Cornell University

Category: Print Volume 108

Political Advertising on Free Streaming Sites: Conflicts with First Amendment and Exploring Viability of Regulation

Pilar Gonzalez Navarrine

J.D., Cornell Law School, 2024; B.A., Washington University in St. Louis, 2018.

When broadcast TV first became a staple in the American household, it probably seemed unlikely that fifty years later, its hold on the American public would lessen in favor of other types of media. However, for years now, users have relied on online news—whether websites, social media sites, or streaming sites—instead of cable and broadcast…

Jan 2024

Waging War: Exercising the Right to Selfdefense in Disputed Territories

Merrick Black

B.A., Yale University, 2019; J.D., Cornell Law School, 2024; Publishing Editor, Cornell Law Review, Vol. 109.

This Note will focus on whether a state may invoke the right to self-defense in order to protect citizens living in a different territory. In my Note, I will examine the separatist regions of Abkhazia, Transnistria, and Donbas. First, I will argue that Russia’s efforts to foster sovereignty in separatist regions by creating treaties with…

Jan 2024

Arbitration Secrecy

E. Gary Spitko

Presidential Professor of Ethics and the Common Good and Professor of Law, Santa Clara University.

Parties to an arbitration contract may agree to a secrecy clause that will govern their arbitration process to protect the confdentiality of their proprietary or personal information. Of great concern, however, is that they also may use such an arbitration secrecy clause to hide their improper or discriminatory practices or defects in their products, and…

Jan 2024

Federal Rules of Private Enforcement

David L. Noll & Luke P. Norris

Professor of Law and Associate Dean for Faculty Research and Development, Rutgers Law School & Associate Professor of Law, University of Richmond School of Law.

The Federal Rules of Civil Procedure were made for a different world. Fast approaching their hundredth anniversary, the Rules reflect the state of litigation in the first few decades of the twentieth century and the then-prevailing distinction between “substantive” rights and the “procedure” used to adjudicate them. The role of procedure, the rulemakers believed, was…

Jan 2024

The Sea Corporation

Robert Anderson

Professor of Law, University of Arkansas School of Law.

Over the past two centuries the corporation has emerged from obscurity to become the dominant form of business organization in the United States, accounting for more productive assets than all other business forms combined. Yet the corporation is relatively young for a legal institution of such economic importance. As late as the middle of the…

Jan 2024

How to Get Away with Murder: The Norwegian Approach

Elena Smalline

J.D., Cornell Law School, 2023; B.S. (Business Management and Psychological Sciences), Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, 2020.

What does it mean for one to be insane enough to not be held responsible for a criminal act one committed? The answer to this question varies across differing eras, cultures, countries, and laws. If one were to ask English legal-scholar Sir Matthew Hale, he would assert that to be insane enough to not be…

Nov 2023

Googling, Profiling, and Drafting a “Fantasy Team” of Jurors: Contextualizing Online Investigations into Jurors and Venirepersons Within Centurues of Analog Litigation Practices

Alison Draikiwicz

J.D., Cornell Law School, 2023; B.A., Wellesley College, 2018.

In recent years, judges and commentators have sounded the alarm on litigators’ increasingly extensive research into jurors’ and venirepersons’ online presences. Despite critics’ ethical and practical concerns, the age of “voir google” continues to thrive and evolve. In this Note, I seek to contextualize the era of online investigations within the broader era of American…

Nov 2023

The Unique Appearance of Corruption in Personal Loan Repayments

John J. Martin

Research Assistant Professor of Law, University of Virginia School of Law.

Under U.S. campaign finance jurisprudence, electoral candidates have the right to self-fund their campaigns without limitation. The majority of self-funded candidates do so by issuing personal loans—i.e., personal money given to their campaign with the expectation of having it paid back. Many such candidates rely on outside contributions to help repay these personal loans, leaving…

Nov 2023

The Constitutional Limits of Criminal Supervision

Eric S. Fish

Acting Professor of Law, University of California at Davis.

Nearly four million people are under criminal supervision in the United States. Most are on probation or parole. They can be sent to prison if a judge concludes that they violated the terms of their supervision. When that happens, there is no right to a jury trial. The violation only needs to be proven to…

Nov 2023

The Independent Agency Myth

Neal Devins & David E. Lewis

Sandra Day O’Connor Professor of Law and Professor of Government, College of William and Mary & Rebecca Webb Wilson University Distinguished Professor, Vanderbilt University.

Republicans and Democrats are fighting the wrong fight over independent agencies. Republicans are wrong to see independent agencies as anathema to hierarchical presidential control of the administrative state. Democrats are likewise wrong to reflexively defend independent agency expertise and influence. Supreme Court Justices also need to break free from this trap; the ongoing struggle over…

Nov 2023

Where is Statutory Law?

Jesse M. Cross

Associate Professor, University of South Carolina School of Law.

Textualism has become the ascendant method of statutory interpretation on the Court, and it is rapidly reshaping the entire judiciary. Yet we still do not understand the “text” in textualism. This is part of a broader failure in legislative studies: we lack a basic understanding of the texts that comprise our statutory law. As this…

Sep 2023

Building Better Species: Assisted Evolution, Genetic Engineering, and the Endangered Species Act

John A. Erwin

Assistant Professor at Florida International University College of Law.

On December 10, 2020, Elizabeth Ann, a black-footed ferret, was born. This was a momentous occasion, as it was the first time a native species listed under the Endangered Species Act (“ESA”) had been cloned. This is the first major attempt to use biotechnology to aid in the conservation of an endangered species, but it…

Sep 2023

Vigilante Federalism

Jon D. Michaels & David L. Noll

Professor of Law, UCLA School of law & Associate Dean for Faculty Research and Development and Professor of Law, Rutgers Law School.

In battles over abortion, religion, sexuality, gender, and race, state legislatures are mass producing a new weapon. From Texas’s S.B. 8 to book bans and a flurry of bills empowering parents to sue schools that acknowledge LGBTQ+ identities or implement anti-racist curricula, state legislatures are enacting laws that call on private parties—and sometimes only private…

Sep 2023

A Site to Save a Life: The Case for Lobbying Congress to Restrict the Department of Justice from Targeting Supervised Drug Consumption Sites

Trevor Thompson

J.D., Cornell Law School 2022; B.A. Columbia University, 2018.

This Note will begin with an overview of fentanyl’s role in exacerbating the opioid crisis that has now claimed over a million American lives. It will then offer a partial explanation for why the crisis has gotten worse over the past few years: the Food and Drug Administration’s (“FDA”) refusal to initiate a prescription to…

Sep 2023

Tripping on Patent Hurdles: Exploring the Legal and Policy Implications of Psilocybin Patents

Jennifer S. Seidman

J.D., Cornell Law School, 2023; B.S. in Public Health, B.A. in Chemistry, University at Buffalo, 2020.

Ask any hippie and they will tell you about the euphoric and therapeutic properties of psychedelic “magic” mushrooms (psilocybin). While the therapeutic effects of psilocybin have been long known among indigenous and underground practices, the medicalization of psilocybin therapy is a new phenomenon. Psilocybin poses a unique and promising solution for the growing mental illness…

Jul 2023

Pharmaceutical Patent Protection Beyond the Twenty-Year Statutory Term

M. Houston Brown, Jr.

J.D., Cornell Law School, 2023; B.A. in Neuroscience and Behavior, Columbia University, 2019.

Although many life-saving pharmaceuticals on the market have already seen their patents expire, there are countless life-saving pharmaceuticals that still have patent protection, and many more are currently or will be seeking patent protection. Some of these pharmaceutical inventions still have patent protection despite the initial patents having been filed as far back as 1985….

Jul 2023

Theorizing Corroboration

Maggie Wittlin

Associate Professor, Fordham Law School

A child makes an out-of-court statement accusing an adult of abuse. That statement is important proof, but it also presents serious reliability concerns. When deciding whether it is sufficiently reliable to be admitted, should a court consider whether the child’s statement is corroborated—whether, for example, there is medical evidence of abuse? More broadly, should courts…

Jul 2023

International Law in the Boardroom

Kishanthi Parella,

Professor, Washing & Lee University School of Law.

Conventional wisdom expects that international law will proceed through a “state pathway” before regulating corporations: it binds national governments that then bind corporations. But recent corporate practices confound this story. American corporations complied with international laws even when the state pathway broke down. This unexpected compliance leads to three questions: How did corporations comply? Why…

Jul 2023

The Private Enforcement of National Security

Maryam Jamshidi

Associate Professor of Law, University of Colorado Law School.

The private enforcement of public law is a central feature of the American administrative state. As various scholars have argued, the federal government depends upon private parties to enforce public laws through litigation in order to achieve the government’s regulatory objectives. This scholarship has, however, largely overlooked the phenomenon of private enforcement in the national…

Jul 2023

Religious or Not Religious? That Is Not the Establishment Clause Question

Ashley Stamegna
J.D. Candidate, Cornell Law School, 2022.

While the Supreme Court struggles to find solid footing for its Establishment Clause jurisprudence, it is rare that attention is given to this particular inconsistency. Instead, courts in the Establishment Clause context have done exactly what they condemn in the free-exercise context: evaluate the veracity of a claimant’s sincere beliefs. This Note attempts to reconcile…

Jun 2023

Political and Judicial Incorrectness: The Case for Modifying the Arlington Heights Test to Disincentivize Discriminatory Appeals

Steven D. Mirsen
J.D. Candidate, Cornell Law School, 2023.

Throughout history, discriminatory appeals to the public have been exploited by demagogues and dictators in order to concentrate power predicated on prejudice. As recent events have revealed, creating scapegoats, cultivating resentment, and capitalizing on fear and hate all remain unfortunately familiar marks on the political roadmap. Discriminatory appeals, particularly those rooted in Islamophobia, remain a…

Jun 2023

Property in Wolves

Jack H.L. Whiteley
Teaching Fellow & Supervisory Attorney, Georgetown University Law Center; Associate Professor of Law Designate, University of Minnesota Law School.

From colonial times until the mid-twentieth century, governments paid bounties to extirpate wolves, mountain lions, and other ecologically important wild animals. Clearing the wild was a sustained legislative project. I argue that these bounty statutes have implications for the history and theory of property. The statutes, in their intent and effect, selected among land uses….

Jun 2023

Miscarriage of Justice: Early Pregnancy Loss and the Limits of U.S. Employment Law

Laura T. Kessler
S.J. Quinney Endowed Chair and Professor of Law, University of Utah, S.J. Quinney College of Law.

This Article explores judicial responses to miscarriage under federal employment law in the United States. Miscarriage is a common experience. Of confirmed pregnancies, about 15% will end in miscarriage; almost half of all women who have given birth have suffered a miscarriage. Yet, this experience slips through the cracks of every major federal employment law…

Jun 2023

Addiction and Liberty

Matthew B. Lawrence

Associate Professor of Law, Emory Law; Affiliate Faculty, Harvard Law School, Petrie-Flom Center for Health Law Policy, Bioethics, and Biotechnology.

This Article explores the interaction between addiction and liberty and identifies a firm legal basis for recognition of a fundamental constitutional right to freedom from addiction. Government interferes with freedom from addiction when it causes addiction or restricts addiction treatment, and government may protect freedom from addiction through legislation empowering individuals against private actors’ efforts…

Apr 2023

Municipal Failures

Nancy Leong

William M. Beaney Memorial Research Chair and Professor of Law, University of Denver Sturm College of Law.

Calls for reforming the civil rights enforcement regime often focus on individual government officers. Recent years have brought demands to abolish qualified immunity—a defense that protects individual officers from liability so long as they did not violate clearly established law—and to end indemnification—a practice in which government employers satisfy judgments against their employees. This Article…

Apr 2023

Unequal Protection: Challenges to Serious Mental Illness Exemptions from the Death Penalty

Claire M. Piorkowski

J.D. Candidate, Cornell Law School, 2023; B.A. in Political Science, University of Cincinnati, 2020.

This Note explores the contention that Ohio House Bill 136 and similar proposed bills with a diagnosis-based categorical approach to death penalty exemptions violate seriously mentally ill individuals’ rights under the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment by limiting the scope of eligible mental illnesses to a narrow subset of specified disorders. This Note…

Apr 2023

Politicization of State Attorneys General: How Partisanship is Changing the Role for the Worse

Marissa A. Smith

J.D. Cornell Law School; B.S. University of Texas at Austin.

The position of State AG has long been said to stand for ‘Aspiring Governor’ rather than Attorney General. It is remarkable how the significance of that joke has changed as the role has become one of the most influential in the country.2 What began as insolent mockery is now a fearsome truth. State attorneys general…

Apr 2023

If We Build It, Will They Legislate? Empirically Testing the Potential Testing the Potential of the Nondelegation Doctrine to Curb Congressional “Abdication”

Daniel E. Walters & Elliot Ash

Associate Professor of Law, Texas A&M University School of Law & Assistant Professor, Law, Economics, and Data Science, ETH Zurich.

A widely held view for why the Supreme Court would be right to revive the nondelegation doctrine is that Congress has perverse incentives to abdicate its legislative role and evade accountability through the use of delegations (either expressly delineated or implied through statutory imprecision), and that enforcement of the nondelegation doctrine would correct for those…

Apr 2023

Privacy Pretexts

Rory Van Loo

Boston University School of Law and Affiliated Fellow, Yale Law School Information Society Project

Data privacy’s ethos lies in protecting the individual from institutions. Increasingly, however, institutions are deploying privacy arguments in ways that harm individuals. Tech companies like Amazon, Meta (Facebook), and Alphabet (Google) wall off information from competitors in the name of privacy. Financial institutions under investigation justify withholding files from the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau by…

Mar 2023

The Borderline of Crime: The Case for Reevaluating United States v. Bowman & Vigorously Applying the Presumption Against Extraterritoriality to Federal Criminal Statutes

Danielle T. Dominguez

J.D., Cornell Law School, 2023; B.A., Claremont McKenna College, 2019

In Part I, this Note will provide background information on extraterritoriality. This Note will define extraterritoriality and expand upon the crucial role of the presumption against extraterritoriality in determining the jurisdictional reach of federal statutes. This Note will also expand on the unique history of extraterritoriality in federal statutory jurisprudence. Furthermore, this Note will identify…

Mar 2023