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D. Benjamin Barros et al., Rethinking Generative AI’s Performance on the Bar Exam and on Law School Exams, 5 Stetson Business Law Review 1 (2025)Clicking on the button will copy the full recommended citation.
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Ellen S. Podgor, Prosecutorial Discretion Is Grounded in Law, 30 Berkeley Journal of Criminal Law 225 (2025)Clicking on the button will copy the full recommended citation.
This Essay examines prosecutorial discretion by building on DA Kimberly Foxx's discussion of who holds this power, while adding critical questions about what discretion actually is and when it crosses into misconduct. Argued here is that while prosecutors are entitled to significant discretionary authority grounded in law, this discretion is not unlimited—prosecutors are not above the law. The fundamental challenge lies in distinguishing between lawful prosecutorial discretion and unlawful prosecutorial misconduct, both of which are defined by law.
The essay explores the expansive powers granted to prosecutors, with particular emphasis on their authority to bring criminal charges—a power with a unique constitutional status that remains unchecked by many constitutional protections extended to defendants, particularly the grand jury requirement which has never been incorporated to apply to the states. While acknowledging that prosecutorial powers are extremely broad, the author's core argument is that law provides clear boundaries distinguishing legitimate discretionary power from misconduct. Recognizing these limits does not infringe on prosecutors' rightful authority; rather, it establishes the legal framework within which their discretion properly operates.
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Grant Christensen and Anne E. Mullins, The Lone Dissent, 82 Wash. & Lee L. Rev. 1219 (2025)Clicking on the button will copy the full recommended citation.
What can be learned when a Supreme Court justice decides to write a lone dissent? There exists a powerful set of incentives for Supreme Court opinions to achieve consensus. Although closely divided cases grab news headlines, unanimous opinions are actually the most commonly issued judicial alignment, and cases in which a single justice dissents are the most unlikely judicial outcome. Despite voluminous academic discussion of judicial behavior, no legal scholarship has focused upon the lone dissent. This Article is designed to insert consideration of lone dissenting opinions into the broader discussion of judicial behavior.
Looking at the set of Supreme Court opinions in which there is a lone dissent from the appointment of Chief Justice Vinson in 1946 through the end of the 2022-23 term, we explain how lone dissents occur in cases of particular salience to the dissenting justice and where the stakes of the litigation create an incentive for the dissenting justice to risk institutional opprobrium in order to insert their counter interpretation of the law into the written record. This Article then goes even deeper, examining the moment a justice decides to issue a lone dissent for the first time. We conclude that these initial lone dissents are crucially important datapoints to explain a justice’s subsequent jurisprudence and judicial identity. The first lone dissent is carefully selected by each justice to signal support for important constituencies, and to definitively define the justice who must write in opposition to all of their colleagues for the first time. The examination of a justice’s legal philosophy and broader jurisprudence is incomplete without an examination of this one seminal moment of judicial behavior.
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Linda S. Anderson, Balancing Acts: Student Rights, Parental Authority, and State Interests in Modern Sex Education, 27 Marq. Ben. & Soc. Welfare L. Rev. 1 (2025)Clicking on the button will copy the full recommended citation.
The article explores the complex interplay between parental rights, state authority, and student interests in the context of sex education in American public schools. It highlights the ongoing tension between abstinence-only and comprehensive sex education approaches, emphasizing the need for a student-centric framework that balances the rights and responsibilities of all stakeholders. The current legal landscape is examined through historical development, seminal court decisions, and recent legislative trends. Empirical evidence is presented to demonstrate the effectiveness of comprehensive
sex education in promoting public health and supporting adolescents' development. The article advocates for a framework that incorporates student autonomy, age-appropriate content, and comprehensive teacher training, while addressing practical considerations such as content standards and opt-out provisions. Through this analysis, the article aims to advance understanding of sex education law and advocate for policies that better serve students' health and well-being.
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Darryl Wilson, Keeping Current – Property, 39 Probate and Property 18 (2025)Clicking on the button will copy the full recommended citation.
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Emerson Wright, Gender Affirming Rhetoric, 15 Tennessee Journal of Race, Gender, & Social Justice 45 (2025)Clicking on the button will copy the full recommended citation.
During the runup to the 2024 election, virtually every person who watched an American football game saw an advertisement alleging that Kamala Harris was 'for they/them," while "President Trump is for you." Candidates and interest groups spent more than $200 million on ads shaping and preying on public perception of trans people, and Democrats wasted no time blaming Kamala Harris's electoral loss on messaging around trans issues. On the heels of a contentious election that relied heavily on this type of weaponized culture war messaging, misleading and hostile discourse about transgender people and the issues they face is hard to escape.
Transphobic debates dominate the public sphere, often fueled by cisgender anxious compulsions to categorize others according to heteronormative gender roles. Even the Olympics were marred by a transphobic harassment campaign against a gold medalist who is not in fact transgender. More broadly, concerns about slippery slopes and far-reaching hypotheticals have birthed a moral panic about the ways trans people disrupt the cultural order, and courts have been complicit in reinforcing traditional cisgender norms even when it causes real harm to trans people.
The U.S. legal system uses traditional legal rhetoric as the generally accepted form of logical reasoning, a form of reasoning that relies heavily on
categories and syllogistic reasoning to reinforce heteronormative social roles and hierarchies. Traditional legal rhetoric ratifies hate-motivated marginalization of peoples who defy, transcend, resist, or reject classification according to traditional cisgender norms. For example, restrictions and bans on gender affirming healthcare effectively relegate trans folks to a permanent lower caste by not only denying them essential medical care, but also by signaling that they are unworthy of recognition, support, or dignity, thereby reinforcing their systemic marginalization.
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Theresa J. Pulley Radwan, Get Out the Vote: Reconciling the Treatment of Nonvoting Creditor Classes in Chapter 11 Bankruptcy Cases, 99 American Bankruptcy Law Journal 532 (2025)Clicking on the button will copy the full recommended citation.
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Ashley Krenelka Chase, A Knight in Shining Nascency: Under-the-Radar Platforms as a Solution to Access to Justice for Incarcerated Litigants, Va. L. & Bus. Rev. 347 (2025)Clicking on the button will copy the full recommended citation.
Access to justice in the criminal legal system and antitrust laws are inextricably intertwined, though not obviously so. But when major corporations behave in a way that creates a moat between incarcerated people and the laws they need to experience access to justice, the relationship of the two cannot be ignored. The "Curse of Bigness" in the legal information industry-the idea that corporations can get too big to collapse and then fail to benefit the market in a meaningful way-widens that moat and demonstrates that the companies that provide legal research services to prisons present both a social and industrial menace. This menace is damaging to all who seek legal information but is particularly and uniquely problematic when looking through the lens of access to justice for incarcerated litigants, individuals whose access to legal information is directly tied to their constitutional rights, and whose access is controlled by a massive monopsony in the industry: the prisons, themselves.
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Anne E. Mullins, Beyond the First Draft (Review), 29 Legal Writing 313 (2025)Clicking on the button will copy the full recommended citation.
Teaching grammar and style in the legal writing classroom is back in vogue. Grammar and style are foundational to legal rhetoric because they are part of the intentional meaning-making that is legal writing. Moreover, grammar and style come together to form the writer's authorial voice. Developing a voice is one of the most difficult challenges for novice writers-and it is particularly difficult for those who have little experience using formal written English and those who
have deep experience writing in a field that has very different audience expectations. Targeted grammar and style instruction helps students master the fundamentals, write what they mean, and do it in a way that is effective and expected in the profession. The second edition of Megan McAlpin's Beyond the First Draft is an effective tool to teach grammar and style with a rhetorical approach.
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Darryl Wilson, Keeping Current – Property, 39 Probate and Property 22 (2025)Clicking on the button will copy the full recommended citation.