Category: Notes

Taming the Paparazzi in the “Wild West”: A Look at California’s 2009 Amendment to the Anti-Paparazzi Act and a Call for Increased Privacy Protections for Celebrity Children – Note by Lauren N. Follett

From Volume 84, Number 1 (November 2010)
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With our culture’s celebrity obsession intensifying each year, it is not surprising that recent media attention has concentrated on the children of these famous faces. Unfortunately, there are currently no adequate federal or state laws in place to protect these children from being hounded by paparazzi and exploited by entertainment magazines and Web sites worldwide. This Note examines the evolution of antipaparazzi legislation and analyzes the inadequacies of current and proposed legal protections. Further, it recommends strengthening existing safeguards by creating paparazzi-free buffer zones around family-oriented areas and following international approaches to maintaining an adequate level of privacy, and consequently safety, for celebrity children. 
 

 

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Beyond No-Man’s Land: Psychiatry’s Imprecision Revealed by Its Critique of SVP Statutes as Applied to Pedophilia – Note by Jennifer Jason

From Volume 83, Number 6 (September 2010)
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The field of psychiatry has identified a problem with the law, its source, and suggested a solution. The problem is “legislators . . . us[ing] psychiatric commitment [of sex offenders] to effect nonmedical societal ends.” The source is U.S. Supreme Court decisions allowing legislatures to use definitions of mental illness that have no basis in psychiatry: “As a consequence of U.S. Supreme Court decisions that are written ambiguously and tentatively, the bright line separating . . . [the legal conception of] mental disorder [(for the purposes of civilly committing sex offenders under sexually violent predator statutes)] from ordinary criminal behavior is difficult to draw and tests a no-man’s land between psychiatry and the law.” 

The solution is “[g]reater clarity and standardization . . . com[ing] from both sides: the legalists who interpret the law and the clinicians who apply and work under it.” A close analysis of the psychiatric critique of these statutes that allow for the civil commitment of sex offenders reveals psychiatry’s own imprecision within the bounds of psychiatry and in the domain of the overlap between psychiatry and the law.

 

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Rethinking Conditional Federal Grants and the Independent Constitutional Bar Test – Note by Douglas A. Wick

From Volume 83, Number 6 (September 2010)
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On a crisp January night, a SWAT team descends on a house in Pullman, Washington. Onlookers can only imagine what type of crime warrants such a response. Was it a hostage situation? Were they trying to subdue a psychotic killer? Maybe there was a violent drug cartel operating out of the house? No. On January 21, 2009, a SWAT team raided a Washington State University fraternity house because some college students may have been drinking alcoholic beverages before their twenty-first birthdays. 

The National Minimum Drinking Age Act forced states to raise their drinking age to twenty-one, or lose federal highway funds. The negative side effects of that law—illustrated by the extreme example above—are leading many to call for its abolition. The American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 will dole out $144 billion to ease fiscal pressures on state and local governments, but instead of allowing them to spend the money based on their best judgments, Congress attached unattractive conditions to the grants. The No Child Left Behind Act of 2001 grants money to states conditioned upon school districts meeting federally imposed education standards. The result is bad education policy the states cannot afford to abandon, lest they lose much-needed federal aid. Congress could not enact any of these policies directly. Instead, Congress used its spending power to indirectly regulate these state and local matters via conditional grants.

 

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Fighting for Asylum: A Statutory Exception to Relevant Bars for Former Child Soldiers – Note by Dani Cepernich

From Volume 83, Number 5 (July 2010)
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Over the past decade, the tragedy of child soldiers has attracted increased attention. Much of the world, including the United States, has recognized the toll that this practice takes on the youth of our time and has dedicated itself to preventing the further use of child soldiers. In December of 2002, the United States became a party to the Optional Protocol to the Convention on the Rights of the Child on the Involvement of Children in Armed Conflict (“Optional Protocol”) and joined forty-four other states in the fight against the use of child soldiers. As a party to this protocol, the United States has committed itself to taking “all feasible measures to . . . accord to [persons within its jurisdiction recruited or used contrary to the protocol] all appropriate assistance for their physical and psychological recovery and their social reintegration.” 

Despite this commitment, child soldiers are often denied asylum in the United States because of acts they were forced to commit while serving in foreign armed forces. The United Nations’ Committee on the Rights of the Child addressed this issue in its first review of the United States’ compliance with the Optional Protocol, in which it criticized the United States’ asylum law as applied to former child soldiers. The United States’ asylum law currently includes several potential obstacles for former child soldiers seeking asylum, two of the most prevalent of which are the “persecution of others” bar and the “material support” bar. If the United States is to come into compliance with the Optional Protocol, something must be done to provide greater protection under asylum law to former child soldiers.

 

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Alternatives to District Court Patent Litigation: Reform by Enhancing the Existing Administrative Options – Note by Eric B. Cheng

From Volume 83, Number 5 (July 2010)
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The American patent system, mired with rising costs and uncertainty, is in need of reform. To address these issues, the United States needs a viable proceeding to challenge the validity of granted patents and a forum specialized in patent matters to hear infringement litigation trials. Rather than implement proposals from legislators and commentators that may be too duplicative, incremental, or heavy-handed to put into practice successfully, the American patent system would be best served by bringing its existing administrative alternatives, with some enhancements, to the forefront as a comprehensive solution for patent reform.

 

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“These Scales Tell Us That There Is Something Wrong with You”: How Fat Students Are Systematically Denied Access to Fair and Equal Education and What We Can Do to Stop This – Note by Michelle Stover

From Volume 83, Number 4 (May 2010)
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The Supreme Court’s decision to bar the foreign Fat students are denied access to fair and equal education due to widespread antifat discrimination. Unfortunately, there are currently no statutes that provide adequate recourse for fat students. Thus, this Note advocates the drafting of new legislation specifically aimed at eliminating discrimination against students on the basis of fatness and recommends measures that can be adopted by school districts to combat discrimination against fat students.

 

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Discovery for Foreign Proceedings after Intel v. Advanced Micro Devices A Critical Analysis of 28 U.S.C. 1782 Jurisprudence – Note by Marat A. Massen

From Volume 83, Number 4 (May 2010)
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The Supreme Court’s decision to bar the foreign discoverability requirement in Intel Corp. v. Advanced Micro Devices, Inc. has led district courts after Intel to render troubling and inconsistent decisions on whether to grant requests for discovery for use in foreign tribunals under 28 U.S.C. § 1782(a). Because Intel gave district courts no guidelines for evaluating foreign tribunals’ receptivity to discovery acquired in the United States, § 1782(a)’s goals of fostering international judicial cooperation and providing efficient resolutions offoreign cases have gone unfulfilled.

 

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Using Numerical Statutory Interpretation to Improve Conflict of Interest Waiver Procedures at the FDA – Note by Saurabh Anand

From Volume 83, Number 4 (May 2010)
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Conflicts of interest frequently arise when industry experts advise federal agencies. Critics claim agencies’ decisions to waive conflicts of interest often lack consistency and clarity, but they have yet to propose a comprehensive system to improve the conflict of interest waiver process.

 

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