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.
“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 […]
In McDonough Power Equipment, Inc. v. Greenwood, the Supreme Court reaffirmed that a litigant is entitled to a fair trial but not a perfect one, because there is no such thing as a perfect trial. When allegations of juror misconduct arise, prompting claims of an unfair trial, courts are reluctant to pierce the secrecy of the […]
As surveillance cameras and other ubiquitous devices record more events in the world, appellate courts are being flooded with video and sound recordings, usually in digital form, as part of the record below. Such digital evidence offers substantial potential benefits in proving or disproving facts at trial. But that evidence can also pose associated challenges […]
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 […]
The Symposium was a deep dive into one pathway to assuring the conditions for optimal health and wellbeing by addressing the health-harming impact of the criminal legal system. Panelists described historical laws and policies that have resulted in inequitable outcomes for people of color and other economically and socially marginalized populations. Panelists also discussed re-envisioning […]