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The Underground Scholars Initiative Language Guide
No full textThere is a resource that provides guidance for replacing common, dehumanizing words in our legal vocabulary: the Underground Scholars Initiative (USI) Language Guide (“the guide”). The guide was released in 2019 by the USI, a group of “formerly incarcerated and system-impacted academics” at the University of California, Berkeley. It offers substitutes for commonly used but harmful criminal law terms.
The guide is short, simply written, and easily accessible online. In about 1,500 words it describes why humanizing language is important and includes both a terminology guide of 15 terms and a topical guide for four related topics. Ever since a student introduced it to me, I have used it in my legal writing classroom as a tool to help students eliminate biased language from their writing. It is equally useful to practicing attorneys who are looking for ways to decrease bias in their own writing.
This article introduces some of the terms in the guide and attempts to answer questions you might have about using the guide
Blockchain Games and a Disruptive Corporate Business Model
Get PDFThis Article is the first to identify and theorize on a new disruptive corporate business model unfolding in the gaming industry that is larger than both the movie and music sectors combined. Corporations in blockchain gaming reject the old paradigm of amassing profits by turning the public into spenders for and consumers of corporate products. The new corporate business model transforms members of the public into producers and true owners of new corporate property while earning income and garnering governance voting rights. Through a case study of Axie Infinity, a blockchain game launched in 2021, this Article explores how the new corporate business model challenges traditional theories of the corporation and relationships among stakeholders. Additionally, the disruptive model percolates implications of decentralized property ownership in the age of widening income inequality
GENETIC TECHNOLOGIES: PATENT PROTECTIONS & THE CASE FOR TECHNOLOGY TRANSFER
Get PDFGenetic technologies range in scope from agricultural to medical applications. Most recently, during the COVID-19 pandemic, companies like Moderna developed and patented genetic technologies for diagnostic and therapeutic purposes, like the mRNA vaccine. However, patent protection provides these companies with a monopoly that ultimately limits domestic production of generic versions, thus limiting access to life-saving diagnostics and therapeutics. When a company located in one country files a patent for recognition in another country, it effectively places a hold on production of any technologies covered by that patent’s reach, whether that patent is enforced or not. However, the TRIPS Agreement, the Convention on Biological Diversity and Nagoya Protocol, and other instruments create obligations for countries to transfer technology to other countries. TRIPS and the Nagoya Protocol permit countries to exempt genetic technologies from patentability. However, some countries have formed “TRIPS-Plus” agreements that are superimposed upon, and prevent countries from taking advantage of, these exceptions in TRIPS.
This article will cover current patent law governing genetic technologies, and how these laws, along with intellectual property rights and anti-competitive practices, often hinder access to genetic technologies. It will also provide recommendations on how to facilitate access, including via a duty to transfer
The Five Internet Rights
Get PDFSince the dawn of the commercial internet, content moderation has operated under an implicit social contract that website operators could accept or reject users and content as they saw fit, but users in turn could self-publish their views on their own websites if no one else would have them. However, as online service providers and activists have become ever more innovative and aggressive in their efforts to deplatform controversial speakers, content moderation has progressively moved down into the core infrastructure of the internet, targeting critical resources, such as networks, domain names, and IP addresses, on which all websites depend. These innovations point to a world in which it may soon be possible for private gatekeepers to exclude unpopular users, groups, or viewpoints from the internet altogether, a phenomenon I call viewpoint foreclosure.
For more than three decades, internet scholars have searched, in vain, for a unifying theory of interventionism—a set of principles to guide when the law should intervene in the private moderation of lawful online content and what that intervention should look like. These efforts have failed precisely because they have focused on the wrong gatekeepers, scrutinizing the actions of social media companies, search engines, and other third-party websites—entities that directly publish, block, or link to user-generated content—while ignoring the core resources and providers that make internet speech possible in the first place. This Article is the first to articulate a workable theory of interventionism by focusing on the far more fundamental question of whether users should have any right to express themselves on the now fully privatized internet. By articulating a new theory premised on viewpoint access—the right to express one’s views on the internet itself (rather than on any individual website)—I argue that the law need take account of only five basic non-discrimination rights to protect online expression from private interference—namely, the rights of connectivity, addressability, nameability, routability, and accessibility. Looking to property theory, internet architecture, and economic concepts around market entry barriers, it becomes clear that as long as these five fundamental internet rights are respected, users are never truly prevented from competing in the online marketplace of ideas, no matter the actions of any would-be deplatformer
Marital Disharmony: Examining the Adverse Spousal Testimonial Privilege and Its Impact in Washington State
Get PDFIn Washington State, RCW 5.60.060(1) provides that “[a] spouse or domestic partner shall not be examined for or against his or her spouse or domestic partner, without the consent of the spouse or domestic partner.” This evidence rule, known as the adverse spousal testimonial privilege, allows a defendant to exclude witness testimony by their spouse under most circumstances. A product of common law tradition, this privilege stems from a time when the law treated women as chattel with no independent legal rights. Since Washington State codified the adverse spousal privilege, the United States Supreme Court amended the federal spousal testimonial privilege by vesting the power to determine whether to testify or not in the witness-spouse. That is, a witness-spouse may choose not to testify against the defendant- spouse, but the defendant-spouse cannot prevent the witness-spouse from willingly testifying. After this landmark decision, most states followed suit and amended their evidentiary rules to reflect the federal standard. However, Washington State remains one of four states that still retains the common law tradition as it once was, allowing the defendant-spouse to prevent spousal testimony (with a few specific exceptions). This Comment contrasts the evolution of the adverse testimonial privilege at the federal level with Washington State. It examines how Washington courts are slowly chipping away at the edges of this statutory privilege in the absence of legislative action. This Comment argues that despite legislative efforts to modernize the privilege by creating certain exceptions, the Washington rule remains overly burdensome for testifying witness-spouses to overcome and perpetuates historical inequities for women, who are often the witnesses and victims of their husband’s crimes. Finally, this Comment recommends that the Washington State Legislature follow federal precedent and vest the privilege solely in the witness-spouse
The Four Corners of Indian Water Rights: Tribes, Treaties, and the Adjudication of Reserved Rights
No full textOne Crisis or Two Problems? Disentangling Rural Access to Justice and the Rural Attorney Shortage
Get PDFWe have all seen the headlines: No Lawyer for Miles or Legal Deserts Threaten Justice for All in Rural America. There is a substantial body of literature, across disciplines and for diverse audiences, that looks at access to justice in rural communities and geographies. However, in both the popular and scholarly imaginations, the access to justice crisis has been largely conflated with the shortage of local attorneys in rural areas: When bar associations, lawyers, and legal academics define the problem as not enough lawyers, more lawyers become the obvious solution. Consequently, programs aimed at building pipelines from law schools to rural locations and incentivizing rural practice have proliferated in central states, including South Dakota, North Dakota, Montana, Illinois, Nebraska, and Arkansas. And while there may be good reasons to want more lawyers in rural communities, we argue that more lawyers may not, in fact, be the most effective or impactful intervention in the rural access to justice crisis.
This Article begins with the hypothesis that an attorney shortage and the justice gap are two distinct issues that have been uniquely conflated in the rural context and that when we begin to disentangle these problems, we better understand the complexity of each. As a starting point, we cannot measure what we cannot define. Advocates, scholars, and the legal profession lack shared definitions of both “access to justice” and “rural,” making measurement of rural access to justice, let alone comparisons across jurisdictions, nearly impossible. When we look at rural access to justice independently and without a bias or preference for lawyer-focused solutions, it seems less likely that more attorneys can effectively address the crisis for a multitude of reasons including rural community dynamics, information gaps, unclear demand, mismatched skills or expertise, cost, and potential conflicts. What we propose, instead, is a conceptualization of access to justice that is not centered around the lawyer, and we argue for a measurement of access to justice that does not rely on lawyers per capita or county (or anything) as its primary unit of measure. This Article, in turn, establishes the foundation for future work developing broader measures of access to justice infrastructure and proposing legal vulnerability as a concept that could help anticipate the needs of a community
Cases and Controversies - Pebble Mine, Snake River, and the Klamath
No full textPatty Goldman, Earthjustice (Seattle) - The Klamath: Preventing Extinction and Moving Forward to Restore the Salmon Fishery (timestamp - 10:00)
Catherine O\u27Neill, Visiting Research Professor, Seattle University School of Law - Cases and Controversies: The Snake River (timestamp - 32:33)
Charisse Arce, Earthjustice (Alaska) - The Proposed Pebble Mine (timestamp - 55:44
International Law and the Taliban\u27s Legal Status: Emerging Recognition Criteria?
Get PDFAfter the American-mediated attempts at facilitating a negotiated transition failed in Doha, on August 15, 2021, the Taliban retook the Afghan capital and soon after re- established the “Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan” (2021-) along with a caretaker government. The forceful return of the Taliban to power in Afghanistan poses difficult questions of international law. Chief among these questions is who has the right to represent the Afghan state internationally after August 15, 2021. Applying the rules of public international to the case of the Taliban’s caretaker government, this article argues that the strongest argument for disqualifying the Taliban as a government capable of representing Afghanistan is that the regime espouses principles, as a matter for formal governmental policies, which, in their totality, are so fundamentally discriminatory that they violate jus cogens norms of international law. These violations are especially egregious regarding the Taliban’s treatment of women. In many ways, the Taliban’s gender-based discrimination shares similarities to South Africa’s racial apartheid. As a result, the Taliban’s effective control over Afghanistan may not be enough to confer on it the status of a “government” under international law. This argument depends on the comparability of race-based discrimination with some fundamental forms of gender-based discrimination in a world where gender-based restrictions are not uncommon albeit not to the extent that the Taliban imposes. The Taliban’s caretaker government has provided the occasion where the unanimous condemnation of the international community could indicate that international law has come to contain a jus cogens norm banning some fundamental forms of gender-based discrimination denying admission to a government that holds those policies de jure recognition under international law