Supreme Court News Article
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Louis J. Virelli and Richard W. Murphy, Supreme Court News, 48 Administrative & Regulatory Law News 21 (2023)Clicking on the button will copy the full recommended citation.
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Louis J. Virelli and Richard W. Murphy, Supreme Court News, 48 Administrative & Regulatory Law News 21 (2023)Clicking on the button will copy the full recommended citation.
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Robyn Powell, Disability Reproductive Justice During COVID-19 and Beyond, 72 Am. U. L. Rev. 1821 (2023)Clicking on the button will copy the full recommended citation.
The United States is experiencing the convergence of two crises threatening the reproductive freedom of people with disabilities and other historically marginalized groups: the COVID-19 pandemic and a rising assault on reproductive rights, including the U.S. Supreme Court’s recent Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization decision. This convergence has created a perfect storm, revealing the depth of existing reproductive injustices endured by disabled people and forcing a reckoning with the consequences of permitting such inequities to persist. As such, urgent attention by activists, scholars, legal professionals, and policymakers is necessary.
In response, this Article offers a vision for addressing the deeply entrenched reproductive injustices experienced by people with disabilities throughout the COVID-19 pandemic and beyond. To do so, first, the Article explores the reproductive oppression experienced by disabled people before and during the COVID-19 pandemic, demonstrating that the current inequities are a continuation of long-lasting problems. Specifically, it examines reproductive health and healthcare inequities, barriers to information, contraception, and abortion, risks to self-determination and autonomy, and parenting challenges and threats. Thereafter, it presents disability reproductive justice and explains the significance of this jurisprudential and legislative framework for achieving reproductive freedom for people with disabilities during and after the COVID-19 pandemic. Finally, drawing from the disability reproductive justice framework, this Article concludes by suggesting legal and policy solutions to address disabled people’s immediate reproductive needs during the COVID-19 pandemic, as well as a path forward for dismantling the roots of the longstanding reproductive inequities they experience. It also considers issues requiring further attention and inquiry.
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Shannon B. Hartsfield and Anthony Palermo, When Cybersecurity Goes Wrong: Breach Notice Obligations under the Florida Information Protection Act, 97 Florida Bar Journal 20 (2023)Clicking on the button will copy the full recommended citation.
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Kristen David Adams, The Move toward an Indigenous Virgin Islands Jurisprudence: Banks in Its Second Decade, 91 Fordham L. Rev. 1601 (2023)Clicking on the button will copy the full recommended citation.
In 2011, the Supreme Court of the U.S. Virgin Islands decided Banks v. International Rental & Leasing Corp. and, with that decision, introduced a new era in Virgin Islands jurisprudence that embraced a much more active role for Virgin Islands courts and a correspondingly diminished role for the American Law Institute's restatements. This Essay examines what I will call "second-generation" decisions referencing Banks with the goal of determining whether Banks and its progeny have met, or are at least in the process of meeting, "the goal of establishing 'an indigenous Virgin Islands jurisprudence "' set by the Banks court. Ultimately, this Essay concludes that this question has now been answered in the affirmative, and strongly so.
In reaching this conclusion, this Essay opens by tracking Virgin Islands courts' increased willingness to reject and modify restatement rules, increasingly clear treatment of the restatements as secondary sources, and increased willingness to adopt minority rules when doing so is the best fit for the Virgin Islands. It continues by exploring several changes in the Banks analysis over time, several reasons why courts may decline to do a Banks analysis, and several cases that demonstrate that Banks 's meaning continues to evolve.
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Louis J. Virelli and Richard W. Murphy, Supreme Court News, 48 Administrative & Regulatory Law News 21 (2023)Clicking on the button will copy the full recommended citation.
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Ellen S. Podgor, Symposium Introduction: White Collar Crime: The Past, Present & Future, 2 Stetson Business Law Review i (2023)Clicking on the button will copy the full recommended citation.
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Theresa J. Pulley Radwan, Odd Man out: The Survival of Junior Lien Strip-offs in Chapter 13 following the Caulkett Decision, 75 Okla. L. Rev. 457 (2023)Clicking on the button will copy the full recommended citation.
The bankruptcy system seeks to strike a balance between promoting a fresh start for a debtor in financial distress and a fair and equitable distribution of the debtor's assets to its creditors.' But among creditors, equitable does not mean equal, and some creditors enjoy more protection both within and outside of the bankruptcy system. Among the most protected creditors in bankruptcy are those with a prepetition security interest in the debtor's assets, and among the most protected of these secured creditors are those with a lien on the debtor's residential property in a Chapter 13 case. Yet those creditors-ones with a residential lien in Chapter 13-may find themselves losing the protection of that lien in bankruptcy. Lien-stripping may occur in individual cases at any time, but an interest in lien-stripping particularly increases any time the housing market declines, such as when the debts secured by those homes may exceed the value of the collateral itself. While Supreme Court case law denies the ability to undo liens in any Chapter 7 case and in some Chapter 13 cases, the Court still must determine the ability to strip off "wholly unsecured" liens in Chapter 13 cases. The circuit courts overwhelmingly allow such a strip-off, leaving creditors in those cases singularly unprotected.' While previous law review articles and legal scholarship have analyzed this issue,' many did so prior to the most recent Supreme Court decision in 2015, and these articles often consider the impact on strip-off generally. This Article reconsiders the result of that decision and the impact of seemingly inconsistent results, both on Chapter 13 strip-off cases and on Chapter 20 cases," where courts frequently disagree on the appropriate result.
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Jason Bent, Compensability, Opportunism, and the Race to the Bottom: A View from (near) the Bottom, 37 A.B.A. J. Lab. & Emp. L. 221 (2023)Clicking on the button will copy the full recommended citation.
This article is a contribution to a symposium marking the fiftieth anniversary of the National Commission on State Workmen’s Compensation Laws (National Commission). My perspective on the successes and shortcomings of the National Commission is informed by my vantage point—the State of Florida, a formidable contender in the legislative “race to the bottom” that followed the early reforms spurred by the National Commission’s admirable work. The workers’ compensation regime in Florida has undergone such significant retrenchment over recent decades that at least one Florida judge and some academic observers now hold the view that it has crossed into unconstitutionality. This article, then, is a view of the state of workers’ compensation
law from near the bottom.
The article proceeds in three parts: first, a look at the “major contributing cause” rule as applied in Florida and the resulting employer opportunism that undermines worker expectations; second, an examination of how the compensability hurdles for diseases in Florida usually permit employers to escape the costs imposed by occupational diseases; and finally, an exploration of possible solutions. Ultimately, the current inadequate and inequitable system at the bottom of the workers’ compensation hierarchy needs to be addressed by state legislatures (under renewed threat of federal action, if necessary), by state judiciaries, or by tightened federal regulation of workplaces with meaningful front-end enforcement before accidents or diseases occur, such as
through effective reforms to the Occupational Safety and Health Act of 1970 (OSHA).
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Ellen S. Podgor and Wilma F. Metcalf, The Fox Guarding the Henhouse: Government Review of Attorney-Client Privileged Material in White Collar Cases, 103 B.U. L. Rev. 475 (2023)Clicking on the button will copy the full recommended citation.
Government review of privileged material seized during law office searches or following the subpoena of an attorney to a grand jury, raise genuine concerns that implicate attorney-client privilege, work product doctrine, and ethical mandates of confidentiality. Currently, the review process may be through a Department of Justice taint or filter team, a court appointed special master, or a hybrid of these two approaches. When applied to high-profile cases such as Michael Avenatti, Rudy Giuliani, and Michael Cohen, one sees an inconsistent approach that is largely controlled by the government. Problems arise not only from this lack of uniformity, but also from certain inherent deficiencies in using a taint/filter team to review privileged material.
This Article offers a reconfiguration of this review process starting with the government’s initial decision to opt for a law office search as opposed to grand jury subpoenas duces tecum. It calls for an expansion of ethical mandates to increase the neutrality of this review process, as well as instituting procedures to ensure an independent review of privileged documents that does not compromise a defendant’s right to due process and right to effective assistance of counsel. Although fortifying the judicial role in reviewing privileged materials comes with certain costs, the aggregate benefits provide a more balanced judicial process.
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Erin E. Andrews et al., Rethinking Systematic Ableism: A Response to Zagouras, Ellick & Aulisio, 18 Clinical Ethics 7 (2023)Clicking on the button will copy the full recommended citation.
This article is a response to Zagouras, Ellick, and Aulisio who presented a case study justifying the questioning of the capacity and autonomy of a young woman with a physical disability who was pregnant and facing coercive pressure to terminate.