NULR Of Note

On December 4, 2017, the Supreme Court heard oral argument in Christie v. National Collegiate Athletic Association, a case in which the State of New Jersey is challenging the constitutionality of the Professional and Amateur Sports Protection Act (PASPA). Passed by Congress in 1992, PASPA banned all state-sanctioned sports gambling, but provided exemptions for four states—Nevada, Oregon, Delaware, and Montana—where laws allowing certain types of sports gambling were already on the books. PASPA also contained a provision that would have…

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When it comes to flying drones, the issue of property rights to low-altitude airspace above privately owned property is murky. Some claim that a property owners’ rights generally extend up about 500 feet, which gives them the right to prevent drones from flying or hovering over their land.  Others argue that drones represent an important technological innovation, and decisions about where and when they can fly should be made collectively, not by landowners through tort law. The courts have taken very few…

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In 2003, Errol Barrington Scarlett, a long-time permanent resident from Jamaica who had been living in the United States for over thirty years with U.S. citizen children and grandchildren, was taken into custody by the Department of Justice. Scarlett was previously convicted of drug possession in 1999, but a year and a half after his release, during which he did not commit additional crimes, the DOJ summarily detained him without a bond hearing. He spent the next five and a…

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Modern lawyers are required to keep up with emerging legal technologies in order to stay competitive and adequately serve their clients, but recent technological innovations have also begun impacting traditionally analogue fields, like originalist constitutional interpretation. Originalist scholarship that focuses on the “original public meaning” of a constitutional or statutory term has often been criticized for the inherent uncertainty or impracticability that comes with trying to ascertain the meaning of a word as it was used centuries in the past….

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The 2017 Charlottesville protests against the University of Virginia hosting Unite the Right leader Richard Spencer marked a turning point in how universities deal with hosting controversial speakers. Universities must balance their own institutional goals—asking hard questions and probing the darkness in pursuit of knowledge—with concerns for physical safety. When a divisive figure wants to speak on campus, a universities are faced with two options: (1) allow the speaker to use their campus as a platform for incendiary rhetoric and…

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On January 24, 2018, former USA Gymnastics doctor Larry Nassar was sentenced to up to 175 years in prison for sexually abusing scores of athletes he treated over the course of several years. Nassar’s sentencing hearing has drawn nationwide attention to the role of victim impact statements in our judicial system. Generally, victim impact statements involve written or oral communication from a crime victim about how the crime has affected them. All fifty states allow victim impact statements at some…

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In the first year of the Trump Administration, the President doubled down on many of his immigration-related campaign promises. 2017 brought Executive Orders and agency guidance designed to streamline enforcement of the existing statutory scheme (DACA recission) and to invigorate infrastructure (securing ports of entry under the travel ban and building the southern border wall). 2017 was slated to be an important year for immigration long before the 2016 election.  In October, the Supreme Court reheard argument in Sessions v. Dimaya, a…

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When the chief judge of U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit initiated a judicial review of the sexual harassment allegations against Judge Alex Kozinski, it presented a rare opportunity for the public to witness how the federal judiciary handles allegations of sexual misconduct against its members. That opportunity was seemingly lost when Kozinski resigned shortly after review began. Following Kozinksi’s resignation, almost 700 former federal judicial clerks and employees penned a letter to Supreme Court Chief Justice John…

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On Monday, January 29, 2018, Equip for Equality filed a federal civil rights class action lawsuit against Chicago Public Schools (CPS) and the Illinois State Board of Education (ISBE), alleging their failure to adequately support limited English proficiency (LEP) parents of CPS students with disabilities as required by law. According to the complaint, 52,903 CPS students received special education services through the implementation of Individualized Education Programs (IEPs) during the 2016–17 school year. Of those students, 42% lived in households where…

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