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Articles

Articles

Volume 109, Issue 3

Reimagining First Amendment Remedies

Ronald J. Krotoszynski, Jr. & Caprice L. Roberts

Since the Warren Court’s landmark First Amendment decisions of the 1960s, the Supreme Court has aggressively deployed the Free Speech Clause to provide broad substantive protections for expressive freedoms. These rules, in theory, should effectively safeguard the marketplace of political ideas and facilitate both speaker and audience autonomy. No matter how broadly fashioned, however, a constitutional rule is only as strong as the remedies available to enforce it—and far too often, First Amendment remedies are either woefully weak or effectively nonexistent. . . .

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Disappearing Commissioners

Brian D. Feinstein & David Zaring

Assistant Professor of Legal Studies & Business Ethics, the Wharton School.

Independent regulatory commissions are, in the face of a judicial campaign against their independence, suffering from an internal ailment that is just as serious. These mainstays of the administrative state, including the Federal Trade Commission, National Labor Relations Board, and other important regulators, are becoming one-person bands. . . .

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Corporate Empires: Past, Present, and Future

Gideon Parchomovsky & Asaf Eckstein

For decades, the corporate world has been dominated by “Corporate Empires.” Corporate empires are conglomerates comprising a parent and tens, even hundreds, of subsidiaries. Corporate empires differ from standalone companies not only in the scale and scope of their operations, but also in the interdependencies that exist among entities in the group and the international nature of their activities. . . .

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The Original Meaning of Enumerated Powers

Andrew Coan & David S. Schwartz

The powers of Congress are limited to those enumerated in the Constitution and must not be construed as the equivalent of a general police power. This doctrine of “enumerationism” is the linchpin of a multidecade conservative assault on the broad conception of federal powers recognized by the Supreme Court since 1937. . . .

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Synthetic Data: Legal Implications of the Data-Generation Revolution

Michal S. Gal & Orla Lynskey

A data-generation revolution is underway. Until recently, most of the data used for algorithmic decision-making was collected from events that took place in the physical world (“collected” data). Yet it is forecast that by 2024, sixty percent of data used to train artificial intelligence systems around the world will be synthetic (!). . . .

Poked, Prodded, and Privacy: Parents, Children, and Pediatric Genetic Testing

Allison M. Whelan

“Knowledge is power,” so the saying goes. But does that always prove true? What if knowledge comes without the power or resources to act? What if knowledge is unwanted and uninvited? Significant advancements in genetics and genomics have thrust these and other difficult questions into the professional and public discourse. These developments include “pediatric predisposition genetic testing” (“PPGT”), a term used in this Article to describe genetic testing performed on a minor with parental consent to either determine with certainty or predict the risk that the minor will develop an adult-onset disease. . . .

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Notes

Student Notes

Volume 109, Issue 3

Murky Waters: Exploring the Future of Criminal Law Liability in State Territorial Waters off the American Coast . . .

Jessica R. Davis

Since the recent overturning of the landmark Roe v. Wade case, which granted the right to abortion through the right of privacy, a flood of creative solutions to help patient access to abortion care have taken center stage. Amongst those solutions is PRROWESS, Protecting Reproductive Rights of Women Endangered by State Statutes, a proposal for a ship docked in federal waters that would provide abortion care and other healthcare to patients from states along the Gulf of Mexico. . . .

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Family Time Is Money: Modernizing Iowa’s Child Labor Laws

Holden C. Sinnard

In recent years, actions taken by the executive and legislative branches of Iowa’s government have reinvigorated the conversation around Iowa’s child labor regulations because these branches have continued to loosen the state’s labor laws. Yet, the legislature has acknowledged the need to modernize the Iowa Code in the face of remote work and a changing labor landscape. . . .

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Una Herida Abierta: Utilizing the National Environmental Policy Act and the Inflation Reduction Act . . .

Jonathan A. Picado

Circuit courts are divided as to whether Section 602 of Title VI of the 1962 Civil Rights Act creates a private right of action enforceable under 42 U.S.C. § 1983. In the past, many environmental justice groups have brought their claims under Section 602, since it is easier to prove disparate impact as opposed to direct discrimination. . . .

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The Simple Bare Necessities: Why Iowa Should Enact Legislation Providing Incarcerated Individuals with Outdoor Recreation Time

Emily F. Street

The Eighth Amendment of the U.S. Constitution bars excessive bail, excessive fines, and cruel and unusual punishments. The U.S. Supreme Court has determined that the meaning of cruel and unusual punishment is not static, but instead evolves with society. This Note discusses the Cruel and Unusual Punishments Clause generally and its application to prison conditions. . . .

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Recent Online Edition:

Recent Online Edition:

How the Supreme Court Ghosted the PHOSITA: Amgen and Legal Constructs in Patent Law

Timothy R. Holbrook & Mark D. Janis

This Essay is an invited response to The Ghost in the Patent System: An Empirical Study of Patent Law’s Elusive “Skilled Artisan,” by Professors Laura Pedraza-Fariña and Ryan Whalen. In their piece, Pedraza-Fariña and Ryan Whalen offer an empirical study and use it to argue for a new conception of the Person Having Ordinary Skill in the Art (“PHOSITA”), patent law’s nod to the “reasonable person” construct. . . .

The Game, the Players, and the Board

Bruce E. Boyden

109 Iowa L. Rev. Online 105 (2024)

Christopher Seaman and Thuan Tran’s fascinating article, Intellectual Property and Tabletop Games, raises important questions about the role of intellectual property (“IP”) in developing and distributing innovative products. The market for tabletop games, Seaman and Tran argue, is able to sustain a high level of creativity at a high up-front cost, all while protected by some but not all of the IP rights that other industries’ outputs receive. Is that evidence of IP’s necessity or its superfluousness? . . .

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Interpreting Textualist Slogans

Guha Krishnamurthi

109 Iowa L. Rev. Online 15 (2023)

Slogans are a blunt instrument—they may convey something of the truth, but they rarely do so undented. So too is the case with the influential textualism slogans “the text is [the] law,” “only the text [is] the law,” and “[o]nly the written word is the law.” In his insightful Article, Professor Erik Encarnacion shows why these statements are false, as they are category errors. He then observes that these slogans are unnecessary to establishing the core theses of textualism and that these slogans misunderstand and confuse features of textualism. And he is right about all of that. . . .

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Should the Recent Timbs and Dobbs Decisions Revive Interest in the Excessive Fines Clause as the Constitutional Basis . . .

N. William Hines

109 Iowa L. Rev. Online 46 (2024)

In a series of cases in the early 1990s, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that the Due Process Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment implicitly enabled federal courts to review state punitive damages awards for unconstitutional arbitrariness and excessiveness. Before settling on the Due Process Clause as the basis of federal regulation of punitive damages, in a 1989 decision the Court considered and rejected the claim that the Excessive Fines Clause of the Eighth Amendment, as incorporated into the Fourteenth Amendment, could provide the constitutional foundation for federal regulation of state punitive damages awards. . . .

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The Racism of Immigration Crime Prosecution

Ingrid V. Eagly

109 Iowa L. Rev. Online 27 (2023)

Eric Fish’s Article, Race, History, and Immigration Crimes, explores the racist motivation behind the original 1929 enactment of the two most common federal immigration crimes, entry without permission and reentry after deportation. This Response engages with Fish’s archival work unearthing this unsettling history and examines how his research has informed a series of legal challenges seeking to strike down the modern federal border crossing law as violating the Equal Protection Clause of the Constitution. . . .

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Does DARC Really Matter?: A Response to Wright & Moore

Troy A. Rule

109 Iowa L. Rev. Online 1 (2023)

Danaya Wright and Ethan Moore’s Article, DARC Matters: Repurposing Nineteenth-Century Property Law for the Twenty-First Century, is a valuable contribution to a growing body of legal academic literature focused on property law obstacles to the deployment of commercial drone technologies. Wright and Moore rightly acknowledge landowners’ long-held rights to exclude objects from the low airspace immediately above their land–rights that some major retailers have aggressively sought to weaken in recent years to facilitate drone delivery services. . . .

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