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The Corporate Transparency Act or an Expanded Customer Due Diligence Rule
Full text linkIn 2021, Congress passed the Corporate Transparency Act (“CTA”) to combat money laundering, terrorist financing, and other illicit activities by requiring certain business entities to report personal information about the individuals who own or control the business and those who helped create or register the business. The reported information will be held in a federal database controlled by the U.S. Department of the Treasury’s Financial Crimes Enforcement Network and can be disclosed upon request by domestic and foreign governmental agencies and financial institutions.
While the motivation behind the CTA is warranted due to the recent uncovering of illegal shell companies and reports of poor governmental policies and procedures, there are numerous issues with how the CTA is currently written. The definitions are overly broad and confusing to the average business owner and leave the door open for complex organizational structures to be exempt from compliance. Further, the CTA may intrude on many constitutional rights, such as the freedom of association, the right to privacy, and state sovereignty from the federal government.
A potential solution to fix these issues would be to expand the already well-established Customer Due Diligence Rule (“CDD Rule”) to include the new CTA requirements. The CDD Rule requires financial institutions to collect similar beneficial ownership information from companies when the companies go to open a bank account. By requiring the financial institutions to collect and retain the beneficial ownership information from the companies, the burdens of compliance and monitoring shift from the individual business owners to the financial institutions. The financial institutions likely have more capital and resources to understand and comply with these complex requirements. In addition, by moving the relationship away from the federal government and to the financial institutions, the potential constitutional issues could vanish
Black History Month Book Display 04
No full textClose up of book display created by Black Law Students Association in the law library from February through March 2025.https://scholarship.law.tamu.edu/black-history-month-2025-photos/1006/thumbnail.jp
Who Owns the Heat? Property Rights in Geothermal Energy
Full text linkLandowners can have ownership claims to oil, gas, water, and other tangible natural resources located in their subsoil. But can they also claim rights to the thermal energy found below their land? With 50,000 times more heat energy within the top 10,000 meters (around 33,000 feet) of the Earth’s surface than contained in all of the world’s oil and natural gas resources combined, geothermal energy is a tremendously promising, clean, and renewable energy resource. Yet, ambiguities in property rights related to the development and ownership of geothermal energy resources raise questions about who is entitled to benefit from that potential.The article explores questions of ownership rights and interests in geothermal energy—an incorporeal, uncontainable, natural resource that is better defined as a characteristic of underground formations rather than as a physical or tangible thing. More broadly, it looks at the effects various theoretical approaches to ownership might have on the development of geothermal energy resources.The underlying premise of the article is that absent clear property rules for ownership in geothermal energy, commercial and public investment in this promising, clean, renewable energy resource will remain limited. In contrast, clearly defined ownership interests could have profound implications for nearly every aspect of geothermal energy development—exploration, harvesting, conversion, and transfer of this distinct energy source—as well as for decarbonizing the economy
April 2025 Poetry Month Display Photo 12
No full text1st part of the poem Alabama contained in the book of poetry Felon by Reginald Dwayne Betts on display April 2025https://scholarship.law.tamu.edu/poetry-month-2025-photos/1015/thumbnail.jp
Optimal Real-Time Review Standards: Implications for Law Enforcement and Competitive Games
Full text linkReal-time review systems are frequently used in various sports to monitor the decisions of referees and correct their mistakes. Interventions through these systems cause delays in games, which are perceived as being costly. This makes it optimal for these review systems to interfere with the decisions of the referee less frequently than would minimize the costs of decision errors, which I formalize through an analysis of the VAR system in football. This analysis also reveals that optimal review standards ought to be laxer when an important event (e.g., a goal) occurs between the position in which the potential error took place and the VAR intervention. In the near future, it may be possible to introduce similar review systems in the law enforcement context, e.g., by utilizing police officers’ body cameras. I compare optimal intervention standards in this context to their analogues in the sports context, and discuss implications
Reviving Exclusion
Full text linkOver a century ago, 15 states enacted alien land laws designed to deprive Japanese immigrants of property rights. It took half a century for these laws to be repealed. Today, alien land laws are experiencing a strong revival in America. Twelve states have enacted new versions targeting the Chinese community, with seventeen states preparing to follow suit. This Paper provides a comprehensive analysis of this revival, tracing its legal roots to early 20th-century Supreme Court cases that upheld the constitutionality of the old alien land laws. These cases, referred to as “zombie cases,” remain on the books despite being irreconcilable with contemporary constitutional jurisprudence, particularly the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment. This Paper explores the power dynamics behind alien land law revivals through the Critical Race Theory (“CRT”) lens, particularly the Interests Convergence Theory. The widespread repeal of alien land laws in the 1960s was primarily due to the convergence of interests between mainstream America and the Japanese community, driven by a Cold War need to build alliances in Asia against the Soviet Union. Today, such convergence no longer exists. The revival of alien land laws occurred in a new geopolitical context: the New Cold War between China and the United States. Unlike the Japanese community, the interests of the Chinese community do not align with those of mainstream America. Instead, the strong adversarial stance towards China has reshaped the Chinese community’s racial identity in America, leading to a nationwide effort to enact theatrical anti-China laws, often with a bipartisan consensus to ignore their constitutional defects and discriminatory impact on the Chinese community. Compared with many other minority groups, mainstream America has demonstrated a higher tolerance toward civil rights violations against the Chinese community—a phenomenon this Paper refers to as the Chinese Exceptionalism. In the New Cold War, everything revolves around China, which is particularly damaging for the Chinese. Thus, this Paper proposes a modification to C.J. Kim’s Racial Triangulation Theory. The Chinese deserve their own spot on this triangulation: they are racialized as a community that is much more foreign than many other Asian communities due to their presumed connections with a geopolitical rivalry, and they are also considered culturally inferior due to the association with communism, which often operates as a negative racial identity that reinvents and justifies orientalism during a geopolitical crisis
Non-Traditional Fashion Trade MarksTo Protect or Not to Protect? Comparative Examples
No full textThis chapter discusses the protection of non-traditional trade marks (NTTMs)—which refer to shapes, colours, scents, sounds, positions, and multimedia marks, amongst others—in the fashion industry. In particular, it reviews several cases related to the protection, or lack thereof, of famous fashion NTTMs in several jurisdictions and, notably, Louboutin’s red sole design, LV’s Damier patterns, Gucci’s monograms and patterns, Hermès’ iconic Birkin and Kelly bags, and Adidas’ three-stripe mark in different countries. Through this analysis, this chapter shows how different cases related to the same marks in different jurisdictions indicate somewhat conflicting results, which confirms the ongoing struggle that courts and intellectual property (IP) offices still face when deciding whether to protect NTTMs and the conditions upon which to grant such protection