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Teaching Tiger King
Get PDFWhen our home institution moved all instruction online in response to the pandemic, we began redesigning our business law survey course from scratch. Specifically, we decided to use the popular docuseries Tiger King: Murder, Mayhem, and Madness to explore the legal and ethical environments of business with our undergraduate students. We deliberately chose this surprise-hit television show in order to make our online course as relevant, timely, and engaging as possible. The remainder of the paper will describe the contents of each module of the course, explore their relation to Tiger King, and explain the logic of our design choices.
Keywords: business law, ethics, legal environment of business, Tiger King
JEL Codes: A22, K10, K11, K12, K13, K14, K33, K41
Word Count: 13,024
Date of Revised Draft: January 12, 2021 (Date of First Draft: July 1, 2020
Centering Racial Equity: Disparities Task Forces as a Strategy to Ensure an Equitable Pandemic Response
Get PDFCOVID-19 has had a stark and severe impact on health, economic stability, housing, and education in communities of color in the United States. As the pandemic has unfolded, the disproportionate number of cases, hospitalizations, and deaths due to COVID-19 among Black, Hispanic and Latinx, and Indigenous people has served as a stark reminder that the systems and structures that lead to these disparities need to be changed in order to achieve equitable outcomes.
This Article assesses efforts by cities, counties, states, and organizations to address the impact of COVID-19 on communities of color through formal task forces or working groups as of November 2020. This assessment includes an evaluation of approaches taken to establish the groups, group composition, and assigned duties and responsibilities. Key issues addressed include: approaches to partnership and collaboration; engagement of community leaders and strategies to include community voices; authorities and resources; accountability to policymakers and stakeholders; and a review of actions that have been recommended or implemented. Success of these working groups will be measured by near-term actions to address disparities due to COVID-19 and longer-term solutions that support post-pandemic recovery and build community resilience
Seeking Safety While Giving Birth During the Pandemic
Get PDFAs COVID-19 spread throughout the United States in early 2020, many pregnant people sought alternatives to delivering in a hospital. Midwifery practices offering services at home or in a freestanding birth center reported record numbers of inquiries, including from people looking to transfer care near the end of pregnancy. Whether due to fear of COVID-19 exposure in health care settings or out of a desire to avoid restrictive hospital policies regarding support people and newborn separation, people who had not previously considered home birth were newly drawn to midwifery care and others who had considered a midwife-attended birth redoubled their efforts to find an available provider. The turn to community birth—birth in a freestanding birth center or at home, usually with the support of a midwife—is a reasonable and understandable development, given the strong health and safety record of midwifery care, midwifery’s focus on holistic and individualized care, and the generally smaller caseload size of midwifery practices relative to obstetrics practices, which can minimize the number of people to whom providers are exposed during a health crisis. Midwifery care is especially attractive for some pregnant people of color—and Black women in particular—who have experienced bias and discrimination in health care settings and who have higher rates of both provider mistreatment and adverse health outcomes than White women in mainstream maternity care. But many pregnant people who sought midwifery care during the pandemic discovered they lacked access to non-hospital-based alternatives, as the supply of local midwives could not meet demand or legal restrictions meant there simply were no midwives in the area.
This Article examines the turn to community birth during the COVID-19 pandemic and argues that various legal and regulatory restrictions on midwifery practice unfairly interfere with access to this important, health-promoting model of care, especially for people of color, who disproportionately bear the burden of poor maternal health outcomes and hospitalization or death from COVID-19. In particular, this Article examines how lack of licensure for direct-entry midwives in some jurisdictions, along with non-evidence-based restrictions on scope of practice for all types of midwives and burdensome regulatory hurdles to establishing freestanding birth centers, impedes the growth of midwifery as a profession and limits access to community birth. This Article concludes with several recommendations that draw on the experiences of pregnant people during the pandemic to advance a pro-midwifery reform agenda that will tackle inequities in access to community birth and improve maternity care for all
Enforcing the “Safe and Sanitary” Environment Standard Within U.S. Detention Facilities to Save Children’s Lives
Get PDFOvercrowding and unsanitary conditions within Customs and Border Protection (CBP) detention facilities are ideal for the transmission of infectious disease among CBP detainees. This is a dangerous problem. Between 2018 and 2019, at least six children died after acquiring infectious diseases while detained at CBP facilities. Migrant children are particularly vulnerable because their immune systems are not fully developed and due to the negative impact of trauma and stress have on their immune systems. Infectious disease promulgation within CBP facilities also puts the American public at risk because of the potential for transmission beyond CBP facilities. Employees who are regularly in direct contact with detainees, as well as released detainees, may expose members of their communities to infectious disease.
Under Section 264 of the Public Health Service Act (PHSA), the federal government has the duty to protect American citizens from the spread of infectious disease. Additionally, the Flores Settlement Agreement (FSA) charges the federal government with the duty to provide “safe and sanitary” living conditions for children in its custody. This Article argues that the government is in violation of the PHSA and the FSA by allowing the poor conditions within CBP facilities and by failing to provide vaccinations within CBP facilities. The federal government should provide vaccinations within CBP facilities in order to protect the children in its custody, as well as the American public
The Fourth Amendment Limits of Internet Content Preservation
Get PDFEvery year, hundreds of thousands of Internet accounts are copied and set aside by Internet providers on behalf of federal and state law enforcement. This process, known as preservation, ordinarily occurs without particularized suspicion. Any government agent can request preservation of any account at any time. Federal law requires the provider to set aside a copy of the account just in case the government later develops probable cause and returns with a warrant needed to compel the account’s disclosure. The preservation process is largely secret. With rare exceptions, the account owner will never know the preservation occurred.
This Article argues that the Fourth Amendment imposes significant limits on the preservation of Internet account contents. Preservation triggers a Fourth Amendment seizure because the provider, acting as the government’s agent, takes away the account holder’s control of the account. To be constitutionally reasonable, the initial act of preservation must ordinarily be justified by probable cause—and at the very least, in uncommon cases, by reasonable suspicion. The government can continue to use the Internet preservation statute in a limited way, such as to freeze an account while investigators draft a proper warrant application. But the current practice, in which investigators order the preservation of accounts with no particularized suspicion, violates the Fourth Amendment
The Real Problem with Katz Circularity
Get PDFThe Fourth Amendment protects people against “unreasonable searches” by police. To operationalize this protection, courts must have a workable definition of a search. Since 1967, the Supreme Court has used the two-step Katz test as a primary measure of when a search has occurred. Under Katz, a court will find that something has been subject to search when (1) the individual in question has a subjective expectation of privacy in that thing and (2) such an expectation of privacy would be reasonable. From early on, commentators have decried the Katz test as circular and have urged courts to adopt something else. This essay explains what the circularity worry really amounts to: the worry is about courts using improperly reduced expectations of privacy as a reason to withhold Fourth Amendment protection. This worry is much broader than most commentators have seen, and this broader framing allows one to deflect recent concerns that Katz circularity (more narrowly construed) is a myth. With the ‘circularity’ worry properly understood, the essay offers a way to deal with it: courts could simply drop Step One of Katz
The International Convention on the Elimination of all Forms of Racial Discrimination: An Analysis of Article 4’s Implementation on Hate Speech in the United States, Japan, and Germany
Get PDFIn 2017, white supremacists gathered in Charlottesville, Virginia to protest the removal of Confederate General Robert E. Lee’s statue from a public park. The “protesters” chose to voice their concerns by carrying tiki torches and spewing racist chants. The encounter began with hateful speech and ended in bloodshed and death. This is one example of how the United States, along with several other democracies, has been confronted with the question of how far they should go in limiting extreme forms of hateful, discriminatory expression.
In various countries around the world, hate speech, at its worst, has resulted in political extremism and targeted violence. But the way these countries have responded to hate speech has varied vastly with different democracies having conflicting views on how hate speech should be regulated. Different definitions, standards, and regulations exist in various countries to constitute how a given country would classify “hate speech.” This results in different responses to these differing interpretations of hate speech. Freedom of speech, however, is almost always regarded as a fundamental individual right in most democratic constitutional systems. It is a right that international human rights law obliges states to guarantee, respect, and enforce.
This Note focuses on three countries and their response to hate speech: The United States, Japan, and Germany. It will discuss how hate speech is defined in these countries, and what regulations—or lack thereof—have resulted. Additionally, this Note will focus on one of the international human rights treaties, the International Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination (“ICERD”). Article 4 of ICERD requires states both to implement hate speech laws for purposes of furthering the right to equality, and to respect and enforce freedom of expression. This Note will discuss how ICERD can be implemented in areas where hate speech legislation has failed
Touchdown St. Louis: A Recap of the NFL and Rams Lawsuit
Get PDFThe Rams’ move to Los Angeles in 2016 brought about more than just hard feelings toward the National Football League and owner, Stan Kroenke—it resulted in a billion dollar lawsuit. In this article, Katie Hoffecker analyzes the past five years of the litigation proceedings as the case ultimately settles.https://scholarship.law.slu.edu/lawjournalonline/1082/thumbnail.jp
My Body, My Temple: The Constitutional Requirement for Religious Exemptions to a COVID-19 Vaccination Mandate
Get PDFWhile the COVID-19 crisis has caused many to fear the threat that the virus poses to the health and safety of themselves and their loved ones, for others, and particularly for those with certain religious beliefs, the cure is worse than the disease. The possibility of a government mandated vaccine has caused extreme anxiety for many Americans. In this article, Ben Davisson discusses the constitutionality of mandatory vaccination programs and how such programs may come into conflict with the Free Exercise Clause of the First Amendment.https://scholarship.law.slu.edu/lawjournalonline/1056/thumbnail.jp
Freedom of Tweets: The Role of Social Media in a Marketplace of Ideas
Get PDFOne of the more polarizing political issues of 2021 was when social media platforms like Twitter permanently banned President Donald Trump from their platforms. As the law stands, most experts agree that the First Amendment does not restrict online social media platforms from exercising broad discretion to censor content or individuals. However, even if social media platforms have a right to unilaterally ban users from their platforms, should they? More importantly, should we let them? In this article, Patrick Ganninger explores these important questions.https://scholarship.law.slu.edu/lawjournalonline/1059/thumbnail.jp