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Playing the Unfair Game: Apostates, Abuse & Religious Arbitration
Get PDFThis Note argues that the Bixler [v. Superior Court] approach should become the standard for evaluating the enforceability of religious arbitration against ex-members. Courts should not enforce agreements to religious arbitration against ex-members of a faith when the relevant conduct occurred after their religious affiliation ended. The First Amendment right of believers to leave their faith should prevail over the First Amendment right of churches to police their internal religious doctrine. Siding with the institutions on this issue allows them the power to exert control over apostates in perpetuity through an unintended synergy of the First Amendment and American contract law.
Part I of this Note discusses the state of the law, beginning with the Federal Arbitration Act (FAA) and concluding with a survey of religious arbitration. Part II serves as a brief introduction to the complex world and culture of Scientology to better understand the dynamics of Bixler and other Scientology-adjacent litigation. Part III examines the approaches of various courts to Scientology’s religious arbitration contracts, concluding with Bixler. Part IV applies the Bixler holding to the other Scientology cases and religious arbitration cases involving other faiths. Part V addresses counterarguments.
This abstract has been taken from the author\u27s introduction
Dobbs\u27 Sex Equality Troubles
Get PDFThis article takes up what Dobbs v. Jackson Women\u27s Health Org. may mean for sex equality rights beyond the abortion setting. It details how Dobbs lays the foundation for rolling back and even eliminating Fourteenth Amendment sex equality protections. The work scales these possibilities against a different dimension of the ruling that’s yet to receive the attention that it merits. An important footnote in Dobbs, Footnote 22, sketches a new history-and-tradition-based approach to unenumerated rights under the Fourteenth Amendment’s Privileges or Immunities Clause. The jurisprudence that this Footnote capacitates could transform the constitutional landscape via new economic and social rights that set the Court on a collision course with the Slaughter-House Cases. Dangers on the economic rights front include reviving Lochner and its political economic principles in new constitutional garb. Dangers on the social rights front, by contrast, include new constitutional family law rules written from the social-conservative right, overriding constitutional and positive law developments that, since the 1960s, have broadly managed family law from and toward the liberal to progressive left. In both these areas, the Court’s decisions would be capable of catching various sex equality protections in their snares. The future in relation to all these prospects may be set by Justice Brett Kavanaugh, the swing-vote justice in Dobbs. So, this Article attends to the determinants of Kavanaugh’s Dobbs concurrence, and thus Dobbs’ meaning. While matters could obviously get much worse for sex equality rights after Dobbs, Kavanaugh’s concurrence also offers some reason to hope that they won’t. Struggles for sex equality rights may be intensifying and entering distinctively perilous times. Their future, however, has yet to be determined, including by the Supreme Court
Making Waves: How Mandated Arbitration Could Better Address Cultural Heritage and Bring Treasure Salvage Law into the Twenty-First Century
Get PDFThis Note argues that American treasure salvage law should implement the modern legal techniques of Alternative Dispute Resolution—specifically arbitration—to address the modern problems surrounding treasure salvage law. Part I of this Note provides an overview of the law governing treasure salvage law. This includes common law principles called the law of finds and the law of salvage as well as the governing United States law and international treaties. Part II will outline the problems with the current standing of treasure salvage law, particularly how it fails to address modern cultural heritage considerations such as scientific advancement and the proliferation of commercial salvors. Part III outlines a proposal suggesting that the United States adopt a policy of mandatory prelitigation arbitration among all interested parties for each salvaged shipwreck. This Note argues that mandated arbitration will resolve issues with cultural heritage, commercial salvage, and the rights of all key stakeholders in a more efficient manner than litigation.
This abstract has been taken from the author\u27s introduction
Core and Periphery in Constitutional Law
Get PDFThis paper embarks on an excursion through a number of the most vital constitutional rights cases, and other contexts as well, and seeks to show that the recurring judicial attempts to distinguish between core and peripheral areas within any given broad constitutional right are unnecessary and distracting. Intriguingly, the case for this conclusion varies significantly depending upon the nature of the general constitutional right in question. But the overall lesson is that courts should abandon their attempts to distinguish between core and peripheral areas of any given broad constitutional right. Courts should instead focus—directly or indirectly—on their best assessment of the purposes underlying, and the resulting scope and limits of, the broad constitutional right in question. Courts have, as well, a variety of alternative means of deciding any specific constitutional case that do not rely on inevitably vain attempts to distinguish between core and periphery
Plea Bargains: Efficient or Unjust?
Get PDFThe vast majority of state and federal cases end in plea bargains. The practice has eased backlogs and may benefit some defendants — but the trade-offs, some say, are too steep. Is there a better way
“You’ve Got a Friend in Me”: Helping Students Help AI
Get PDFChatGPT and its family of generative tools may seem new, but the process that ChatGPT imitates is as old as Egyptian papyri: The end-user still had to adapt the form text to each person’s unique situation.
Similarly, modern attorneys may use AI to adapt legal documents to their clients’ needs. But they must also learn how to spot problems in AI-generated documents — omissions, wrongful additions, inaccurate law, legalese, and poor typography. They need to instruct ChatGPT or other generative AI to continue revising until the document reflects best practices.
In short, our students as future attorneys need to know how to help AI be helpful. A student who hasn’t learned how to approach drafting or redrafting a good legal document will be at AI’s mercy rather than being able to use the AI tech to create good documents. A clueless student using AI is really no better off than generations of lawyers who have blindly recycled old forms that are full of problems.
Specifically, Charles and Cooney’s presentation will cover these topics: Brief history of legal forms (positive and negative) Survey results of how other disciplines are using AI A real-to-life positive approach to working with AI to generate legal documents Experience from incorporating AI into teaching Research & Writing, Advocacy, and Drafting How to arm students with knowledge about what makes a document sound, navigable, and enforceabl
Scheherazade, ChatGPT, and Me: Storytelling and AI
Get PDFHumans developed language to tell stories. Gesturing, demonstration, and vocalization worked for communicating instructions or basic information. But establishing and maintaining community required story, and story required language. Our desire to tell better stories and share them more widely has led to the creation of art forms from simple guitar ballads to epic motion pictures and intricate first-person video games. So it’s no wonder that, in the era of generative artificial intelligence, storytellers would be among the first to put AI to work. Storytellers have been using AI for years already to develop stories, which means that AI has itself become an accomplished storyteller. However, the stories that generative AI tells are not usually constrained by a factual record and legal precedent the way that legal stories are. It’s no wonder then that generative AI is not yet ubiquitous as a storytelling tool for lawyers. But it will be. In this presentation, I will model a process for training ChatGPT-4 on a factual record and relevant law. I will then model “coaching” ChatGPT-4 to generate a sequence of drafts, each one a better, more compelling draft of a trial or appellate Statement of Facts. Time permitting, I will also demonstrate how to use ChatGPT-4 tendency to “hallucinate” to draft assignments, including curated hypothetical facts, in seconds
Technology Integration in Higher Education and Student Privacy Beyond Learning Environments -- A Comparison of the UK and US Perspective
Get PDFTechnology integration in higher education (HE) has brought immense innovation. While research is investigating the benefits of leveraging, through learning analytics, the data created by the greater presence of technology in HE, it is also analysing the privacy implications of vast universes of data now at the fingertips of HE administrators. This paper argues that student privacy challenges linked to technology integration occur not only within but also beyond learning environments, namely at the enterprise level. By analysing the UK and US legal frameworks surrounding how HE institutions respond to parents demanding disclosure of their adult children\u27s personal data in the event of mental health crises, this paper offers an example of real and complex privacy issues, often overlooked by interdisciplinary inquiry, that exist in the ‘interstitial space’ between HE technology and privacy law. The purpose of conducting a comparative analysis was to demonstrate that countries with different privacy regimes are similarly ill-equipped to address certain student privacy issues at the HE enterprise level, leaving HEIs exposed to potential litigation/ regulatory risks. The contribution of this work is to invite greater interdisciplinary awareness of, and inquiry into, student privacy beyond learning environments