Representatives from Temple Law Review and Temple International & Comparative Law Journal will participate in the 2018 Student Symposium on March 29 from 4:00 to 5:30 PM in the Moot Court Room located in Klein Hall (1719 N. Broad St.). In advance of the students’ presentations, here are summaries of the articles they will be discussing:
Temple Law Review
Sonya Bishop, Executive Editor. Bishop’s Comment examines the intersections between the disproportionately high rate of behavioral health disorders among low-income Americans, geographic and socioeconomic barriers to treatment, and telemental health’s ability to use communication technologies to provide healthcare across great distances. “Own-time” interventions, consisting of video games and apps, have proven effective despite not requiring real-time medical supervision, but are not covered under Medicaid. Bishop advocates piloting coverage for these technologies using the Affordable Care Act’s Section 1315a innovation grants, arguing that the grants provide the most fair and effective means of testing new treatments for Medicaid-eligible individuals and, using data from past grantees, that the technologies fit the grants’ criteria.
David Nagdeman, Note/Comment Editor. Nagdeman’s Comment discusses states’ Article III standing to bring suits against the federal government. Federal courts have traditionally limited these suits to common law injuries related to property and contracts and injuries to states’ sovereignty. The Fifth Circuit’s 2015 decision, affirmed by a split United States Supreme Court, to grant Texas standing to sue the Department of Homeland Security interpreted states’ “quasi-sovereign” interests as allowing parens patriae standing, standing on the basis of collective injuries to a state’s citizens. Nagdeman argues against this approach as it both conflicts with the Supremacy Clause and Supreme Court precedent and, when coupled with perverse incentives for state attorneys general, has the potential to freeze executive action through a flood of litigation.
Brianna Vinci, Research Editor. Vinci’s Comment evaluates fetal burial laws, like those proposed in Indiana and Texas, requiring women to bury or cremate fetuses and embryos that have either been aborted or miscarried. Such legislation, she argues, seeks to undermine a woman’s right to an abortion by establishing personhood in a fetus. Vinci advances two reasons for why such laws are unconstitutional: (1) they do not withstand scrutiny under the undue burden standard established in Planned Parenthood v. Casey and (2) they represent state endorsements of the Christian belief that a fetus is a person in violation of the First Amendment’s Establishment Clause.
Temple International & Comparative Law Journal
Daniel Cole, Editor-in-Chief. Cole’s article examines the International Criminal Court’s late 2016 war crimes prosecution of Ahmad Al Faqi Al Mahdi for the destruction of ten significant sites of cultural heritage in Timbuktu. This case note plumbs the case and history for succinct legal insights useful to practitioners and scholars within international criminal law, addresses potential criticisms of the decision, and examines how the International Criminal Court will handle admissions of guilt. Using political and quantitative tools of analysis, this article also examines this case and the Court itself, examining the Court’s standing, and the new prosecutorial and political strategies employed by the Court’s new Chief Prosecutor.
Michael Dean Krebs, Executive Editor. Krebs’s article examines foreign and domestic commercial competition within China, specifically within the mobile gaming apps industry. Including an in-depth analysis of SAPPRFT regulations and their functionality, this comment follows China’s development of a protectionist economic and technology licensing model, which now makes both foreign and domestic startup entry within the Chinese mobile app market very difficult, and financially unattractive. These regulations are combined with a restrictive cultural bureaucracy, which regulates information and access. Taken together, this comment examines the results of these policies, and predicts their inevitable result.
F. Shannon Sweeney, 2016-2017 Staff Editor. Sweeney’s article focuses on the “rock versus island” portion of the Permanent Court of Arbitration’s 2016 decision regarding the South China Sea and China’s controversial territory claims. Through a close analysis of the Court’s decision, this case note distills an operative analysis for determining: the proper legal categorization of a marine land feature as a low-tide elevation, a high-tide elevation, or an island; what economic and sovereign entitlements are bestowed by each designation; and the significance and legitimacy of human alterations to these features. These questions are key to resolving emerging conflicts and questions based upon claims to the seas and resources therein.
The Temple International & Comparative Law Journal articles can be found in full in Volume 31, Number 2 of the journal. Nagdeman’s article is available in Temple Law Review Volume 90.1 and on the Temple Law Review website. Stay tuned for the publication of Bishop and Vinci’s articles later this year.