Behind the Binary Bars: A Critique of Prison Placement Policies for Transgender, Non-Binary, and Gender Non-Conforming Prisoners
By Jessica Szuminski. Full Text. To help us more easily understand the world, society relies on binary concepts to create a sense of order: left or right, up or down, this or that. But when relying on binary concepts, the other available options often are neglected: not left or right, but forward; not up or…
Continue ReadingMinnesota’s Digital Divide: How Minnesota Can Replicate the Rural Electrification Act to Deliver Rural Broadband
By Abby Oakland. Full Text. For disadvantaged communities, education can be the silver bullet. It can equip and empower students to rise above their economic station. It can level the playing field. It can provide opportunity absent in their current circumstances. It can open doors that would otherwise remain closed. Recognizing this power, Minnesota’s Constitution…
Continue ReadingThe Advent of Effortless Expression: An Examination of the Copyrightability of BCI-Encoded Brain Signals
By Jonathan Baker. Full Text. This Note anticipates the development and deployment of brain-computer interfaces (BCIs) and attempts to reconcile this technology’s implications with modern U.S. copyright doctrine. Although researchers and practitioners have primarily used BCIs to restore motor function to and improve the quality of life for people severely disabled by neuromuscular impairments, the…
Continue ReadingTransactional Scripts in Contract Stacks
By Shaanan Cohney and David A. Hoffman. Full Text. In conventional transactions, written contracts usually memorialize the terms of the commercial exchange. For deals in which some of the goods being transferred and the forum for the trade are digitized—as in the case of cryptocurrencies—parties may use computer code rather than a written contract to…
Continue ReadingCore Criminal Procedure
By Steven Arrigg Koh. Full Text. Constitutional criminal procedural rights are familiar to contemporary criminal law scholars and practitioners alike. But today, U.S. criminal justice may diverge substantially from its centuries-old framework when all three branches recognize only a core set of inviolable rights, implicitly or explicitly discarding others. This criminal procedural line drawing takes…
Continue ReadingParental Autonomy over Prenatal End-of-Life Decisions
By Greer Donley. Full Text. When parents learn that their potential child has a life-limiting, often devastating, prenatal diagnosis, they are faced with the first (and perhaps, only) healthcare decisions they will make for their child. Many choose to terminate the pregnancy because they believe it is in their potential child’s best interest to avoid…
Continue ReadingNo Privilege to Pollute: Expanding the Crime-Fraud Exception to the Attorney-Client Privilege
By Tom Lininger. Full Text. This Article argues that a venerable rule of evidence—the attorney-client privilege—is due for reform. In particular, I propose the expansion of the crime-fraud exception to the attorney-client privilege. The exception presently only applies to crimes and civil frauds. I argue that the exception should extend to certain violations of civil…
Continue ReadingRestoring ALJ Independence
By Richard E. Levy and Robert L. Glicksman. Full Text. Institutional structures that protect the impartiality of federal agency adjudicators and insulate them from undue political pressure are essential to the constitutional legitimacy of agency adjudication. Those structures are crumbling, leaving the administrative law judges (ALJs) who conduct formal adjudications for the federal government increasingly…
Continue ReadingFun with Reverse Ejusdem Generis
By Jay Wexler. Full Text. In the canon of statutory construction canons, perhaps no canon is more canonical than the canon known as ejusdem generis. This canon, which translates as “of the same kind,” states that when a statute includes a list of terms and a catch-all phrase, the set of items covered by the…
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