Volume 41, Issue 2

Decarbonizing Constitutions

Quinn Yeargain

The threat of climate change demands far-reaching, systematic changes to the global economy—and similar changes to how governments around the world set environmental policies. In recent years, many environmental policymakers have developed plans to “decarbonize” the economy. These plans provide detailed, sector-specific plans for how the latest scientific consensus on climate change can be incorporated into the policymaking process and for how the Sustainable Development Goals can be achieved. But articulating the policies is one thing—actually setting them is another.

Locking Down “Reasonable” Cybersecurity Duty

Charlotte A. Tschider

Following a data breach or other cyberattack, the concept of “reasonable” duty, broadly construed, is essential to a plaintiff’s potential causes of action, such as negligence, negligence per se, breach of contract, breach of fiduciary duty, and any number of statutory claims. The impact of an organization’s discretionary choices, such as whether to take specific security steps for a system, may result in potential risk to an individual, another organization, or the organization itself. Although organizations regularly engage in cybersecurity risk analysis, they may not understand what practices will be considered reasonable in a court of law and are therefore unable to anticipate downstream legal issues. Attorneys are likewise unable to confidently advise their clients on how to best avoid liability. This Article examines, in detail, potential sources for reasonably defining duty, and how organizations and attorneys might consider legal duty through the lens of cybersecurity risk management.

Do Fraternities Violate the Fair Housing Act? An Empirical Study of Segregation in the Greek Organizations

Stephen Clowney

The American Greek system has long been the site of fierce resistance to integration.  Until quite recently, African Americans, Jews, Asians, and other ethnic and religious minorities found themselves excluded from the bonds of membership.  Sororities at the University of Arkansas, for instance, remained entirely segregated until 2004,  while the Greek system at the University of Alabama did not begin to desegregate until 2013.  It is little wonder that students around the country increasingly view the Greek system as a deep cavity of racial isolation on otherwise diverse campuses. 

Administrative Aggregation Applied: Theorizing Class Motions in EOIR Adjudication

Kayla Crowell

The Executive Office for Immigration Review (EOIR) is an agency in need of structural intervention. Its failure to ensure due process for noncitizens in removal proceedings has grave consequences for those individuals, their families, and their communities. Despite the high human stakes of its decisions, EOIR’s adjudications are plagued by a lack of access to meaningful participation, extreme backlog, and inconsistent application of the law. Ensuring respondents’ ability to participate in their defense is especially fraught: a lack of guaranteed legal representation, scarce pro bono resources, language barriers, unfamiliarity with the U.S. legal system, detention, and untreated trauma are among the myriad factors that impede legal access.

If You’re a Minister and You Know It, Clap Your Hands: Contract Nondiscrimination Clauses as a Voluntary Waiver of the Ministerial Exception

Jacquelyn Oesterblad

Looking back, I’m not sure if I ever had any employment protections or whether I was, legally, a minister. Yes, I was a “secular studies” teacher, but I also led lower-school tefillah after lunch two days a week. I was expected to plan and lead lessons every month for our character development (tikkun middot) curriculum, which included values like “Torah,” “faith,” “joy,” and “gratitude.” On Fridays, I had to sit at a table with students and celebrate an early Shabbat—we’d light candles, cover our eyes, sing prayers, and pass around a loaf of challah. I folded Jewish and Israeli history into our curriculum, painstakingly pulling passages from the Torah and prophets to lay side-by-side with excerpts from Gilgamesh, or Assyrian relief sculptures, or the Qur’an, or whatever else we were studying.

Florida’s Bad Faith Prosecutions of Good Faith Voters

Angel E. Sanchez, Esq.

When I was a teenager, I was convicted of a felony in Florida and stripped of my right to vote before I was even old enough to cast a ballot.  I regained that right in 2018 when Florida voters approved the historic state constitutional amendment known as Florida’s “Amendment 4”.  Amendment 4 ended life disenfranchisement for many people with past felony convictions like me who had served their sentence. Lawmakers, however, reacted to this historic amendment with a law known as SB 7066, which requires people with past felony convictions to make payments of legal financial obligations (LFOs) in order to receive Amendment 4 restoration regardless of indigency or the state’s inability to properly implement this LFO system.