The American Bar Association requires law schools to move beyond the traditional, single final exam and incorporate more assessment. One method of assessment law professors may want to use is live critique. Through live critique, the professor examines students’ work for the first time in front of students and reacts to it live. This article details the benefits of live critique for law students, which include enhanced learning, increased confidence, and practice-ready skills. It also describes how professors can boost the effectiveness and efficiency of their feedback by delivering it live. Finally, the article provides suggestions for professors in overcoming potential challenges and provides step-by-step guidance on how to integrate live critique into any law school course.
Category: Issue 1
Sports gambling is inherently a states’ rights issue, as recognized by the United States Supreme Court in recent pivotal cases, such as the 2018 seminal case, Murphy v. NCAA. In Murphy, the Court found that a provision in Professional and Amateur Sports Protection Act (PASPA), a federal law regulating state sports gambling, that restricted a state’s ability to repeal its own sports betting legislation unconstitutionally commandeered state legislatures. Following this 2018 ruling, and the addition of President Trump appointed justices, the Court has consistently reaffirmed state’s rights, from employment contracts to sports gambling. As states, voters, and sports organizations, like the NCAA and the NFL, push to legalize sports betting, especially with the rise of Daily Fantasy Sports, more legal challenges to PASPA will inevitably arise. So, with President Trump’s states’ rights bias and its reflection in his appointments to the Supreme Court, the end of PASPA is near and states’ rights will ultimately win.
For statists, the government is not only conceptualized independently of and/or before experience, but also apart from experience, or a priori. When problems are not solved through the state, then more government intervention is logically required, because it is understood by statists as the solution. Since the state is not blamed for the failures (because it is said to be the solution for the failures), statism results in a logical fallacy. We intend to present and refute such fallacy in the present work.
Futerman and Block perform an important service by putting a name—a priori statism—to the unreasoning attachment so many people feel for socialism, the only system of political economy that has been conclusively refuted in practice. They set out their own doctrine in brisk, manifesto-like fashion, which means that they inevitably assert more than they argue. Hence, if Futerman and Block wish to convince even someone who, like the author of this response, is among the freest of free marketeers, they will have to do much more than they do here. In particular, they will have engage seriously with the fact that the market and the government, as fundamentally different social institutions, face very different schedules of transactions costs. Thus, with respect to some value-producing transactions, it is very likely that the government’s costs are lower, which implies that, in a limited range of cases, governmental intervention in the market is efficient. If they wish to make their moral arguments persuasive, Futerman and Block need to clarify how they understand some key moral terms. It may be that, once they do so, whatever plausibility their more radical claims possess will evaporate.
The ability to engender trust is a critical skill for mediators, especially when conducting online dispute resolution. The purpose of this empirical research is to examine the extent to which parties can trust a mediator when communicating in a video- collaborated environment known as telepresence. Will parties who have never met a mediator prior to the mediation and who communicate solely using telepresence, find the mediator to be trustworthy and trust the mediator to the same extent as those parties who communicate face-to-face with the mediator? Will factors such as age, gender, and educational level significantly affect an individual’s ability to trust a mediator? Does an individual’s familiarity with, and use of, a video-collaborated environment such as Skype, FaceTime or a similar platform affect an individual’s ability to trust a mediator? What is the impact of an individual’s predisposition to trust? We analyzed data from a small-scale experimental study (N=59), and in this research project conclude that there is no statistically significant difference in the extent to which participants trust a mediator in all contexts and factors. The same result applies to trustworthiness except for one exception regarding the effect of a pre-disposition to trust.
This Article provides an in-depth look at the act of state doctrine and its application in Republic of Ecuador v. Dassum. Specifically, the Author explains the doctrine and its underlying purposes, which includes avoiding friction between the executive branch of the United States and foreign nations, encouraging settlement of disputes outside of the judiciary, promoting predictability in transnational transactions, and avoiding potential interference with the executive branch’s interests in foreign relations. Further, the Author argues that the preservation of amicable diplomatic relations between the United States and foreign sovereign states requires that particular caution be taken with lawsuits filed within the jurisdiction of the United States against or by these sovereign states as the doctrine’s principle consideration is international comity. The Author explains that, despite these underlying principles, the Third District Court of Appeal in Miami, Florida, held that the doctrine precluded inquiry into the merits of the case, which determinatively found the defendants personally liable for the failure of what was previously one of Ecuador’s largest banks. The Author argues that, by erroneously applying the doctrine here, the Third District effectively denied the Isaias brothers due process and set a dangerous precedent.
This Article takes the critical position that taxpayer pluralism, a distributive justice principle that underlies the current charitable tax incentive, is violated when an elite class of taxpayers are empowered to determine which charities merit subsidization. Recent enactments brought in by the TCJA will most likely place a damper on giving from low- and middle-income taxpayers. Charitable giving from high-income taxpayers, however, will remain unaffected because they’re more likely to itemize their deductions and will continue to receive tax benefits for their philanthropy. This Article proposes a non-refundable charitable tax credit to replace the current below-the-line deduction to induce giving from a wide-array of donors in an effort to restore taxpayer pluralism—supported by both a detailed economic and philosophical analysis. Finally, this Article outlines the foundations of a charitable tax credit system that prioritizes giving to different charitable subsectors based on the following factors: the positive externalities generated by each charitable subsector, the price elasticity of giving, and the government’s ability to subsidize each charitable subsector in the absence of a tax incentive.