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An Interview with W.C. Jefferson (part two)
Get PDFThe second part of Jefferson’s oral history interview took place in the Reeder Media Center on October 11, 2023, and covers Jefferson’s story post-graduation. After law school, Jefferson returned with his family to Ohio where he was dean of students at his alma mater, Central State University. He then described working as a public defender in Dayton, Ohio, particularly enjoying negotiation work. In coping with PTSD, Jefferson moved to Tucson, Arizona where became a contracts administrator for Hughes Aircraft. Jefferson then described taking a new position in Saudi Arabia, where he lived and worked for five years. Wanting to return to the US, Jefferson then took a position as a negotiator before taking up teaching, later returning to Saudi Arabia for his present job representing the business interests of a member of the Saudi royal family. The interview concluded with Jefferson describing lessons he learned from the law school and the legacy of the law school today.https://scholarship.law.wm.edu/oralhist_all/1007/thumbnail.jp
Using What We Have: How Existing Legal Authorities Can Help Fix America\u27s Nursing Home Crisis
Get PDFThe COVID-19 pandemic exposed systemic quality-of-care problems in American nursing homes as well as the deadly consequences of a regulatory system that has enabled nursing homes to divert funds needed for care to profit. Policy experts have responded by urging regulators to improve nursing-home oversight practices and by calling for new regulatory and statutory authority to increase accountability. These calls, however, have been met with sharp political headwinds. This Article suggests a path around the political impasse. Specifically, it identifies and explores four opportunities to leverage existing statutory schemes to create stronger incentives for nursing homes to provide high-quality care. It then explores how politics, administrative complexity, and ageism have come together to prevent this existing authority from being used to its full potential. It concludes by situating the current regulatory failure to hold nursing homes accountable in the context of a larger discussion about the costs of federalism in the health care arena
The Evolution of Sodomy Decriminalization Jurisprudence in Transnational and Comparative Constitutional Perspective
Get PDFIn this Article, I demonstrate that legal mobilization by activist litigants combined with a comparative methodological jurisprudence has been central to the “transnational legal process” of the generation and diffusion of the sodomy decriminalization norm since the 1950s. My analysis of the transnational comparative jurisprudence relies on a comprehensive legal survey of seven decades of decriminalization jurisprudence (1954–2022), primarily using successful cases. Although the scholarship on the well-known Dudgeon, Toonen, and NCGLE cases often asserts the influence that these cases had on subsequent domestic court constitutional jurisprudence, I suggest that it is the domestic privacy jurisprudence of lobbyists, legislators, claimants, and judges from the United Kingdom and United States in the 1950s through 1970s that shaped the claims-making in Dudgeon and Toonen. Conversely, I argue that the difference between the outcomes in Bowers v. Hardwick and Lawrence v. Texas can be explained in part by developments in transnational equality and human dignity jurisprudence that resulted in a shift from the privacy legal frame to the equality and human dignity legal frame and a shift from a spatial conception of privacy to a decisional (personal choice) conception of privacy. Additionally, I move beyond scholarship centered on European and U.S. case law to include the jurisprudence from the Global South (2005 to present) that, to my knowledge, has yet to be analyzed systematically and comparatively. My Article is among the first to analyze the five landmark decriminalization cases decided in 2022, and one of the few that discusses judicialized sodomy decriminalization in transnational and comparative constitutional perspective.
This inquiry is retrospective: how has legal mobilization and comparative methodological jurisprudence contributed to understandings of sexual freedom and the justifications for sexual freedom? But it is prospective as well. Sixty-six countries retain sodomy prohibitions; will the sodomy decriminalization trend continue, and if so, what role(s) will legal mobilizations play? There is also the question of backlash and retrenchment—whether homosexual conduct will be recriminalized in jurisdictions that have decriminalized. In 2022, in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, Justice Clarence Thomas essentially invited reactionary and regressive forces in society to bring to the U.S. Supreme Court cases that would overturn Griswold v. Connecticut and its progeny in the LGBTQ rights space—Lawrence and Obergefell v. Hodges. I recommend activists and their allies begin the work of upholding Griswold, Lawrence, and Obergefell by exploring not only U.S. domestic jurisprudence but also transnational jurisprudence—in international human rights law and comparative constitutional law—to support the continued legalization of adult, consensual, same-sex sexual conduct and same-sex marriage
Legal Order at the Border
Get PDFFor generations, the United States has grappled with high levels of illegal immigration across the U.S.-Mexico border. This Article offers a novel theoretical framework to explain why legal order remains elusive at the border. Drawing inspiration from Lon Fuller’s “interactional view of law,” I argue that immigration law cannot attract compliance unless it is general, public, prospective, clear, consistent, and stable; obedience with its rules is feasible; and the law’s enforcement is congruent with the rules as enacted. The flagrant violation of any one of these principles could frustrate the development of a functional legal order. Remarkably, U.S. immigration law violates all of these principles in its treatment of asylum seekers. As the number of asylum seekers pursuing entry to the United States has risen sharply in recent years, these legality deficits have become increasingly salient. No wonder, then, that even the most aggressive deterrent measures — from mass prosecution to family separation to the construction of steel border walls — have failed to solve the United States’ border crisis. The United States faces an urgent dilemma: it may preserve the Immigration and Nationality Act (“INA”) in its current form, denying protection to too many forced migrants and reserving broad discretion to the Executive Branch, or it may establish a functional legal order at the border. It cannot have both.
If lawmakers were serious about establishing legal order at the border, there are measures they could take to strengthen the immigration system’s structural integrity. They could eliminate the Attorney General’s discretionary authority over asylum. They could clarify ambiguities in the INA to promote greater consistency, stability, and congruence in immigration adjudication and enforcement. They could extend protection to all forced migrants who face a serious risk of death, torture, rape, or other serious harm abroad, including victims of gang violence and gender-based violence. In short, they could enact laws that asylum seekers could rationally obey. To the extent that lawmakers are unwilling to take these steps, it is fair to question their commitment to establishing a functional legal order at the border
Creating Land with Artificial Oyster Rings: Legal Challenges from State Owned Bottom Land to Living Shorelines
Get PDFThe Virginia Sea Grant program approached VCPC to conduct research in partnership with the William & Mary Public Policy Program and a James Madison University (JMU) architecture professor, Jori Erdman. Professor Erdman is researching the viability of creating land with artificial oyster rings based on similar projects seen in Louisiana. Professor Erdman has provided the diagrams of the project used throughout this paper. Ultimately, this paper examines some legal issues raised by the use of these rings to prevent coastal erosion or act as a flooding buffer for commercial or residential buildings. With this goal in mind, this paper addresses three key issues: (1) the legal ramifications if the private property ownership line shifts; (2) the legal ramifications if the Resource Protection Area (RPA) shifts; and (3) whether the project can be considered a living shoreline under relevant statutes and guidance.
This abstract has been taken from the authors\u27 introduction