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Breaking Down Siloes and Building Up Students: The Transformational Possibilities of Professional Identity Formation
No full textUnder the ABA’s sequenced approach to implementation of Standard 303(b)(3), schools should now have developed plans for providing opportunities for professional identity formation and should be implementing them. These plans must provide students with an “intentional exploration of the values, guiding principles, and well-being practices considered foundational to successful legal practice.” In addition, these plans should provide for frequent opportunities for development, “during each year of law school and in a variety of courses and co-curricular and professional development activities.” Because Standard 303(b)(3) is necessarily tied to the unique character, existing structures, and available resources of a law school, each school’s plan will be different. That has been our experience as we have worked as professional identity formation leaders in different roles with varying perspectives: Lindsey Gustafson at the William H. Bowen School of Law, University of Arkansas at Little Rock, is a current Associate Dean for Academic Affairs and a skills and doctrinal professor; Aric Short at the Texas A&M School of Law is a former Associate Dean for Academic Affairs, a doctrinal professor, and currently serves as the Director of the Professionalism and Leadership Program; and Robin Thorner at St. Mary’s University School of Law is an Assistant Dean for Career Strategy, a teaching adjunct, and the current Director of Professional Identity Formation. In this essay, we hope to emphasize that professional identity formation efforts can occur all across the law school’s operations, from administrative offices to classrooms to voluntary student activities. We also provide specific examples of how schools can be more intentional and explicit as they weave together multiple professional identity formation opportunities for their students. This process takes time and attention, but it creates a powerful whole-building approach to identity formation that not only complies with 303(b)(3), but best positions our students for a successful, fulfilling, and impactful career in law
The 1619 Project: A New Origin Story
No full textThe 1619 Project reexamines the legacy of slavery in the United States by positioning the year 1619 when the first enslaved Africans arrived in Virginia as a foundational date in American history. The project argues that slavery and the contributions of Black Americans are central to the nation’s development, democracy, and identity. Through essays, poetry, and fiction, the project challenges traditional historical narratives, explores the enduring impacts of systemic racism, and highlights Black resistance and achievement. It seeks to reframe American history by placing the consequences of slavery and the experiences of Black Americans at the core of the national story.https://scholarship.law.tamu.edu/black-history-month-2025-works/1001/thumbnail.jp
Does Intellectual Property Promote or Hinder Sustainability? The Case of Upcycling
No full textThis book chapter explores upcycling and its intricate legal and ethical challenges, addressing the challenges upcycling faces from an IP perspective and highlighting the defenses potentially available to justify the practice
Murder on the Hearsay Trail
Get PDFJudges, lawyers, and law students struggle to apply American evidence law’s most distinctive feature—the hearsay prohibition. The problem is that hearsay is difficult to master and somewhat dull. At the same time, hearsay evidence is ubiquitous and important. Every litigator has a story about a judge’s eccentric hearsay rulings; mine is the trial judge who waved his hand dismissively at hearsay objections, letting witnesses answer on the grounds that “I want to hear it.” And the case law is littered with appellate opinions scolding trial judges for erroneous hearsay rulings while introducing errors of their own.
That is just the visible aspect of the problem. Lawyers are no better at hearsay than judges. Yet for every trial, there are countless non-trial resolutions where no evidence is presented, much less ruled upon. When hearsay is involved, parties evaluate the wisdom of these dispositions (dismissals, settlements, and guilty pleas) with only a rough understanding of the evidence that would be admissible at trial.
This Article attempts to remedy this unsettling state of affairs. First, to get around the dullness problem, it weaves hearsay analysis into a mystery in the spirit of a John Grisham novel. The fictional tale of intrigue and murder twists and turns while dropping clues that ultimately solve the case. Then, the Article tackles hearsay’s complexity by solving the evidentiary puzzles inherent in those clues, which represent key inflection points in the doctrine. By explaining which clues can be presented to the jury, and how those answers evolved over time, the Article paints the modern American hearsay landscape and rehabilitates its (unfairly) reviled rules. Finally, the Article explains why—if we are going to have a hearsay prohibition—this is as good as it gets. Contrary to the complaints of numerous critics, the current hearsay definition is the simplest of the alternatives and offers the best results
The Subfederal in Immigration Polarization
Get PDFThe framing of subfederal immigration regulation as a red- blue divide is conventional wisdom. As more states, cities, and counties have engaged in the regulation of immigrants within their jurisdictions, it is not particularly surprising to see deep-red states like Texas enacting laws that restrict the rights of immigrants in their jurisdictions (e.g., requiring police within the state to honor detainers issued by United States Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE)) or deep-blue states like California enacting laws that protect immigrants’ rights (e.g., issuing driver’s licenses without requiring proof of lawful immigration status).
Rather than only reflecting national polarization on immigration issues, however, our empirical study shows that subfederal immigration regulation has contributed to increasing national polarization on immigration issues. Using our unique Immigrant Climate Index (ICI) and over fifteen years of subfederal immigration legislation data, we find that subfederal regulation initially crossed red-blue lines more frequently, with blue jurisdictions enacting restrictive laws and red jurisdictions enacting integrationist laws.
Starting with the Obama Administration, subfederal regulation has become more partisan, which has increased national partisanship in two important ways. First, as national legislative policy remains gridlocked on immigration issues, regulation has devolved to smaller, more partisan state legislatures or city councils. This change then extends regulation to include policies and issues that are primarily, if not exclusively, within local control (e.g., access to private housing or professional licenses). Thus, as local governments regulate immigration through local policies, they create more substantive issues about which to express immigration disagreement in the national debate. Second, we identify a copycat counter-effect dynamic between subfederal governments, as the enactment of a novel, controversial immigration regulation often inspires duplication and then a counter-reaction as protest effect. For example, Arizona’s infamous S.B. 1070 law (requiring law enforcement officers to verify the immigration status of detained persons whom officers suspect are in the United States illegally) inspired copycat laws in Utah, Georgia, Indiana, Alabama, and South Carolina. These restrictive laws, in turn, engendered protest legislation, like California’s “anti-Arizona” TRUST Act that greatly restricts police in honoring immigration detainers. Further, as more formerly federal policies (like abortion) devolve to the subfederal level, our analysis of polarization trends in immigration provides insights into polarization in other policy areas
WIPO Negotiations on Intellectual Property, Genetic Resources and Associated Traditional Knowledge
Get PDFAt the 2000 General Assembly, the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO) established the Intergovernmental Committee on Intellectual Property and Genetic Resources, Traditional Knowledge and Folklore (IGC) to address intellectual property issues relating to genetic resources, traditional knowledge (TK) and traditional cultural expressions (TCEs). Although the IGC initially focused its work on studying these issues, it obtained a new mandate to accelerate its work in October 2009 and began text-based negotiations on an international instrument, or international instruments, a few months later. These negotiations paved the way for WIPO to convene a diplomatic conference to conclude an International Legal Instrument Relating to Intellectual Property, Genetic Resources and Traditional Knowledge Associated with Genetic Resources. Held in Geneva in May 2024, this conference resulted in the establishment of the new WIPO Treaty on Intellectual Property, Genetic Resources and Associated Traditional Knowledge. Written for the 2024 Intellectual Property Issue and before the adoption of the new treaty, this article focuses on developments surrounding the WIPO negotiations on genetic resources, TK and TCEs. It begins by scrutinizing the Basic Proposal the IGC released in the run-up to the WIPO Diplomatic Conference. It examines five provisions that have posed challenges to, or raised complications for, the negotiations as well as the ongoing and future efforts to strengthen the protection of TK and TCEs at the international level. The article then draws five reflections from the WIPO negotiations. These reflections will help evaluate the outcome of the Diplomatic Conference while also informing the future development of the international intellectual property regime, particularly in the areas of genetic resources, TK and TCEs
CISG
Get PDFThis survey article discusses cases during the prior year, which are decided based on one or more provisions of the United Nations Convention on Contracts for the International Sale of Goods (CISG). The CISG is a United Nations treaty that provides a uniform international sales law. It was adopted in Vienna in 1980 and went into effect in 1988. The CISG governs contracts for the international sale of goods between businesses located in different countries that have ratified the treaty. It has been adopted by 95+ countries, including major trading nations like the United States, China, and most European countries. The CISG governs unless the parties expressly contract otherwise. It governs contract formation, obligations of buyers and sellers, remedies for breach, and passing of risk. It doesn\u27t apply to consumer sales, services contracts, or certain excluded goods like ships or aircraft. This year’s survey includes cases discussing: (1) the applicability of the CISG, (2) the CISG’s preemption of certain tort claims, (3) contract formation, (4) the lack of a formal statute of frauds writing requirement, (5) contract interpretation, (6) conformity of goods, (7) breach of contract, (8) recovery of attorney’s fees, and (9) recovery of prejudgment interest
Why MLP Legal Care Should Be Financed as Health Care
Get PDFMedical-legal partnership (MLP) integrates the unique expertise of lawyers into collaborative clinical environments. MLP teams meet the needs of individual patients while also detecting structural problems at the root of health inequities and advancing solutions at the institutional, community, and system levels. Yet MLPs today operate in limited settings and survive on scant budgets. Expanding their impact requires secure funding. Financing MLPs as health care can do the following: (1) help address inequity at the point of care; (2) enable expert diagnosis and treatment of nonmedical drivers of health; (3) enhance team-based practice in health care organizations; (4) offer another way for clinicians to participate in advocacy; and (5) bolster a broader movement to increase access to justice
A Reputational View of Antitrust’s Consumer Welfare Standard
Get PDFA reform movement is underway in antitrust. Citing prior enforcement failures, deviations from the original intent of the antitrust laws, and overall rising levels of sector concentration, some are seeking to fundamentally alter or altogether replace the current consumer welfare standard, which has guided courts over the past fifty years. This policy push has sparked an intense debate over the best approach to antitrust law enforcement. In this Article, we examine a previously unexplored potential social cost from moving away from the consumer welfare standard: a loss in the information value to the public from a finding of liability. A virtue of the current standard is the knowledge that firms who violate the antitrust laws have harmed consumers. This simple reality is a direct, easy-to-interpret signal to market participants and investors. In contrast, a broader and more nebulous standard—such as a “public interest” approach, which has been proposed by some academics and agency officials—could conceivably water down the information value of a finding of liability. In essence, the greater the license that regulators and courts have to condemn a business practice beyond a finding of harm to consumers, the noisier the signal to the public about what the verdict means. We can call this phenomenon “the stigma dilution effect.” To that end, we develop a formal model to gain insight into the role of reputation in the enforcement and deterrence effects of antitrust laws. The model reveals that broadening the welfare standard is likely to weaken the reputational impact of antitrust violations. This dilution can, in turn, have implications that go against what the proponents of abolishing the consumer welfare standard desire. Namely, a new standard could increase, rather than decrease, the frequency of conduct they seek to deter. Thus, our analysis suggests there may be important and underappreciated costs associated with departures from the consumer welfare standard. In fact, the presence of reputational considerations suggests that these departures can produce effects contrary to the stated goals of their proponents
War & IP
Get PDFOn February 24, 2022, war broke out between Russia and Ukraine, sparking concerns among government leaders, intergovernmental bodies and the public at large. A month later, the Russian government issued Decree 299, which reduced to zero the royalty rate for national security-based compulsory licenses to intellectual property rights held by individuals or entities originating from the United States or other unfriendly nations. Meanwhile, the United States and other members of the international community imposed sanctions on Russia, raising questions about whether those sanctions would prevent U.S. companies and individuals from engaging with Russian intellectual property agencies. Many multinational corporations also withdrew from the Russian market.The Russo-Ukrainian War has raised important questions that have been virtually unexplored in intellectual property literature. To fill this gap, the present article examines wartime and postwar protection of intellectual property rights. It begins by showing that armed conflicts are not new to the international intellectual property regime and that this regime already contains robust structural features and carefully drafted safeguards, limitations and flexibilities to protect intellectual property rights holders during wartime. This article then explores the international intellectual property obligations of countries that are parties to an armed conflict as well as those that are not directly involved but have imposed sanctions on belligerent states. To cover developments in areas relating to international trade, investment and intellectual property laws, this analysis focuses on the WTO TRIPS Agreement, bilateral investment agreements and regional or plurilateral trade agreements that include intellectual property and investment chapters.This article further outlines the different proactive measures that policymakers can introduce to help protect intellectual property rights holders during and in relation to an armed conflict. The discussion specifically explores the development of domestic measures, international mechanisms and academic and policy research. The article concludes by probing the deeper theoretical questions generated by wartime and postwar experiences in relation to innovation theory, intellectual property law and international law