Author: lawreviewadmin

Ronald J. Bacigal

Professor Peter Nash Swisher, seventy-two, passed away on June 15, 2016, after a year-long battle with multiple myeloma. Pete was born in 1944 in Oxford, England to Margaret Dixon and Dr. George Nash, a Captain in the Royal Army Medical Corps. His father died returning from the War, and his mother eventually remarried Raymond Swisher, an American, and raised her two sons in Wisconsin.

Clay Calvert

Tershone Phillips

In March 2015, the Federal Communications Commission (FCC or Commission) proposed fining a Roanoke, Virginia, television station a whopping $325,000 for briefly broadcasting extremely graphic and explicit sexual material, specifically, a video image of a hand stroking an erect penis. The offending content aired for three seconds on WDBJ Channel 7 during a 6:00PM news segment about a former female porn star turned local volunteer rescue squad member.

At first blush, the FCC‘s proposed indecency fine seems like a legal slam dunk. As media attorney Harry Cole wryly writes, “[e]rect penises (and the manipulation thereof) are well outside the range of conventional prime-time acceptability.”

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.