Cornell Law School Logo - white on transparent background

Category: Current CLR Print Vol.

Article

Addiction and Liberty

Matthew B. Lawrence

Associate Professor of Law, Emory Law; Affiliate Faculty, Harvard Law School, Petrie-Flom Center for Health Law Policy, Bioethics, and Biotechnology.

This Article explores the interaction between addiction and liberty and identifies a firm legal basis for recognition of a fundamental constitutional right to freedom from addiction. Government interferes with freedom from addiction when it causes addiction or restricts addiction treatment, and government may protect freedom from addiction through legislation empowering individuals against private actors’ efforts…

Apr 2023

Article

Municipal Failures

Nancy Leong

William M. Beaney Memorial Research Chair and Professor of Law, University of Denver Sturm College of Law.

Calls for reforming the civil rights enforcement regime often focus on individual government officers. Recent years have brought demands to abolish qualified immunity—a defense that protects individual officers from liability so long as they did not violate clearly established law—and to end indemnification—a practice in which government employers satisfy judgments against their employees. This Article…

Apr 2023

Note

Unequal Protection: Challenges to Serious Mental Illness Exemptions from the Death Penalty

Claire M. Piorkowski

J.D. Candidate, Cornell Law School, 2023; B.A. in Political Science, University of Cincinnati, 2020.

This Note explores the contention that Ohio House Bill 136 and similar proposed bills with a diagnosis-based categorical approach to death penalty exemptions violate seriously mentally ill individuals’ rights under the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment by limiting the scope of eligible mental illnesses to a narrow subset of specified disorders. This Note…

Apr 2023

Note

Politicization of State Attorneys General: How Partisanship is Changing the Role for the Worse

Marissa A. Smith

J.D. Cornell Law School; B.S. University of Texas at Austin.

The position of State AG has long been said to stand for ‘Aspiring Governor’ rather than Attorney General. It is remarkable how the significance of that joke has changed as the role has become one of the most influential in the country.2 What began as insolent mockery is now a fearsome truth. State attorneys general…

Apr 2023

Article

If We Build It, Will They Legislate? Empirically Testing the Potential Testing the Potential of the Nondelegation Doctrine to Curb Congressional “Abdication”

Daniel E. Walters & Elliot Ash

Associate Professor of Law, Texas A&M University School of Law & Assistant Professor, Law, Economics, and Data Science, ETH Zurich.

A widely held view for why the Supreme Court would be right to revive the nondelegation doctrine is that Congress has perverse incentives to abdicate its legislative role and evade accountability through the use of delegations (either expressly delineated or implied through statutory imprecision), and that enforcement of the nondelegation doctrine would correct for those…

Apr 2023

Article

Perceptions of Justice in Multidistrict Litigation: Voices from the Crowd

Elizabeth Chamblee Burch, Fuller E. Callaway Chair of Law, University of Georgia School of Law & Margaret S. Williams, Adjunct Faculty, Johns Hopkins University

With all eyes on criminal justice reform, multidistrict litigation (MDL) has quietly reshaped civil justice, undermining fundamental tenets of due process, procedural justice, attorney ethics, and tort law along the way.  In 2020, the MDL caseload tripled that of the federal criminal caseload, one out of every two cases filed in federal civil court was…

Nov 2022

Article

Remote Work and the Future of Disability Accommodations

Arlene S. Kanter, Laura J. and L. Douglas Meredith Professor of Teaching Excellence (2005–07), Syracuse University; Bond, Schoeneck and King Distinguished Professor of Law (2011–13); Director, Disability Law and Policy Program; Director, International Programs, Syracuse University College of Law

When the Americans with Disabilities Act was originally enacted in 1990, and later amended in 2008, technology had not yet advanced to where it is today. In the past decade, sophisticated computer applications and programs have become commonplace. These advances in technology, have enabled millions of employees to work from home since the onset of…

Nov 2022

Article

Discredited Data

Ngozi Okidegbe, Associate Professor of Law & Assistant Professor of Computing and Data Science, Boston University

Jurisdictions are increasingly employing pretrial algorithms as a solution to the racial and socioeconomic inequities in the bail system. But in practice, pretrial algorithms have reproduced the very inequities they were intended to correct. Scholars have diagnosed this problem as the biased data problem: pretrial algorithms generate racially and socioeconomically biased predictions because they are…

Nov 2022

Note

Websites, Wellness, and Winn-Dixie: Telehealth Accessibility During COVID-19 and Beyond

Peyton B. Brooks, J.D., Cornell Law School, 2023

During the COVID-19 pandemic, people with disabilities struggled to find proper access to health care. According to a report by the disability services organization Easterseals, approximately forty-six percent of those who had used Easterseals services lost access to health care between the beginning of the public health emergency in March 2020 and April 2021. Furthermore,…

Nov 2022

Note

Judicial Discretion Across Jurisdictions: McGirt’s Effects on Indian Offenders in Oklahoma

Emily N. Harwell, J.D., Cornell Law School, Class of 2022

Oklahoma’s exercise of criminal jurisdiction over crime committed on tribal reservations remained unchecked until 2020. In McGirt v. Oklahoma, the Supreme Court held that the Muscogee Creek Nation’s reservation had in fact never been disestablished and remains in existence today. In doing so, the Court restored criminal prosecution authority to tribal and federal courts. McGirt…

Nov 2022

––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––