By Taylor Mayhall. Full text here. More than fifty U.S. coal mining companies have gone bankrupt since 2012. When a coal mining company goes bankrupt, its ability to clean up, or reclaim, its mines becomes questionable, and the burden may end up falling on taxpayers. This Note addresses the struggle to hold U.S. coal mining…

By Trevor Matthews. Full text here. Can school districts force students with disabilities to attend schools that segregate them from their peers without disabilities? Case law resulting from federal special education law, particularly the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA), has generally indicated that the answer to this question is yes. In fact, in 2015, almost…

By Devin T. Driscoll. Full text here. This Note explores the creation of so-called problem-solving courts, including state drug courts and federal reentry courts, as well as the future of this kind of reform within the federal criminal justice system. It traces the development of problem-solving courts, beginning first with state drug courts in the…

By Claire Williams. Full text here. Access to housing has been a central issue throughout much of the United States’ history. Both government and private actors furthered and reinforced segregated and substandard housing for people of color. From the time of its passage, the Fair Housing Act and antidiscrimination litigation has been an important tool for…

By Lauren Clatch. Full text here. Plea bargaining is a central feature of the American criminal justice system. Traditional legal scholarship on plea bargaining, influenced by the subdiscipline of law and economics, assumes that criminal defendants simply compare the two criminal sanctions being offered—the criminal charge and sentence in the plea bargain versus the criminal charge…

By Emily C. Atmore. Full text here. Would you rather protect employee rights or stimulate economic growth? It seems like an impossible choice. This is a dichotomy that has been debated by scholars and lawmakers throughout history. Most recently, this issue has arisen in the context of the so-called gig economy. The gig economy uniquely challenges…

By Franklin R. Guenthner. Full text here. When state governments overrule local ordinances, but do not replace those local laws with affirmative statewide policies, does that constitute a valid act of city-state preemption? From North Carolina, where the passage of the now infamous (and recently repealed) HB2 overruled Charlotte’s LGBT civil protections; to Arizona, where…

By Anabel Cassady. Full text here. Full text here. Blended sentencing laws allow judges to impose either or both a juvenile court disposition and an adult criminal court sentence on certain juvenile offenders. Minnesota’s blended sentencing statute, known as Extended Jurisdiction Juvenile (EJJ), was enacted in 1995 with the intention of giving juveniles “one last chance…

By Amanda McAllister. Full text here. As we approach the impending technological revolution of the proliferation of robots and weapons on the spectrum of autonomy, we run the risk of being “one technology behind” in anticipating the changing legal landscape in the next season of human-technology interaction. Specifically, the development and emergence of autonomous robots and…

By Julia Glen. Full text here. Women hold far fewer seats on U.S. corporate executive boards than men, despite composing nearly half of the workforce. In 2015, women held only 16.5% of the top five executive board positions in businesses on the S&P 500, and fourteen percent of all executive board positions. Internationally, governments are instituting…