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Exporting Equity: Lessons from the Equal Credit Opportunity Act
No full textCredit functions as a fundamental gateway to economic mobility; however, questions arise regarding the legal and societal implications when an individual is denied access to such credit. In theory, fair lending principles dictate that equal access to credit is a legal right. The premise is reasonable but becomes convoluted when consumer credit is clouded by lender bias, resulting in credit discrimination. This Article presents a comparative perspective revealing a jurisdictional difference in legislation affecting equal access to credit between the United States and Canada. Specifically, this Article will focus on the American Equal Credit Opportunity Act (hereinafter ECOA) and whether an equivalent legislation comparable in Canada is needed to further protect consumer rights in financial services and credit relationships. Canada’s current legislative framework is failing to safeguard fair lending principles and meaningful access to financial services. The structural inequities and exclusion embedded within the financial system continue to create barriers for racialized and Indigenous communities. By failing to address these issues, economic justice and meaningful financial inclusion cannot exist.
With the advancement of technology and the accelerated growth in financial services, financial regulators are continuing to struggle to not only ensure fiscal stability, but also to understand unintended pitfalls produced by innovation. The intersection between these new modalities and discrimination is a critical concern for stakeholders. This has led to a renewed interest in ensuring consumer protection. However, the current regulatory system and the structural components governing consumer credit have been critiqued for failing to create a uniform national regime. The last few years have seen a resurgence of legislative interventions with respect to financial consumer protection, yet the one component not directly addressed is credit discrimination and financial bias within the meaningful extension of financial services
Pleasure & Pain in Intellectual Property
No full textIntellectual property produces pleasure. IP laws incentivize investment in popular culture, helping to ensure the viability of entertainment industries and the steady production of our favorite shows, cherished brands, and beloved celebrities. Across IP-heavy industries, creators cite the joy of writing, composing, coding, and experimenting as a motivation for countless hours in the office, studio, or lab. Nonetheless, in a broad range of settings, and across several areas of IP, courts have responded with hostility to personal accounts of pleasure in IP disputes. When a defendant admits to using IP because they are fans of the plaintiff, or because they wanted to share their love of popular culture, or because it was simply a lot of fun, courts cite such admissions as reasons for ruling against them.
By contrast, when parties to IP disputes cite not to joy, pleasure, or fandom, but instead to anger, pain, and adversity, courts are far more receptive to such motivations for copying. When a defendant asserts that they copied aspects of the plaintiff ’s work or brand because they felt alienated by it, or because they wanted to ridicule it, or because they wanted to insult the rightsholder, courts have embraced such motives as supporting fair use and free speech defenses. While sanctioning painful narratives may help artists expose the biases embedded in much popular culture, the judicial privileging of pain also has facilitated disempowering, mocking, blatantly hateful, or intentionally harassing portrayals of vulnerable individuals and communities. Moreover, by privileging pain over pleasure, IP law has limited the ability of marginalized groups—especially women, people of color, and queer people—to share their joy publicly.
This Article shows that courts routinely undervalue pleasure and overvalue pain when resolving IP disputes. This “pleasure taboo” discourages honesty in litigation, disconnects IP doctrine from real-world creative practices, and skews IP’s moral compass. Insults and derision emerge as archetypes of fair use and free speech, while fandom and joy become commodities for rightsholders to harvest and control
Domestic Military Deployments After \u3cem\u3eTrump v. United States\u3c/em\u3e
No full textThe current legal regime governing domestic military deployments was, largely, born of the Civil War. While conflict was ongoing, Congress enacted what are now a pair of statutes criminalizing military interference with federal elections. And as a coda to Reconstruction, Congress criminalized using the military as a civilian law enforcement force. Over the past 160 years, successive Congresses and Presidents have steadily chipped away at these crucial criminal-law protections. In 2024, the Supreme Court’s decision in Trump v. United States further undermined the limitations that remained.
In Trump, the Supreme Court held that Presidents enjoy, at minimum, a presumption of immunity from criminal prosecution regarding their official acts. The majority construed “official acts” quite broadly, a move that is particularly consequential regarding the law of domestic military deployments given the plethora of statutes and the array of inherent constitutional powers Presidents have asserted authorizing such activities. Taken together, this amalgam of judicial intervention, statutory law, and executive practice yield a legal regime especially susceptible to abuse by a motivated President.
Equally as consequential is the shadow cast by the Trump majority’s understanding of executive power over actions taken by subordinate officials to implement presidential orders. Although Trump did not address subordinate criminal immunity, its dicta contained sweeping endorsements of executive power. This Article demonstrates how the executive branch would likely assert that, at least insofar as military deployments are concerned, implementing actions by subordinate military officials also enjoy a presumption of criminal immunity under Trump’s logic. It then presents two theories why such an argument would be incorrect—one rooted in the broader jurisprudence of subordinate immunity and another rooted in more particular jurisprudence concerning domestic military deployments.
Even without trickle-down immunity, Trump places unsustainable burdens on military personnel. The military justice system’s core tenants are largely incompatible with a world in which the President is immune from prosecution for issuing criminal orders while the military subordinates who receive those orders remain bound to refuse the same patently unlawful orders. In practical effect, military personnel will have every incentive to obey orders with a colorable basis in statutory or constitutional law, regardless of whether they run afoul of criminal prohibitions.
This is not to say that all was well regarding the law of domestic military deployments before Trump. Congresses of both parties have enacted an elaborate web of statutory law eroding this regime of criminal law. Add to this an array of implied presidential powers to deploy the military within the United States, and we had already inherited a deeply broken body of law.
While litigation can curb some of the dangers inherent to the law of domestic military deployments, Congress is the only branch capable of righting this ship. Whether by clawing back broad grants of power to the President or limiting domestic uses of the military through appropriations restrictions, what Congress began by enacting loopholes to this regime of criminal liability it must now reimagine to more fully protect our democratic institutions
National Center for State Courts International Programs Division in Arlington, Virginia
No full textIsabelle Simoneaux [1L] will assist NCSC’s work providing technical assistance, training and technology to enhance justice systems and services around the world, working with government, civil society, and development partners to create more accountable institutions and expand access to justice
Chimeric Contacts and Consent: The Ill-Reasoned Expansion of Corporate Jurisdictional Exposure
No full textTwo recent Supreme Court decisions have imposed aspects of general jurisdiction in a way that exposes corporations and possibly other legal actors to litigation in spuriously connected forums. One case—Ford Motor Company v. Montana—reached a fair result but with strained reasoning that will support unfair results. The second case—Mallory v. Norfolk Southern Railroad Company—was wrong on the facts and the law, imposing general jurisdiction based on a vaguely worded corporate registration statute validated by a more than century-old precedent based on Pennoyer v. Neff’s limited territorial model.
Both decisions were the result of conceptual corners the Supreme Court has created or passively allowed. This Article examines the larger history of corporate “presence” and amenability, then explains the two cases in the milieu of the larger jurisdictional paradigm, highlighting the warp they create for specific and general jurisdiction. The Conclusion summarizes various defense arguments inherent in the Court’s reasoning, although the availability of these defenses does not validate these unfortunate rulings
Countering the Criminalization of Solidarity: An Analysis of Legal Frameworks Proposed to Protect Humanitarian Aid for Migrants and Asylum Seekers
No full textThousands of migrant fatalities are reported each year all across the globe, and as staggering as current numbers are, they are likely an undercount. These deaths are a direct result of government policies that funnel migrants into dangerous routes through deserts and seas to deter immigration. Further, when individuals and groups step forward to provide immediate aid to migrants—such as food, water, shelter, first aid, and search and rescue (SAR)—they are often targeted by intimidation, harassment, discipline, and even criminal prosecution. Thus emerges a question: what legal framework can protect the rights of humanitarian aid workers acting in solidarity with migrants, and what should it entail? This Note analyzes some of the most discussed frameworks in current literature on this issue, identifies their strengths and weaknesses, and finally addresses what factors should be considered in a comprehensive, effective approach to countering the criminalization of migrant solidarity
The \u3cem\u3eRacialized\u3c/em\u3e Retaliatory State: Weaponizing Immigration Law to Criminalize Dissent
No full textThis Essay examines how systemic racism impacts the ways immigration laws operate to retaliate and criminalize immigrants who dissent. Criminalizing dissent—which recently has become more widespread—is one tool within the immigration system that reinforces America’s racialized caste system. This Essay frames immigration exceptionalism as a continual state that excludes nonconforming bodies and ideologies to instill fear as a means of authoritarian governance. This Essay challenges the history of immigration exceptionalism as an objectively neutral system of governance, arguing that it has historically criminalized racialized migrants to suppress dissent and ideological viewpoints that are not aligned with America’s racialized project. Immigration law functions as a retaliatory tool of governance by constructing criminality to suppress both racial outsiders and ideological dissenters, creating a perpetual undocumented class—especially when the two categories overlap.
Part I sets out the theoretical and historical foundations of immigration exceptionalism as a state of continuity. It traces the legal architecture of immigration exceptionalism to the Chinese Exclusion Acts and Supreme Court cases to demonstrate how the U.S. government has long relied on racialized criminal migrant narratives to construct permanent ideological and racial outsiders who can be summarily deported without regard to their human or constitutional rights. Part II walks through historical examples of how immigration laws construct criminality at the intersection of race and dissent. Part III turns to the present and examines how the current administration has escalated the use of immigration enforcement against universities and foreign students, especially in contexts where political dissent, racial identity, or ideological critique challenge state power. It examines how the state now weaponizes immigration law as a retaliatory mechanism. This analysis shows how immigration law is no longer just a border enforcement tool, but an internal governance strategy to suppress both citizen and noncitizen resistance, where the state leverages immigration law to suppress those who expose its violence, reject its exclusions, and demand accountability.
The Essay concludes by arguing that immigration law must be rebuilt from the ground up with non-reformist reforms. Non-reformist reforms reject the deeply rooted racialized logic of U.S. exceptionalism that treats racialized migrants as inherently deportable and constitutionally unprotected. If due process, proportionality, and judicial review are to have any constitutional meaning, they must be restored as the governing principles of immigration law—not exceptions to it. Only then can the United States begin to reverse the dangerous expansion of executive power that criminalizes racialized migrants and reassert a legal order that recognizes migrants as full subjects who warrant equal protection under the law.
This abstract has been taken from the author\u27s introduction
George Wythe Award
No full textFor Exceptional Character, Leadership, and a Spirit of Selfless Service by a Member of the Graduating Class.https://scholarship.law.wm.edu/studentplaques/1131/thumbnail.jp
Chris Creech Award
No full textFor Service and Dedication to William & Mary Law Schoolhttps://scholarship.law.wm.edu/wmlsawards/1002/thumbnail.jp
\u3cem\u3eBrown\u3c/em\u3e Now: The Surprising Possibility of Progressive Reform
Get PDFFor four decades, the Supreme Court has engaged in a determined, systematic, and successful effort to transform and tame Brown v. Board of Education. But there is a surprising counterweight to this standard narrative. If one takes modern doctrine seriously, the Supreme Court’s refashioning of Brown has the potential to support some progressive goals. The modern Court’s decisions provide a basis for upholding race-conscious but facially neutral measures that promote racial diversity, striking down legacy admission standards in colleges and universities, and strictly scrutinizing laws that discriminate based on sexual orientation. The last Part of this Article speculates about whether modern doctrine should be taken seriously