Founded in 1927, Temple Law Review is a student-edited, quarterly journal dedicated to providing a forum for the expression of new legal thought and scholarly commentary on important developments, trends, and issues in the law.
Much of the focus on the upcoming NetChoice, LLC v. Paxton case has been on First Amendment theory and the imagined direct impacts of the social media laws at issue. This Essay takes a different tack, focusing not on the precedent that will inform the case, but the impacts that different proposed limiting principles could […]
The befuddling interplay of state income taxation schemes has been eloquently characterized by legal scholarship as “a mess.” State taxes involve fifty jurisdictions applying distinct rules and differing tax rates. To add more complexity to this tangled web, many states also permit cities, counties, and municipalities to levy separate income taxes. With multiple governmental entities sinking their teeth into the same bundle of earnings, individual taxpayers are often left feeling as though they are paying too much in taxes.
On February 21, 2023, the Supreme Court denied certiorari in Arkansas Times LP v. Waldrip (Waldrip III). Opponents of the Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions (BDS) campaign rejoiced. Arkansas is one of dozens of states with such a law on the books. And prior to the Eighth Circuit’s decision to uphold the Arkansas law in 2022, no anti-boycott law of similar content had ever survived appellate-level scrutiny. How did the Eighth Circuit come to a different conclusion than the district courts that preceded it? This Note argues that a close read of the decision reveals a failure to apply settled law on boycotts and the protections of the First Amendment.
The Department of Justice and Federal Trade Commission Merger Guidelines (the “Merger Guidelines”), including the latest proposed revision in 2023 (the “New Merger Guidelines”), have continued to perpetrate what we call in this Article the horizontal merger efficiency fallacy. The fallacy arises because in the Guidelines the term “efficiencies” has become unmoored from its foundations […]
“Who knows who might be the target of the well-read man?” It appears conservative legislators fear it will be them. In May 2021, the first of a wave of politicians passed laws restricting discussions of race and racism in classrooms across the country. Public schools, from kindergarten to universities, became the center of this culture war, and restrictions on “wokeness” spread like wildfire through 138 school districts by September of 2022, requiring schools to remove books and curb diversity of thought in classrooms. Ultimately, this Comment argues that protections for teacher speech aimed at fostering the success of all students must outweigh states’ attempts to impose their own “orthodoxy of viewpoints” to the detriment of the nation’s youth.
“Just kidding!” Do these words offer comfort following a threat? “It was only a joke.” Do these words elicit forgiveness? “It’s funny because it’s true.” Would it be funny if it were not true? “Can’t you take a joke?” Should anyone have to laugh at being threatened? This Note argues that American jurisprudence should reflect the conventional wisdom that the answer to these questions is “no.”
Many public accommodation acts (PAAs) allow for the weaponization of civil rights law by socially and economically dominant groups. This Comment focuses on the use of PAAs to hinder gender equity. PAAs fail to engage with the reality that women, trans, queer, and nonbinary persons are systemically disadvantaged by a cultural hierarchy that privileges cisgender males over those with other gender identities. The PAAs perpetuate inequity by failing to distinguish between remedial actions and bigoted actions. By providing the most privileged with the same protections as the most vulnerable, PAAs preclude the creation of safe public spaces for vulnerable populations, under the guise of preventing “discrimination.”
Artificial intelligence (AI)-enabled tools have produced a myriad of injuries, up to and including death. This burgeoning technology has caused scholars to ask questions, such as, How do we create a legal framework for AI? Because AI creators have acknowledged that even they do not know the capacities of their technology for good or bad outcomes, this Article argues that an existing framework, strict liability, is an appropriate fit for harms arising from this new technology because a party need not prove negligence to prevail. Strict liability was uniquely developed to handle those activities that are “abnormally dangerous.”
The U.S. Supreme Court’s new conservative supermajority is gaslighting the American public. This Article takes a systematic look at key cases from the Court’s October 2021 Term through the lens of gaslighting. It describes these cases as being part of what it dubs the Court’s “gaslight docket,” a descriptor that provides a useful and potentially unifying theoretical framework for analyzing and understanding the Court’s recent onslaught of rights-diminishing precedents.
“Jurors may not understand the science, but they can count [the experts].” To date, thirty innocent people have been falsely convicted in the United States of assault or homicide of children in their care. The prosecution mechanism for achieving these wrongful convictions was the use of experts to testify to “shaken baby syndrome” or “abusive […]