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Earth Art in the Great Acceleration: Times/Counter-Times, Monuments/Counter-Monuments
Get PDFThis article attempts to situate land art in the deserts of the US Southwest in terms of the works’ relation to and rupture with more traditional genres (seventeenth to twentieth centuries) of parks, gardens, and landscape architecture. It argues that the earlier works provide implicit answers to questions concerning Earth’s meaning and offer models of flourishing habitation. In contrast, the more recent works, all constructed in the era of the great acceleration (the Anthropocene), pose questions having to do with new challenges posed by climate change and the devastation of the Earth
Venture Capital\u27s ESG Problem
Get PDFVenture capital (“VC”) is repeatedly described as one of the “crown jewels” of the U.S. economy for its role in financing startups and innovation. However, recent corporate scandals, including fraud, have exposed a darker side of the VC industry and the startups in which venture capitalists (“VCs”) invest. For example, Theranos received $686 million in VC funding yet proved to be nothing more than a “house of cards” once it came to light that Theranos falsified blood test results. When Theranos founder Elizabeth Holmes was convicted of fraud, many VCs tried to distance themselves, saying Theranos was an exception and that most of Theranos’s financing did not come from VC. Nevertheless, in the wake of Theranos, fraud and mismanagement of VC-backed companies has continued
Biopiracy: Using New Laws and Databases to Protect Indigenous Communities
Get PDFIndigenous people have a historical link to those who inhabited a country or region at the time when people of different cultures or origins arrived. Traditionally, indigenous people have a special relationship with their ancestral environments. But their way of living has long been under threat. The land that indigenous people live on is home to over 80% of our planet’s biodiversity, but it continues to be appropriated and plundered due to bioprospecting or, as some call it, biopiracy. Bioprospecting is defined as “the exploration and information gathering of genetic and biochemical material to develop commercial products.” While innovation is welcomed in our society, bioprospecting often involves fundamental issues of injustice and unfairness. The injustice and unfairness present during bioprospecting led to the creation of the term “biopiracy,” which is when corporations, researchers, and scientists use sources from nature and traditional knowledge without consent and exploit the indigenous cultures from which they have obtained their information. When the term biopiracy was first coined in 1993 by Pat Mooney, president of the Rural Advancement Foundation International, he defined it as:
[T]he use of intellectual property systems to legitimize the exclusive ownership and control of biological resources and knowledge, without recognition, compensation or protection for contributions from indigenous and rural communities . . .
From Suspension to Mass Incarceration: Punishment of Students with Special Needs and the School-To-Prison Pipeline
Get PDFSince their inception in the late 1980s, zero-tolerance policies have been a cornerstone of American school discipline. Passed by legislators with the intent of protecting school children, these policies have disparately upended the education of marginalized students. School discipline of vulnerable students often paves the way to juvenile incarceration, which in turn exponentially increases the likelihood of adult incarceration. Moreover, students with disabilities, especially students of color with learning disabilities, are often physically pushed out of their classrooms through suspensions and other harsh disciplinary policies. This is only made worse by the presence of law enforcement in schools, who treat “difficult” students as suspects rather than individuals in need of support.
All students with learning disabilities are entitled to a free, appropriate public education, and this right is safeguarded through legislation such as the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (“IDEA”). However, vulnerable students often fall through the cracks of this law in a way that mirrors the trends of adult mass incarceration. If students were given the individualized attention they need rather than punishment and suspension, schools would be more effective in reaching students of all backgrounds and fewer students will be pushed from classroom to prison
Free to Learn: Protecting Muslim Students in Public Schools, Case Precedent and Social Theory in the Fight to Protect Their Rights
Get PDFIn the aftermath of 9/11, anti-Muslim American sentiments surged. With social tensions escalating as a result of the ongoing Israel-Gaza war and, what many feel is xenophobic rhetoric from high profile political figures, discrimination against Muslim Americans has further grown. Muslim youth in this country have experienced acute discrimination that has the potential to make school an uncomfortable and hostile place. This article explains the different ways in which Muslim American students experience discrimination and provides a roadmap for how administrators, activists, attorneys, and advocates can use the long and storied history of American civil rights litigation to protect the rights of Muslim students in K-12 schools. School leaders, district administrators, education lawyers, and civil rights groups will find the insights presented in this piece a helpful resource in defending the rights of the students they serve
Filling the Red State Federal Judicial Vacancies
Get PDFDistrict vacancies without nominees that plague red jurisdictions deserve emphasis in this Essay for several reasons. First, there are myriad district court jurists who trigger greater numbers of empty posts when they assume senior status, retire, or die, which triggers more issues. Legislators have created 677 active trial court positions, which dwarf the 179 active court of appeals judicial posts. The trial courts are tribunals of last resort for most cases; their numerous jurists are the only court members that many litigants encounter, and significantly more district court openings lack nominees. In contrast, appellate courts explicitly articulate considerable policy, include multiple states, and enunciate precedent, which strictly binds trial level judges in each circuit’s purview.
Vacancies’ substantial quantity and protracted character impose serious complications. Extensive openings increase pressure on all jurists, court staff, and litigants by prolonging resolution. Litigants who file civil suits particularly feel the pressure of judicial vacancies. The prevalence and duration of many red state trial court vacancies without nominees essentially inflict adverse effects that may prevent judges from satisfying their duties to ensure expeditious, inexpensive, and equitable disposition under Federal Rule of Civil Procedure 1. Accordingly, that issue requires scrutiny, which this Essay undertakes
Communicating Justice...With Comics
Get PDFThis mini-comic was created for a presentation at the SubTech 2024 conference, hosted by Northwestern Law in Chicago, Illinois. It explains why and how comics can help improve access to justice. It also includes tips on using Artificial Intelligence and recommendations for finding cartoon artists..https://scholarship.richmond.edu/law-comics/1010/thumbnail.jp
The Scales Project: Making Federal Court Records Free
Get PDFFederal court records have been available online for nearly a quarter century, yet they remain frustratingly inaccessible to the public. This is due to two primary barriers: (1) the federal government’s prohibitively high fees to access the records at scale and (2) the unwieldy state of the records themselves, which are mostly text documents scattered across numerous systems. Official datasets produced by the judiciary, as well as third-party data collection efforts, are incomplete, inaccurate, and similarly inaccessible to the public. The result is a de facto data blackout that leaves an entire branch of the federal government shielded from empirical scrutiny. In this Essay, we introduce the SCALES project: a new data-gathering and data-organizing initiative to right this wrong. SCALES is an online platform that we built to assemble federal court records, systematically organize them and extract key information, and—most importantly—make them freely available to the public. The database currently covers all federal cases initiated in 2016 and 2017, and we intend to expand this coverage to all years.
This Essay explains the shortcomings of existing systems (such as the federal government’s PACER platform), how we built SCALES to overcome these inadequacies, and how anyone can use SCALES to empirically analyze the operations of the federal courts. We offer a series of exploratory findings to showcase the depth and breadth of the SCALES platform. Our goal is for SCALES to serve as a public resource where practitioners, policymakers, and scholars can conduct empirical legal research and improve the operations of the federal courts. For more information, visit www.scales-okn.org