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Volume 109 – Issue 3

Navigating College Athlete Endorsements Around School Sponsorships

By Campbell Sode. Full Text. Colleges generally resist formal employment relationships with their athletes. But pending NCAA rules that will allow college athletes to solicit third-party endorsements are a game-changer. College athletic departments have lucrative partnerships with companies like Nike. These school sponsors derive significant intrinsic value from the fact that millions of fans will…

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Legal Writing’s Harmful Psyche

By Kevin Bennardo. Full Text. This essay argues that many in the legal writing discipline view themselves in a way that is harmful to the discipline’s success. First, the essay establishes that many legal writing professors view themselves as victims of oppression within the legal academy. Second, it relies on social psychology research to demonstrate…

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Reconstruction in Legal Theory

By George Rutherglen. Full Text. This essay examines the well-known difficulties encountered by legal theorists in offering a justification for Brown v. Board of Education in the immediate aftermath of the decision. It locates these difficulties in the inadequacy of legal theory at the time, which had taken a turn away from normative principles towards…

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Case-Linked Jurisdiction and Busybody States

By Howard M. Erichson, John C.P. Goldberg, and Benjamin C. Zipursky. Full Text. Abstract:  Beginning with Justice Ginsburg’s 2011 opinion in the Goodyear case—and echoed in Justice Thomas’s 2014 opinion in Walden v. Fiore and Justice Alito’s 2017 opinion in Bristol-Myers Squibb v. Superior Court—the Supreme Court has suggested that the distinctiveness of specific personal…

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Nonessential Businesses and Liability Waivers in the Time of COVID-19

By Zahra Takhshid. Full Text. Abstract: States are gradually reopening after months of lockdown. However, the risk of exposure to the deadly COVID-19 virus still remains. While states would like to have the economy up and running, the price that small businesses may be forced to pay following possible coronavirus personal injury lawsuits may drive…

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Bostock, LGBT Discrimination, and the Subtractive Moves

By Andrew Koppelman. Full Text. Abstract: In Bostock v. Clayton County, the Supreme Court held that Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which prohibits sex discrimination in employment, covers discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation and gender identity.  The dissenting Justices, following the reasoning of several Court of Appeals judges, embraced…

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Frank Zimring Responds

By Franklin Zimring. Full Text. This short Essay is a summary of my reply to the presentations at the Minnesota Law Review’s symposium in November of 2019 in Minneapolis, titled “Mass Incarceration as a Chronic Condition: Diagnosis, Prognosis, and Treatment.” I outline the four principal sections of my forthcoming book’s analysis and then discuss and…

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Can Sentencing Guidelines Commissions Help States Substantially Reduce Mass Incarceration?

By Richard S. Frase. Full Text. In his forthcoming book, The Insidious Momentum of Mass Incarceration, Franklin Zimring argues that sentencing guidelines commissions, of the kind that exist in Minnesota and several other states, could help states roll back the massive increases in prison populations that began in the mid-1970s. Professor Zimring proposes to achieve…

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Prison-Release Reform and American Decarceration

By Kevin Reitz. Full Text. Parole boards and other officials with prison-release discretion have enormous statutory power over the size of prison populations in their jurisdictions. In discussions of American mass incarceration and potential decarceration strategies for the future, however, these officials are rarely mentioned. Indeed, little is known about how they do their work…

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The Categorical Imperative as a Decarceral Agenda

By Jessica M. Eaglin. Full Text. Despite recent modest reductions in state prison populations, Franklin Zimring argues in his forthcoming book that mass incarceration remains persistent and intractable. As a path forward, Zimring urges states to adopt pragmatic, structural reforms that incentivize the reduction of prison populations through a “categorical imperative,” meaning, by identifying subcategories…

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