Ilya Somin, both of whom conclude that alternative forms of representation significantly mitigate the shortcomings of the formal electoral process. Professor Fishkin focuses on virtual representation of those unable to vote, while Professor Somin emphasizes foot voting to express individual preferences. This Article suggests the limits of these strategies, especially for the undocumented, and then examines the issues from the perspective of immigrant integration. While most immigrants who are legally present in the United States eventually will be eligible to cast a ballot, those without legal status remain disenfranchised no matter how long they reside in and contribute to their communities. For that reason, it is important to address how a switch to CVAP will affect the political representation of minority communities with substantial numbers of immigrants. This Article’s concluding section shows how this change might violate Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act if adopted in Texas. Redrawn maps could result in voter denial if large districts in areas with high proportions of noncitizens depress minority turnout. Under a totality of the circumstances test, altered district lines would be particularly vulnerable because of Texas’s history of electoral discrimination, ongoing racial and ethnic disparities, and continuing polarization. The shift could also lead to impermissible voter dilution. Empirical data reveals that Texans remain deeply divided along both partisan and racial lines. Using CVAP instead of total population would strengthen non-Hispanic white and Republican representation while weakening Latinx and Democratic representation. Those effects would be pronounced and, therefore, should be subject to the most exacting judicial scrutiny. Otherwise, a purportedly race-neutral choice about population count could be manipulated to suppress minority voters’ influence. By considering how the exclusion of those ineligible to vote will harm the minority electorate, courts can retool and revitalize Section 2 jurisprudence to meet the challenges of a changing demography.

In recent years the theological term “pronomianism” has emerged within lay scholarship and academia. While still evolving as a concept, it is the doctrine that affirms the ongoing and universal nature of all God’s commandments, to be practised literally and non-literally (by way of principlism and paradigm), as opposed to a theological framework that designates only the “moral” as operative and those that are “civil and ceremonial”, as redundant. This dissertation contends that pronomianism is an accurate and credible doctrine of interpretation in which the Jewish and Gentile believers in Jesus Christ are to abide by all the commandments of God as taught throughout the entirety of Scripture and intended as a means of sanctification. The study will start by survey the role of the Law through Church history and evidencing pronomian practises throughout the centuries, defining pronomianism and establishing thirteen principles to guide this pro-Torah hermeneutic and methodology of interpretation, contending the ongoing observation and validity of circumcision, kashrut, and appointed festivals, while also exploring a Law-affirming interpretation of Matthew 5:17–20, the presence of the Law prior to its codification at Mt. Sinai, promoniam attributes of Scripture, and the role of the Law, in particular the appointed festivals, in a futurist reading of Ezekiel 45:9–46:15.