Author: lawreviewadmin

Bryan Lammon

In Gillespie v. U.S. Steel Corp., the Supreme Court emphasized that the final-judgment rule—the general rule delaying appellate review of a district court decision until the district court reaches a final judgment on the case—must be given a practical rather than technical construction. Gillespie seemed to promise a new approach to federal appellate jurisdiction: a balancing approach that would allow courts of appeals to determine, case-by-case, whether to allow an appeal before a final judgment. But it was not long before the Supreme Court retreated from Gillespie, cabining the decision to its facts, and the Court nowadays adamantly rejects ad hoc balancing in appellate jurisdiction.

Deborah Zalesne

As rapidly developing reproductive technologies offer new pathways to parenthood, marriage and parenthood have become increasingly separated, and biology and parenthood no longer go hand in hand. With the advent of Assisted Reproductive Technology (ART), providing alternative methods for people to have children when it is otherwise impossible or infeasible for them to do so naturally, a growing number of parents are not actually biologically related to their children, and even when they are, a growing number of parents have had their children with outside medical assistance.

Evan C. Zoldan

The goal of achieving equality under law is deeply rooted in American philosophical traditions and constitutional doctrine. And although there is no universally accepted definition of equality, some applications of the principle are uncontroversial; most conceptions of equality bristle at the notion of particularized legislative treatment of named individuals without adequate justification.

Sarah Ashley Barnett

Scientific advancement is notorious for pushing legal and ethical boundaries, but never more so than recently. For the first time in history, we have the potential to not only recreate genetic marvels of the past, but also reshape the genetic destiny of future generations. This is due to the development of a new, revolutionary technology in genetic engineering called CRISPR—short for clustered regularly interspaced short palindromic repeats.

Chelsea Shrader

Grade-school and college playing fields have long been segregated on the basis of sex. For decades, male and female students were afforded the opportunity to participate in interscholastic athletic competitions on teams determined by their biological gender. Recently, an increasing number of high school and college-aged [students are publicly] identifying as transgender (or trans), meaning that their internal sense of their gender identity is different from the gender they were assigned at birth. The emergence of openly transgender students in grade schools and colleges, in general, has resulted in vastly disparate rules promulgated by school districts to address how transgender individuals fit into the traditional operation of the education system.

Alexander Fraser

The prosecution of Irek Hamidullin in an Article III federal court crystallized the result of years of heated debate amongst legal scholars, the military, and, most importantly, the executive branch. For the first time in the history of the United States, a military detainee enemy combatant was brought from Afghanistan to the United States to stand for a criminal trial in an Article III federal court. The defendant, Irek Hamidullin, was a known associate of the Taliban who orchestrated an attack in Afghanistan in November of 2009 and was captured by American forces thereafter. This concept—bringing a foreign combatant terrorist into our country for a criminal prosecution in a civilian tribunal for war-like conduct that took place on a foreign battlefield—has left many people, even federal judges, confused.