Note: Left To Languish: The Importance of Expanding the Due Process Rights of Immigration Detainees
Note: Left To Languish: The Importance of Expanding the Due Process Rights of Immigration Detainees By Maisie A. Baldwin. Full text here. Modern immigration detention in the United States is nearly indistinguishable from criminal detention—and often, the same facilities are used to house immigration and criminal detainees side by side. Detainees in both systems may…
Continue ReadingReclaiming Reclamation: Rule Changes Proposed To Ensure Coal Companies Fund Mandatory Clean-Ups
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…
Continue ReadingThe Most Integrated Setting: Olmstead, Fry, and Segregated Public Schools for Students with Disabilities
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…
Continue ReadingSolving the Problem of Problem-Solving Justice: Rebalancing Federal Court Investment in Reentry and Pretrial Diversion Programs
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…
Continue ReadingNote: Inclusive Communities and Robust Causality: The Constant Struggle to Balance Access to the Courts with Protection for Defendants
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…
Continue ReadingNote: Shining a Light on the Shadow-of-Trial Model: A Bridge Between Discounting and Plea Bargaining
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…
Continue ReadingNote: Killing the Goose that Laid the Golden Egg: Outdated Employment Laws Are Destroying the Gig Economy
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…
Continue ReadingNote: Reconsidering Home Rule and City-State Preemption in Abandoned Fields of Law
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…
Continue ReadingNote: The Juvenile Ultimatum: Reframing Blended Sentencing Laws to Ensure Juveniles Receive a Genuine "One Last Chance at Success"
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…
Continue ReadingNote: Stranger than Science Fiction: The Rise of A.I. Interrogation in the Dawn of Autonomous Robots and the Need for an Additional Protocol to the U.N. Convention Against Torture
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…
Continue Reading