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Book Banning: The Post-Pico Epidemic upon Nationwide Academic Curricula
Full text linkThis Note explores the growing wave of book bans across the United States, highlighting the increasing role of state legislators in advancing policies that restrict access to literature in public schools. While historically driven by private individuals or local challenges, contemporary bans are now often state-sanctioned, with states like Texas, Florida, Missouri, Utah, and South Carolina leading the movement. These actions not only suppress specific titles but also target entire genres, disproportionately affecting books dealing with race, gender, and LGBTQ+ identities. Drawing on sources such as the PEN America Index of School Book Bans, the Note analyzes the historical context of censorship efforts and their legal implications. It critically examines the Supreme Court\u27s efforts to set constitutional limits on content-based restrictions in schools, and the ways in which lower courts and school districts have circumvented those guidelines. Ultimately, the Note argues that this resurgence in censorship undermines educational integrity and First Amendment protections, leaving lasting damage to public education and free expression nationwide
Special Immigrant Juvenile Status and Expanding Relief to Prevent Family Separation
Full text linkThis Note will begin by providing a brief overview of Special Immigrant Juvenile Status and the Congressional intentions behind the creation of this classification and its subsequent amendments, primarily the 2008 TVPRA. It will then delve into the decade after the 2008 TVPRA enactment to explore the overall viability of family unity within the context of the United States’ immigration policy. To do so, this Note will look at cases from 2009–2018 before the Supreme Court of the State of New York and Appellate Division Second Judicial Department involving “one-parent cases,” where a biological parent is granted guardianship as part of the SIJS process, to understand how courts weighed family unity in granting guardianship. It will then survey legal status options for individuals already in the U.S. who are victims of violence or serious crimes, comparing application and approval rates to analyze immigration trends. This will be juxtaposed with data on SIJS applications and removal rates of parents before and after the 2008 TVPRA. Considering the increase in SIJS cases, this Note will argue that the “one or both parents” language cannot solely be linked to limiting undocumented parents’ legal status opportunities, but must also be seen in the context of broader removal policies. Despite removals, “one-parent cases” have served as a path to legal status for vulnerable juveniles, as shown by rising SIJS filings. Ultimately, this Note will propose an alternative SIJS framework that incorporates Congressional intent and better protects family unity in one-parent cases
Opioid Settlements and Profitable Public Nuisances
Full text linkThe global settlements between state and local governments and opioid manufacturers, distributors, and retailers require opioid defendants to transform their businesses and pay more than 40 billion in abatement funds is a substantial pool of money that is likely to help states combat opioid use and abuse. Large as the payments are, however, they are significantly smaller than the profits that the opioid defendants made over the course of the epidemic or the total harm that they caused. This Article argues that the global opioid settlements incentivize future defendants to create large public health risks. Rational defendants will look to the opioid settlements when evaluating their own legal risk. The settlements establish that defendants can create enormous public health risks, and the legal consequences will be limited to business reforms and making abatement payments that are less than the profits the defendant generated by creating the public health risk. In other words, public nuisance law’s abatement remedy, upon which the opioid settlements are based, ensures that public nuisance defendants can profitably perpetuate a public nuisance. Accordingly, public nuisance law will fail to deter profit-maximizing defendants from creating a public nuisance. Other approaches, such as restitution, disgorgement, or corporate restructuring, are possible alternative remedies that courts and future parties may consider.
On Guido Calabresi
Full text linkFew individuals have had as long and as influential a career in law as Guido Calabresi. Cofounder of the field of law and economics, teacher, dean, and judge, he has inspired (and infuriated) multitudes. On the United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit, where he has served for thirty years (while continuing to teach until recently), his creativity and doctrinal innovations continue apace. He has urged the academy, legislature, and bench alike to engage in continuing conversation to improve the law and its effect upon those to whom it acts. One of these areas is certification—the practice of referring state law questions to the highest court of the state whose law is involved—in which he became the national leader. He came to all this through a unique perspective, that of a refugee from Italian fascism, which he considers “the most important part of my education”: “Being an outsider shaped me, it made me more empathetic.” As he has noted, “It is said that Italians love to talk, to communicate with everybody.” Certainly no one who has met Guido will dispute that or that he does so with a rare warmth. He also epitomized one institution in a singular way. From a student who helped run the institution’s law journal while at the same time teaching economics to undergraduates before becoming perhaps Justice Hugo L. Black’s best law clerk to a scholar who taught torts with unabated enthusiasm, not to mention provocation, for more than sixty years, and finally to the dean who built the contemporary Yale Law School—he caught its spirit in a way that no one else has. However hard that is to define or capture, Guido, as he is universally known, embodied it. The recent publication of his oral history, appropriately titled Outside In, affords an appropriate opportunity for this examination of his extraordinary life and career
The Impact of Artificial Intelligence on Copyright Infringement Liability
Full text linkAlthough the rise of artificial intelligence platforms has been promoted as a solution to many of our problems, it is important to address the possible issues this new technology may be creating. With artificial intelligence evolving at such a rapid rate, questions arise as to how to effectively regulate and control this technology. Specifically, in the realm of intellectual property, how will copyright protection be ensured and how will liability for copyright infringement be apportioned with the expanding use of artificial intelligence? Users of artificial intelligence platforms should be able to employ such artificial intelligence products freely and confidently without the concern of infringing on a copyright holder’s exclusive rights. As our understanding of artificial intelligence matures and clearer guidelines for the use of artificial intelligence emerge, a system that prioritizes the use of artificial intelligence in a responsible manner that addresses accountability, transparency, and misuse will be within reach
The Systematic Devaluation of Legal Scholarship in Criminology and Criminal Justice
No full textCertain bibliometrics have become important indicators of scholarly impact despite their many weaknesses. This Article presents data demonstrating the shortcomings of using citation counts and journal impact factors for law-based scholarship. Moreover, the Article argues that reliance on these flawed metrics is just one example of how scholars in criminology and criminal justice (“CCJ”) systematically devalue legal scholarship.
The Article begins by offering quotations from social scientists that provide insights into the negative ways they view legal scholars and their work. It also quotes from interviews conducted with CCJ scholars who hold a law degree and either earned or are working on a PhD in CCJ concerning their experiences with social scientists’ hostility toward their law-based work. It then presents data on the underrepresentation of legal scholars among faculty at leading programs offering the PhD in CCJ. The Article examines an array of data demonstrating the mismeasurement of citations to legal scholarship by comparing and contrasting citations to a sample of fifty articles as reported in four databases, including Hein Online, Westlaw KeyCite, Google Scholar, and Scopus. Quantitative findings concerning citation metrics are juxtaposed against the standards for tenure and promotion in a leading CCJ program. Those comparisons are supplemented by the perspectives of scholars who do interdisciplinary legal work at other doctoral-granting CCJ programs. The Article concludes by offering suggestions for mitigating the systematic devaluation of legal scholar
Controlling the Mischief of New York’s Foreclosure Abuse Prevention Act Through Constitutional Pre-emption
No full textDepraved Indifference Murder in New York State: Proving Depravity in Vehicular Homicide Cases
No full textDepraved indifference murder is one of the most complex theories of proving criminal liability for causing the death of another person. New York’s depraved indifference murder statute exists in Article 125 of the Penal Law of the State of New York, under section 125.25(2) as the second subdivision of Murder in the second degree. Its definition in the Penal Law is as follows: “A person is guilty of murder in the second degree when . . . Under circumstances evincing a depraved indifference to human life, he recklessly engages in conduct which creates a grave risk of death to another person, and thereby causes the death of another person . . . .”1 This statute allows for the punishment of an unintentional killing as if the defendant’s conduct to cause the death was intentional. Thus, in New York State, those convicted of depraved indifference murder are facing the same maximum punishment as those convicted of intentional murder
Even If You’ve Adopted the NextGen UBE, Your Work Isn’t Done Yet
No full textThe National Conference of Bar Examiners (“NCBE”) is set to administer the NextGen Uniform Bar Examination’s (“UBE”) first release in July 2026. The exam questions are well-structured, well written, and require examinees to understand how the law operates and think like an attorney when faced with a particular problem. This was a primary objective for the NextGen UBE, and it has been met. However, jurisdictions that have adopted the NextGen UBE or are contemplating its adoption still have work to do to ensure that their objectives for a fair test modality and assessment of a lawyer’s basic skill of writing traditional legal analysis are met. Many practitioners, law professors, and students are unaware that the NextGen UBE has moved to a fully online format where examinees will take the nine-hour exam online using their own laptops. Many are also unaware that the NextGen UBE does not contain an essay writing component. Critical issues are raised by this shift to an online test modality because NCBE has not provided data to show whether there is an impact on examinee performance when shifting from a print to digital format. Research studies over the past twenty years, however, show “lower reading comprehension outcomes for digital texts on computers compared to printed texts.”1 Not only will the NextGen UBE be administered online but examinees will use their own laptops which means that each laptop will be different in screen size, resolution, and processing speed. Those who can afford new laptops with larger screens, higher resolution, and faster processing speed will have an advantage over examinees who cannot afford to do so. Examinees with visual or cognitive deficits that impair online processing abilities and speeds, but that do not rise to the level of medically proven disabilities under applicable law and Board of Law Examiner rules, will be disadvantaged. One must ask whether this will lead to a digital divide for NextGen UBE exam takers. Jurisdictions adopting the NextGen UBE should also be troubled by its absence of an essay writing component. Like NCBE’s decision to move the bar exam to a fully online test modality, it erased the essay component of a licensure exam intended for professionals who spend much of their time engaged in writing legal analysis. Instead, NCBE has substituted Integrated Question Sets where examinees answer multiple-choice questions and write short answers to targeted questions, with Performance Tasks that may include a longer writing assignment based on provided Library materials. While these are valuable skills, they are an inadequate substitute for an IRAC based legal analysis (“Issue, Rule, Application, Conclusion”). Since the NextGen UBE is three hours shorter than the current UBE, NCBE has opened a window for jurisdictions to include their own bar exam component and fill this essay gap. It falls to each jurisdiction that has adopted or intends to adopt the NextGen UBE to deliver on its own promise to examinees that it be fairly and equitably administered, that it assesses their knowledge and skills about the law and not their facility with technology, and that it evaluates whether the law school graduate has mastered the essential legal skills and knowledge that a first-year practicing attorney should possess. A combination of the NextGen UBE and a jurisdictional essay component would provide a rigorous and comprehensive licensing exam
