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Intellectual Property, Sustainability, and the Circular Economy: Friends or Foes in the Fashion Industry?
No full textThis chapter addresses the relationship between the traditional intellectual property (IP) system and the need to promote a sustainable and circular fashion industry. Notably, it criticizes the industry’s environmental impact and highlights how the enforcement of IP rights often hampers or flatly prevents third parties from engaging in practices that promote sustainability and circularity. In particular, this chapter reviews four practices focusing on waste reduction and resource efficiency, namely: (1) reusing, through reselling or renting, fashion items; (2) repairing products to their original appearance; (3) upcycling old products into new, appealing fashion items; and (4) recycling existing products to create new materials or product parts. For each of these practices, the chapter underlines the issues and obstacles that the traditional IP framework presents. The chapter concludes that IP laws can still operate as barriers to a sustainable and circular fashion industry. However, it also highlights several existing limitations and exceptions to IP rights that can be used to overcome these barriers and advocates that IP lawyers and the courts use them more effectively to promote a better fashion industry
The Not Seen Effect of International Financial Centers: Innovation in the Global Financial Ecosystem
No full textInternational Financial Centers (IFCs) are hubs of legal and financial innovation, developing specialized frameworks that facilitate cross-border investment, enhance global capital mobility, and support economic growth. Through jurisdictional competition, professional clustering, and adaptive regulatory frameworks, IFCs have pioneered legal structures that enable enterprises of all sizes to participate in the global economy. Using case studies of the International Business Company, the Limited Liability Company, the Protected Cell Company, and advances in trust law and applying the theoretical frameworks of social scientist Richard Florida and psychologist Mihalyi Csikszentmihalyi, this Article illustrates how IFCs serve as laboratories for financial experimentation, generating widely adopted legal solutions. Beyond creating new business structures, advanced IFCs contribute to the resilience of the global financial system by fostering professional networks, refining regulatory best practices, and enhancing legal certainty for international transactions. Although often mischaracterized as tax havens, IFCs play a far more significant role as centers of legal and financial creativity, shaping the modern global economy through innovation and institutional adaptation
The Great Unsettling: Administrative Governance After Loper Bright
No full text“Chevron is overruled.” These three words surely captured more attention than any others in the U.S. Supreme Court’s thirty-five-page opinion in Loper Bright Enterprises v. Raimondo. For forty years, the Chevron doctrine had been virtually synonymous with administrative law. Now that the Court has taken a step that many scholars thought unfathomable even just a few years ago, speculation abounds about the possible downstream impacts of Loper Bright on both what agencies will be able to do in the future and how lower courts will respond when reviewing agency action. The vast majority of early expert commentaries suggest major changes to the future of administrative governance. This article aims to put this early prognostication into perspective. We explain why it is difficult to know whether or how much Loper Bright will matter at this time, if we will ever really be able to tell. Both as a legal text and as an intervention into the complex web of institutional politics that constitute administrative governance, Loper Bright contains ambiguities that significantly cloud the picture of the future. In fact, the decision might best be thought of as something of a Rorschach test inside a crystal ball: different people can see different things in it, especially when they try to envision what comes next. And what they see may reflect more of what they are primed to see by their own cultural or ideological predispositions than by an underlying, confirmable reality. That is not to say that Loper Bright has not changed nor will not change administrative law. Nor is it to say that it will not have influential effects on the future practice of administrative governance. Rather, it is to say that predictions about the decision’s impacts cannot be made with anything approaching precision or certitude. We know that Loper Bright has shaken up the legal landscape—much like we can feel an earthquake when it literally shakes up the ground beneath our feet. But just as with real earthquakes, it will take time to assess what the full impacts of the Court’s legal tremors have been—and on which particular structures. Rather than make any definitive predictions about Loper Bright’s unsettling consequences, lawyers and scholars alike would do well to be attentive to the multiple ways that Loper Bright may (or may not) shape the future of administrative governance. We suggest here some of those possible ways and explain why it is so difficult to predict Loper Bright’s precise impact on future administrative governance—a conclusion that may itself prove to be as unsettling as the overturning of a forty-year-old precedent itself
Local Government Standing as State Standing
No full textIt is increasingly common, and controversial, for local governments to bring lawsuits as plaintiffs in federal court. Many questions about this practice raise matters that sound in policy. But some, including the issue of standing to sue, also raise issues of constitutional law. How local governments fit into standing rules should reflect how they fit into the U.S. constitutional system more broadly. As the Supreme Court put it in the famous (and infamous) 1907 case Hunter v. City of Pittsburgh, [m]unicipal corporations are political subdivisions of the State, created as convenient agencies for exercising such of the governmental powers of the State as may be entrusted to them. Local governments are arms of the state in our constitutional structure. The Hunter paradigm remains foundational in theory, but it oversimplifies matters in practice. Since the late nineteenth century, state law has granted localities increasing autonomy. Federal law, in turn, often treats localities as independent entities-with sometimes disparate results, including that while local governments are generally subject to the same constitutional burdens as states, they do not always enjoy the same benefits. Standing law provides local governments the worst of both worlds. As arms of the state, they are required by state law to conform their litigation conduct to state control. But as independent entities, they are prohibited by federal law from suing for harms beyond the limited set of injuries that private parties can suffer. So while there are good reasons to view municipalities as well situated to litigate both for themselves and on their citizens\u27 behalf, standing law places a substantial barrier at the proverbial courthouse doors. This Essay argues that standing law should take the foundational understanding of local governments as arms of the state seriously-not just to municipalities\u27 detriment, but also to their advantage. The law should view local government standing as state standing, such that states can, and frequently do, accord interests analogous to the state’s own and delegate authority to sue in the state’s place. This shift would allow localities to sue in more situations than current doctrine permits. But it would also respect the principle of ultimate state control
WOCC Women\u27s History Month Book Display 12
No full textClose up of book display created by Women of Color Collective in the law library March 2025 highlighting the book The Hate U Give by Angie Thomas.
Sixteen-year-old Starr Carter moves between two worlds: the poor neighborhood where she lives and the fancy suburban prep school she attends. The uneasy balance between these worlds is shattered when Starr witnesses the fatal shooting of her childhood best friend Khalil at the hands of a police officer. Khalil was unarmed. Soon afterward, his death is a national headline. Some are calling him a thug, maybe even a drug dealer and a gangbanger. Protesters are taking to the streets in Khalil’s name. Some cops and the local drug lord try to intimidate Starr and her family. What everyone wants to know is: what really went down that night? And the only person alive who can answer that is Starr. But what Starr does—or does not—say could upend her community. It could also endanger her life. ISBN: 978-0062498540.https://scholarship.law.tamu.edu/womens-history-month-2025-photos/1012/thumbnail.jp
An Introduction to U.S. Groundwater Law: Domestic and Transboundary Considerations
No full textIn light of the scientific and historical factors that have shaped the development of groundwater law and policy, this chapter seeks to provide a primarily descriptive account of its current state in the United States and to lay a foundation for future efforts to address gaps in the regime. Section 8B.02 considers the importance of groundwater in modern American society, with a particular focus on its uses and the threats these resources face. Section 8B.03 describes the U.S. framework for the domestic governance of groundwater resources. Section 8B.04 describes the mechanisms for transboundary governance of groundwater between the United States and its neighbors, Mexico and Canada. Section 8B.05 summarizes gaps in and future challenges for responsible groundwater governance in the United States
Constitution Day Sept 2025 Book Display 03
No full textClose-Up of the collection of books on display commemorating the celebration of Constitution & Citizenship Day on display in the law library September 2025.https://scholarship.law.tamu.edu/constitution-day-2025-photos/1003/thumbnail.jp
Dia De Los Muertos 2025 Display 07
No full textClose-up of the flor de muerto offered for the deceased loved ones on the display honoring the Day of the Dead.https://scholarship.law.tamu.edu/los-muertos-2025-photos/1006/thumbnail.jp
Pro Bono Week Oct 2025 Book Display 16
No full textClose-up shot of a few books in display for National Pro Bono Week in the law library October 2025.https://scholarship.law.tamu.edu/pro-bono-week-2025-photos/1016/thumbnail.jp
Indigenous Women Book Display 2025 15
No full textClose up of book display created by Women of Color Collective in the law library October 2025 highlighting the book Legal Codes and Talking Trees by Katrina Jagodinsky.https://scholarship.law.tamu.edu/indigenous-women-2025-photos/1012/thumbnail.jp