Ashley Hutton – Arizona State Law Journal

03Oct 2023 by Ashley Hutton

Conference Realignment: What Does It Mean for Student-Athletes at Arizona’s Universities?

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…

30Sep 2023 by Ashley Hutton

How Joe Biden Can Keep Breaking Records for Confirming Indigenous Judges

Arizona State Law Journal Blog

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…

28Sep 2023 by Ashley Hutton

<em>Dexter v. Big League Advance Fund</em>: An Early Test of State NIL Laws

Dexter v. Big League Advance Fund: An Early Test of State NIL Laws

Arizona State Law Journal Blog

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.…

26Sep 2023 by Ashley Hutton

Navigating Autonomous Vehicles Levels: The <em>Vasquez</em> Case and the Debate Between Level 3 and Level 4 Autonomy

Navigating Autonomous Vehicles Levels: The Vasquez Case and the Debate Between Level 3 and Level 4 Autonomy

Arizona State Law Journal Blog

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…

21Sep 2023 by Ashley Hutton

Arizona’s Empowerment Scholarship Accounts: The Impact of Expansive School Choice on Public Education, Student Protection, and the State Budget

Arizona State Law Journal Blog

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…

19Sep 2023 by Ashley Hutton

Standing in Reserve: A New Model for Hard Cases of Complicity

2023, Current Issue, Print, Volume 55 (2023) Issue 2 (Summer)

By Nicholas Almendares & Dimitri Landa. The “hard cases” for the law relating to accomplices deal with the definition of what counts as aiding and abetting a crime. A retailer might sell a murder weapon in the ordinary course of business, while an accomplice might do nothing because their help was simply not needed. How do we distinguish between these cases? The Capitol Riot is a striking example of this sort of hard case because there were so many people involved in so many different and ambiguous ways. Outside of the conceptually easy cases of someone caught on camera making off with property or attacking officers, who should be found guilty of what? A lack of a rubric for answering these questions makes collective crimes like the Capitol Riot especially challenging…

19Sep 2023 by Ashley Hutton

Transgender Equality and Geduldig 2.0

2023, Current Issue, Print, Volume 55 (2023) Issue 2 (Summer)

By Katie Eyer. In 1974, Geduldig v. Aiello held that pregnancy discrimination is not facially sex discrimination. Only four years later, Congress repudiated Geduldig in the statutory context in the Pregnancy Discrimination Act of 1978. For decades, Geduldig remained largely moribund, as the vast majority of pregnancy cases were brought pursuant to Title VII—and as the courts increasingly recognized that pregnancy discrimination implicated gender stereotypes (and thus sex discrimination) even in the Equal Protection context.But now, close to five decades later, opponents of transgender equality are trying to give the decision new life. Faced with the prospect of defending government laws and policies targeting “sex changes,” “gender dysphoria,” and more, such opponents have relied on Geduldig to argue that such policies are not facially discriminatory on the basis of sex or…

19Sep 2023 by Ashley Hutton

Jammed from Justice: How International Organization Immunity Enshrines Impunity

2023, Current Issue, Print, Volume 55 (2023) Issue 2 (Summer)

By Joanna Jandali. In a tiny fishing village along the Kutch coastline of India, families wake up to ash falling from the sky. Foul smells loom in dark clouds over the settlements, while chemicals and excess salts taint local sources of drinking water. Abscesses and boils paint the bodies of children and respiratory illnesses like asthma afflict the majority of residents. It was not always like this in Mundra, a port city within India’s Gujarat state. Wild animals used to run free among the forests and grazing lands. The water was clean, the air was pure, and the marine life was abundant. For centuries, thousands of Wagher families, a Muslim minority in India, would migrate yearly from the inland villages to the sandy Kutch gulf to begin eight months of…

19Sep 2023 by Ashley Hutton

Morally Regulatable Lives: Corporate Sovereignty, the Rise of Burwell v. Hobby Lobby, and the Ironic Demise of The Walt Disney Company’s Reedy Creek Improvement District

2023, Current Issue, Print, Volume 55 (2023) Issue 2 (Summer)

By Ashton P. Jones-Doherty. Burwell v. Hobby Lobby is a misunderstood case. Since the decision in 2014, scholars have split into two camps, debating Hobby Lobby’s religious liberty concerns. One camp argues Hobby Lobby unconstitutionally allows corporations the right to enact religiously motivated policies where the corporate purpose is purely secular, whereas the other camp argues Hobby Lobby simply affirms an ownership’s right to control the corporation pursuant to their religious interests without government intervention. Both camps miss Hobby Lobby’s underlying reasoning, debating the religious liberty interests while ignoring the case’s constitutional affirmation of corporate sovereignty. Full Article.

19Sep 2023 by Ashley Hutton

Uncharted Violence: Reclaiming Structural Causes in the Power and Control Wheel

2023, Current Issue, Print, Volume 55 (2023) Issue 2 (Summer)

By Tamara Kuennen. The “Power and Control Wheel” (“the Wheel”) is an iconic image in the anti-gender violence field. On a single vivid page, it captures multiple layers of intimate partner abuse. In the Wheel’s hub are the words “power and control,” the fundamental motivation of an abusive partner. Eight spokes emanate from the center, each representing a tactic of abuse designed to accomplish that goal, such as “coercion and threats” and “intimidation.” The rim of the wheel identifies “physical” and “sexual” violence as the actions holding together and fortifying the tactics of an abusive partner’s control.The Wheel sprung from activists’ focus group interviews with two hundred “battered women,” conducted in the early 1980s.4 First printed in a modest spiral bound manual with cover art drawn by a volunteer, the Wheel…