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Vol. 36, No. 3
Get PDFA New Day for Illinois: Expectations on the Impacts of the J. B. Pritzker Administrationhttps://scholarship.kentlaw.iit.edu/iperr/1110/thumbnail.jp
Exposing the Unconstitutionality of the Illinois Firearm Concealed Carry Act
Get PDFWhile the right to bear arms may be controversial, it is nonetheless provided by the Second Amendment to the United States Constitution. States are lawfully able to limit people’s right to bear arms to an extent but must not go so far where a State’s limits ultimately infringe upon that right. The Seventh Circuit in Culp v. Raoul pushed the limits to which a State may restrict a person’s Second Amendment right. In Culp, the court determined whether the Illinois Firearm Concealed Carry Act was constitutional. The Illinois Firearm Concealed Carry prohibits nonresidents from applying for an Illinois concealed carry license if the nonresidents do not live in a state with substantially similar concealed carry requirements to Illinois. The court applied the standard intermediate scrutiny to analyze the constitutionality of the substantial similarity requirement. As a result, the court found the substantial similarity provision of the Illinois Firearm Concealed Carry Act was constitutional. Courts have found laws which act as a total ban against a person’s rights to bear arms do not warrant a standard of scrutiny and are unconstitutional. However, if a law merely burdens a person’s Second Amendment right, courts traditionally analyze the constitutionality of a law within the scope of the Second Amendment under one of two methods: intermediate scrutiny or strict scrutiny. Intermediate scrutiny is generally appropriate for laws which burden a person’s ability to exercise their Second Amendment right outside of their home. An exception to the substantial similarity requirement permitted nonresidents to bear arms in any homes they owned within Illinois, so intermediate scrutiny was the appropriate tier for review. However, the Seventh Circuit in Ezell v. City of Chicago found intermediate scrutiny is a sliding scale, where a state law can warrant a more rigorous review without changing levels. As a result, the court in Ezell recognized what would later be coined as “elevated intermediate scrutiny,” a standard more rigorous than intermediate scrutiny, but not quite strict scrutiny. This Note argues the substantial similarity requirement of the Illinois Firearm Concealed Carry Act warranted an analysis under elevated intermediate scrutiny. While the substantial similarity requirement only restricts nonresidents’ Second Amendment right outside their home, the requirement comes close to acting as a total ban to nonresidents. Yet, the court in Culp failed to analyze the substantial similarity requirement under elevated intermediate scrutiny. If the Seventh Circuit in Culp applied an analysis of elevated intermediate scrutiny as it should have, the court would have found that the Illinois Firearm Concealed Carry Act is unconstitutional
Piercing the Bubble: Why Bubble Zone Regulations are Content Based Restrictions on Speech
Get PDFWhile the Due Process Clause provides a right to privacy, including the right to access to abortion, the First Amendment provides the right to speak publicly against abortion. The clash between those two constitutional rights is most evident outside of abortion clinics, where protestors frequently gather to protests, or “counsel,” those seeking abortions. To ensure that those who wish to speak against abortions are not effectively prohibiting other\u27s right to access to abortions, many municipalities have enacted strict restrictions on the ability to congregate and protests outside of reproductive healthcare facilities. By design, and in their effect, the laws target only certain kind of speech—speech against abortions— and therefore they are textbook content-based regulations subject to strict scrutiny. Yet, in Hill v. Colorado, the Supreme Court went to great lengths to find that such laws are not content-based and thus only subject to intermediate scrutiny. Twenty years later, it is evident that Hill\u27s content-based analysis cannot be squared with subsequent Supreme Court precedent. As the dissenters in Hill pointed out, the Court\u27s content-neutral analysis was outcome driven: the Court wanted to find the law content neutral in order to subject the law to a lower level of scrutiny. Indeed, in virtually all other context, not involving abortion, the Court has no problem applying its traditional content neutrality test. But when dealing with abortion protests, the Court ignores its own precedent and appears to create an entirely new legal framework. Such legal gymnastics should be avoided. Instead, the Court should recognize these laws for what they are: content based restrictions on speech. This recognition does not have to be fatal to the laws because the state likely has a compelling governmental interest in ensuring access to abortions. Therefore, validity of the laws will turn on tailoring, which can be easily achieved in this context
Harmonizing the Liner Notes: How the USCO’s Adoption of Metadata Standards Will Improve the Efficiency of Licensing Agreements for Audiovisual Works
Get PDFIt is no secret that making a living as a musician is not as lucrative of a proposition as it was a generation ago. For this reason, musicians have had to diversify their sources of income. Placement of a song in advertisements, film, or television programs have become an integral part of many successful musician’s careers, but far too many independent artists still find these opportunities out of reach. This disparity is often the result of technical deficiencies in the audio files submitted for consideration, making it difficult to identify and contact the requisite rights holders in order to negotiate a sync license. This article proposes that the consistent application of uniform metadata to audio files could solve this problem and argues that the United State Copyright Office should be empowered by Congress to issue metadata identifiers as a part of the copyright registration process for audio files. Such a change to the registration process would have the beneficial effects of ensuring a reliable method of rights holder authentication and lay down critical legal infrastructure which would promote the formation of a publicly searchable database of copyrighted songs, both developments will make it easier for those looking to license songs for audiovisual works from musicians to get in touch the proper parties in order to facilitate these transactions
The Art of Future Life: Rethinking Personal Injury Law for the Negligent Deprivation of a Patient\u27s Right to Procreation in the Age of Assisted Reproductive Technologies
Get PDFWhat Members of Congress Say About the Supreme Court and Why It Matters
Get PDFRepublican and Democratic senators took strikingly different approaches to Justice Neil Gorsuch’s confirmation hearing. Republicans focused on judicial process—what judges are supposed to do, how they are constrained, and the significance of the constitutional separation of powers—evoking rhetoric long used by the political right. Democrats, by contrast, focused primarily on case outcomes, complaining, for example, that Gorsuch favored “the big guy” over “the little guy” in cases he decided as a judge on the Tenth Circuit. This Article critiques the Democrats’ failure to discuss judicial process and to promote their own affirmative vision of the judiciary and the Constitution. A process-focused critique of Gorsuch’s jurisprudence could have challenged his claims that textualism necessarily constrains judges and is required by the separation of powers. Such a critique need not have ignored the real-world implications of Gorsuch’s jurisprudence and indeed could have demonstrated how his approach can undermine congressional efforts to protect ordinary people. Process language would also have allowed Democrats to use discussions of iconic cases like Brown v. Board of Education to demonstrate their commitment to the Constitution’s promises of equality and liberty and their expectation that any Supreme Court Justice embrace those principles. In future, Democrats should use confirmation hearings not only as an opportunity to question the nominee, but also as a chance to articulate their constitutional vision to the American people. The political right has shown how powerful this strategy can be. The political left should do the same
Layering, Conversion, and Drifting: A Comparative Analysis of Path Dependent Change in Consumer Insolvency Systems
Get PDFThe past twenty-five years have been marked by major developments in consumer insolvency systems around the world. The threshold challenge for comparative scholars is to keep up with the changes occurring in individual countries, as a necessary—but preliminary—step toward broader comparisons of the historical, social, and institutional forces in consumer bankruptcy. In order for deeper work to take place, though, the field needs consensus on what factors are most useful to analyze. Moreover, the dynamic environment of consumer insolvency requires a framework for analysis that is flexible and adaptable enough to provide insights notwithstanding the rapid changes in the field.
Enter historical institutionalism, which Professor Iain Ramsay has proposed as a useful lens for broadly evaluating changes in consumer insolvency systems. In particular, Professor Ramsay argues that in order to take comparative consumer bankruptcy past its current descriptive stage, scholars should focus more carefully on the roles of various institutional actors in facilitating or impeding change in consumer insolvency law.
Drawing on the foundational descriptive work of consumer insolvency scholars, this Article responds to Professor Ramsay’s invitation by using the tools of historical institutionalism to analyze modern trends in seven different insolvency systems. Specifically, I identify the key actors in each system and their role in contributing to legal change. I then evaluate the trends of legal change in each country, with a particular eye toward whether the trends have improved outcomes for consumers and reduced the inefficiencies caused by irrational sorting. My analysis suggests that countries whose insolvency systems have been entrusted to powerful public actors have evolved in pro-consumer ways, while countries whose systems depend on private professionals have trended in the opposite direction. These insights may be helpful for countries that are in the process of designing consumer insolvency systems, as well as for systems that find themselves stuck in suboptimal outcomes and are interested in pursuing effective reform