Abbie Conrad (JD 2024-2025 student)

By Clare Remy. A Brutal, Unsolved Murder In February 2015, Allison Feldman was found murdered in her Scottsdale home. Despite evidence of the perpetrator’s DNA at the scene, the case remained unsolved until April 2018, when police finally announced that they had arrested Ian Mitcham. In a press conference, Scottsdale Police Assistant Chief Scott Popp revealed that Mitcham was identified through a familial DNA test—the first of its kind to be successful in Arizona. The police had already conducted several DNA tests with voluntary contributions from Feldman’s neighbors, but to no avail. They eventually turned to familial DNA testing—a technique only used in twelve other states and explicitly prohibited in the federal DNA database.The search revealed that the DNA left at the Feldman scene came from a close male relative of a convicted…

By Isabella Santos. Current Litigation on an Age-Old Law  On August 22, the Arizona Supreme Court granted petition for review of Planned Parenthood v. Mayes, reviving earlier litigation from 2022 where Mark Brnovich, Arizona’s Attorney General at the time, requested that the court reinstate a legal ban on abortion dating back to 1864. The critical issue before the Arizona Supreme Court is whether the state can prosecute all people—including licensed physicians—for performing an abortion at any time during pregnancy “except to save a mother’s life.”   History of Abortion Law in Arizona  Arizona’s territory-era statutory prohibition on abortion dates to 1864, nearly fifty years before Arizona became a state. Enshrined in the “Howell Code” in 1864 and later codified in A.R.S. §§ 13-211–213, the statute prohibits any person from providing…

By Kennedy Shulman.  Restricting Access to Gender-Affirming Care until 18 In March of 2022, Arizona Governor Doug Ducey signed legislation restricting access to gender-affirming health care for minors. The health care ban, SB 1138, states that “[a] physician or other health care professional may not provide gender transition procedures to any individual who is under eighteen years of age.” Simply put, the bill outlaws gender-affirming surgery until the age of adulthood.  Ducey rationalized his signoff stating, “The reason is simple, and common sense—this is a decision that will dramatically affect the rest of an individual’s life, including the ability of that individual to become a biological parent later in life.” With his signature coming on the eve of the International Transgender Day of Visibility, however, Ducey and other conservative lawmakers…

By Devon Vaughan. The Fake Elector Scheme On August 16, 2023, Arizona Attorney General Kris Mayes confirmed reports of an investigation that had been rumored for months: an investigation into an alleged scheme to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election. As outlined in the federal charges filed against former President Donald Trump and his allies, this multipronged scheme involved unsubstantiated claims of widespread voter fraud as a pretense to pressure officials and lawmakers in battleground states into overriding the popular vote and approving a slate of electors contrary to state law. When this failed and President Joe Biden’s electors were certified, Republican party officials in seven states then assembled their own alternate slates of electors. Two weeks after Biden’s victory in Arizona was certified by then-Secretary of State Katie Hobbs and…

By Bailey Stoltzfus.  Arizona State and the University of Arizona Are Joining the Big 12 in 2024 In August 2023, news broke that Arizona and Arizona State had applied and been accepted to join the Big 12 athletic conference. The Wildcats and Sun Devils are currently members of the Pac-12 conference, but it had been presumed that, if the two schools decided to leave the Pac-12, they would preserve the Territorial Cup rivalry and leave together.  The move was the latest in a series of conference realignment moves that had begun in 2021 when Texas and Oklahoma announced their move from the Big 12 to the Southeastern Conference (SEC). The Arizona schools’ fellow Pac-12 members, USC and UCLA, decided to join the midwest-based Big Ten a year later, setting off…

Guest post by Professor Carl Tobias. President Joe Biden recently traveled to Arizona, Nevada, and Utah when touting his many efforts to protect the environment, curtail climate change, and preserve natural, cultural, and historical resources. For example, Biden designated one million acres near the Grand Canyon National Park as a National Monument. Deb Haaland, the initial Native American to serve in the Cabinet and the first indigenous person to be Secretary of the Interior, proclaimed that “Native American history is American history” and stated that the monument will provide tribal members a voice in managing lands on which Native Americans and their ancestors have long lived, farmed, and prayed. Another critically important effort that Biden has pledged to foster, and should continue promoting, is the nomination and confirmation of well-qualified, mainstream indigenous…

By Andrew Ford. NFL Player Files Suit Over NIL Deal In the new frontier of Name, Image, and Likeness (NIL) contracts for college and high school athletes, a complaint recently filed by Chicago Bears defensive tackle Gervon Dexter, Sr. confirmed what some NIL critics feared: manipulation and coercion of young athletes. Dexter, a second-round pick out of the University of Florida in the 2023 NFL Draft, signed an agreement with Big League Advance Fund on May 16, 2022. Under the agreement, Big League Advance Fund agreed to pay Dexter a one-time fee of $436,485 in 2022 in exchange for the rights to use his NIL during his college and professional career. More controversial, though, the agreement obligated Dexter to pay Big League Advance Fund 15% of Dexter’s pre-taxed NFL earnings for 25 years.…

By Bennett Houck.  Phoenix, Arizona has been one of the foundational locations for Autonomous Vehicle (“AV”) testing since 2016. Fellow Phoenicians may remember that in March of 2018 an Uber AV struck and killed a pedestrian crossing Mill Avenue in Tempe, AZ. This incident was the first pedestrian death involving an AV. In this case, the AV (classified as Level 3) detected the pedestrian but failed to stop or notify the backup driver. Uber quickly reached a settlement with the pedestrian’s family and pulled more than ninety test AVs off the road in Arizona. But for Rafaela Vasquez, the backup driver in this incident, the issue didn’t resolve so quickly. On Tuesday, September 15, 2020, Vasquez was charged with negligent homicide. And on July 28, 2023, Vasquez pled guilty to…

By Samantha Fox.  Expanded School Vouchers in Arizona  School Choice has been a topic of debate among politicians, religious leaders, parents, and educators for decades. At the center of the debate are parents wishing to pull their children from the public education system to find a private institution better aligned with their values. Arizona implemented a School Choice voucher program in 2011, which was expanded in 2022, making it the most comprehensive—and expensive—in the country. In September 2022, every student became eligible for a voucher in the form of an Empowerment Savings Account (“ESA”) worth an average of $7,200 per year. While the original program applied to students who met certain criteria, the recent expansion set Arizona apart from other states by making a voucher available to every student regardless…