Volume 21, Issue 1 (Fall 2023)
Kristen Bentz
In June 2022, the Supreme Court issued its opinion in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Center, holding that the United States Constitution does not grant the right to an abortion. Animating the Court’s decision was the majority’s view that abortion rights are neither expressly stated in the Constitution, nor embedded in the history and traditions adhered to in this country. As a result, the Court overruled nearly fifty years of precedent, abrogating the abortion rights that were previously established through the Due Process Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment. The issue of abortion was thus returned to the states, where elected lawmakers have wasted no time passing laws and implementing strict regulations governing abortion without concern of fulfilling a federal constitutional right.
This note analyzes the ways that prosecutors, litigants, anti-abortion organizations and tech industry giants contribute to and benefit from virtually unrestricted access to Americans’ personal lives by availing themselves of the troves of consumer data that is endlessly collected, stored, shared, sold and transferred. This note discusses ways these and other groups can and will rely on this data to pursue prosecutions, target individuals with civil litigation, and threaten to diminish access to safe and available abortion and reproductive healthcare treatments in the United States.
Michael Hatch
As the United States looks to put COVID-19 behind it, employers are slowly but surely making the pivot to return-to-office mandates. The impact of such a shift will inevitably lead to some segments of the population being forced to make a decision: lose their job because they do not want to return to in-person activities or return to the office (RTO) and risk their health because they are a at a greater risk for contracting COVID-19. This shift will ultimately force Americans who should qualify as persons with a disability under the ADA or Section 504 of the Rehabilitation Act to resort to the law to file disparate impact claims to secure reasonable accommodations from their employers. While employers are ready to make the push to return to in-person activities, those suffering from Long-COVID might be left with the ultimate choice: refuse RTO requirements and risk their job or return to the office and risk their life. With choices like that available, the Court needs to reconsider its jurisprudence on disparate impact claims and clearly delineate the legal boundaries of disparate disability impact claims amidst a continuing global health crisis. Recognizing disparate impact claims for those suffering from Long-COVID will allow persons living with this disability to continue to participate in society while being provided reasonable accommodations from their employers in order to continue to safely perform their jobs while protecting their own health.
The Uneven March of Progress: The Past, Present, and Future of Zoning Reform in the United States
Stephen Menendian
Municipal land use—and zoning regulations in particular—has transformed in recent years from an esoteric local development matter into a hotly debated and fiercely contested public policy issue. There are many academic and mainstream periodical articles published in recent years drawing attention to the harmful effects or deleterious consequences of exclusionary and restrictive zoning, investigating the origins of zoning, and concomitant calls for zoning reform. There is, however, a relative dearth of scholarship examining zoning reform policies that have been promulgated in response, comparing their features, studying the reform process, or tracing the trajectory of policy reform, especially those adopted in the last few years as a product of the pro-housing movement. This Article fills a critical gap in scholarship by examining recent zoning policy reform efforts, successes as well as failures, analyzing the elements and types of reform, and tracing and extrapolating the trajectory of reform based upon the
pace and pattern of reform efforts underway or already adopted. By drawing a comparison to the evolution of fair housing ordinances and the open housing movement of the 1950s and 60s, this Article draws lessons and makes predictions about the future of zoning reform and the challenges the pro-housing movement will have to overcome to produce meaningful and sustainable change in curtailing restrictive and exclusionary zoning practices and their harmful effects.
Julia Pickett
With seemingly little regard to the consequences that this decision would have on women, the Supreme Court decided to end constitutionally protected abortion rights in the United States in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Center. Many people are justifiably angry with the Democrats, who had almost 50 years to codify Roe into law, especially with Republicans telling them that their goal was to overturn Roe; having multiple “trigger laws” across the country that would end abortion rights in their states the moment the Supreme Court overturned Roe. While the Dobbs decision creates immense uncertainty about the future of the country, there is an opportunity to implement some of the policies that had been put on the back-burner and will now be even more relevant and necessary. The fact is that people will be having more children now that abortion is no longer a constitutionally protected right and services become less available. This is true, even though many companies have stepped up and vowed to pay for their employees to travel to states where abortion will remain legal, with some even paying for the abortion procedures as well. However, unfortunately, it might only be a matter of time before conservative states ban travel out of state for women seeking abortion services.
Dr. Benedict Sheehy
Legal research is important because the stakes are high for society as a whole, as well as for individuals’ whose rights and duties are under analysis. The research is contentious, however, because there are deep philosophical disagreements about three main issues: what is law? what is “good”? and what is a desirable social order? In answer to the first question, although most legal scholars agree that law includes the texts of legislation and cases, there is intense disagreement beyond that basic phenomena. Debate about “good” and social order are matters of political philosophy and these are hotly contested as the visions of society offered by politically conservative and progressive scholars are markedly different. Desirable social order too is highly contested and reflects political philosophy. These three questions and their answers provide the often hidden foundations of the vigorous debate about appropriate topics and legal research methods. This article approaches the problem by engaging the disciplinary concepts of “theory,” “method” and “phenomena” and applying them to legal scholarship. To do so, it develops three paradigms of legal research: Law as Text, Law as Social Phenomena and Law as Data, which provide distinct theoretical justifications and methods for approaching phenomena in legal research.