Books and Journals › Business Law

• Scott J. Burnham
• Kristen Juras

• Iowa Law Review

Standards of causation in antidiscrimination law, and disparate-treatment cases in particular, are deeply flawed. Their defects have caused an illogical, obscure, and unworkable proof scheme that requires an overhaul to curb the harm that it engenders and to allow the antidiscrimination statutes to serve their objectives effectively. This Article proposes a theory and method of causation that...

• Iowa Law Review

Bright line constitutional rules tend to create unfair outcomes in close proximity to the bright line. In the context of the death penalty, such distinctions possess an entirely different level of seriousness that requires deeper reflection. This Article develops the concept of presumptive penumbras around capital constitutional bright lines and argues for its application to juvenile offenders...

• Iowa Law Review

• Iowa Law Review

City infrastructure is getting smarter. Embedded smart sensors in roads, lampposts, and electrical grids offer the government a way to regulate municipal resources and the police a new power to monitor citizens. This structural sensor surveillance, however, raises a difficult constitutional question: Does the creation of continuously-recording, aggregated, long-term data collection systems...

• Iowa Law Review

While the public defender is critical to protecting individual rights in the U.S. criminal process, state governments take remarkably different approaches to distributing public defense services. Some states organize indigent defense as a function of the executive branch of state governance; others administer indigent defense through the judicial branch. The remaining state governments do not...

• Iowa Law Review

This Note argues that state legislatures should create statutory frameworks that permit judges to consider a defendant's ability to pay when determining the total amount of criminal restitution that should be ordered. Considering ability to pay before ordering restitution still accomplishes the goals of restitution while potentially increasing collection rates and managing victims' expectations....

• Iowa Law Review

The right of publicity is an individual's right to control the commercial use of her identity. Thirty-five states in the United States recognize the right of publicity, either through statute or common law, and provide their citizens with a mechanism to prevent unauthorized uses of their identities. Iowa, however, is one of the 15 states that does not expressly recognize the right of publicity in

• Iowa Law Review

Gun rights proponents and gun control advocates have devoted significant energy to framing the constitutional right to keep and bear arms. In constitutional discourse, advocates and commentators have referred to the Second Amendment as a "collective, " "civic republican, " "individual, " and "fundamental" right. Gun rights advocates have defended the right...

• Iowa Law Review

The Supreme Court is broken. After cataloging its dysfunctions, this Article suggests a contributing cause and proposes a solution. The contributing cause is that Justices have become celebrities, and, like other celebrities, play to their fan base. The solution is to limit their opportunities to use their official status to do so: Congress should pass a law prohibiting concurring or dissenting...

• Iowa Law Review

Washington State became the first state to legalize "human composting" (also known as "recomposition") as an available method of final disposition. Recomposition is a process that ultimately turns the body into soil. It is more environmentally sustainable than traditional methods of disposition (i.e., burial and cremation) and is a crucial alternative in the face of increasing

• Iowa Law Review

When Pennsylvania introduced the vanity license plate in the early 1930s, it represented the first time a state government added an expressive component to the otherwise solely identificatory license plate. Vanity-plate programs are now ubiquitous across the United States, and those programs are accompanied by sweeping and amorphous restrictions on categories of expression that the states will...

• Wisconsin Law Journal

• Wisconsin Law Journal

• Wisconsin Law Journal

• Wisconsin Law Journal

• Iowa Law Review

Rebuttable presumptions are scattered throughout the Internal Revenue Code and the Treasury Regulations. In many cases, they are employed in service of determining a taxpayer's motive or state of mind. They are not, however, always utilized when motive or state of mind must be assessed. In some contexts, courts are called upon to examine all relevant facts and circumstances in order to divine a...

• Iowa Law Review

The use of Artificial Intelligence ("AI") machines using deep learning neural networks to create material that facially looks like it should be protected by copyright is growing exponentially. From articles in national news media to music, film, poetry and painting, AI machines create material that has economic value and that competes with productions of human authors. The Article...

• Iowa Law Review

Most concerns about delegation are put in terms of the handover of legislative power to federal agencies and the magnitude of the legislative policy decisions made by such agencies. Likewise, most reform proposals, such as the Congressional Review Act and the proposed REINS Act, address these gap-filling, democratic deficit concerns. The same is true of the judicially created nondelegation canons,

• Iowa Law Review

Fifty years ago, the Tinker case confirmed the free speech rights of students and identified the classroom as "peculiarly the marketplace of ideas." Upholding the students' right to protest the Vietnam War, Tinker was one of many Supreme Court decisions to establish the First Amendment as an ally in movements for freedom, justice, and equality. Today, by contrast, free speech has become

• Iowa Law Review

The Hobbs Act, passed by Congress in 1946, makes it a federal crime to obstruct, delay, or affect commerce through robbery or extortion. "Commerce" is the federal jurisdictional hook that elevates robbery to a federal crime. The commerce hook grants jurisdiction for all robberies that Congress's Commerce Clause power reaches. This Note argues that federal Hobbs Act robbery prosecutions...

• Iowa Law Review

The average Iowan would be shocked to learn that the commission of a firearm possession crime in Iowa would expose them to the risk of being sent to federal prison for a time period 25 percent longer than that of a citizen of a neighboring state. This Note argues that the Eighth Circuit's ruling in United States v. Walker was an erroneous interpretation of the U.S. Sentencing Guidelines and that...

• Wisconsin Law Journal

• Wisconsin Law Journal

• Iowa Law Review

Increasingly powerful data mining and analysis technologies are being used to learn information and make decisions about people across all areas of life—ranging from employment and policing, to housing and health insurance—and it is widely thought that the key problems with this are privacy-related. There is also an emerging consensus in the literature that privacy rights lack a unified core....

• Iowa Law Review

Legislative drafting mistakes can upset statutory schemes. The Affordable Care Act was nearly undone by such mistakes. The recent Tax Cuts and Jobs Act is rife with them. Traditional legal scholarship has examined whether courts should help resolve Congress' mistakes. But courts have remained stubbornly resistant to implementing fixes. In the face of legislative error and judicial inaction,...

• Iowa Law Review

In State v. Wilson, an Iowa district court found that a provision in Iowa's recently enacted stand-your-ground law, Iowa Code section 704.13, was unconstitutionally vague. This decision constituted an unusual application of the void-for-vagueness doctrine because courts seldom consider vagueness challenges to statutory defenses and rarely, if ever, strike them down under such challenges. On...

• Iowa Law Review

The Professional and Amateur Sports Protection Act ("PASPA"), which outlawed state-sponsored sports betting in the United States, was recently struck down as a violation of the anticommandeering principle in a 6–3 ruling by the Supreme Court. This has opened the door for states to finally legalize sports betting. This Note argues that in order to craft better legislation surrounding...

• Iowa Law Review

Over the past several years there has been a growing movement aimed at guaranteeing consumers the right to repair their products themselves after purchasing them, as opposed to paying original equipment manufacturers to repair the devices. Advocacy groups have successfully convinced state legislators to introduce these "Right to Repair" bills around the country, however none have...

• Wisconsin Law Journal

• Wisconsin Law Journal