All Homelands Need Agua Caliente: Analyzing the Impact of Arizona’s Gila III Via the Hopi Tribe’s Recommended Decree

2023, Past Issues, Print, Volume 55 (2023) Issue 3 (Fall)
By Clayton M. Kinsey.  “It has been said that to be a Hopi is to be a steward of the earth, a caretaker of the land and the water . . . . It has also been said that in Hopi culture, everything is about water. Water is life. Water is the beginning and end of the cycle of life. Our connection to water is very sacred and intimate.” But, despite this sanctity, and despite the Hopi Tribe’s efforts, there has historically been great uncertainty regarding the Hopi Tribe’s legal water rights. Full Article.
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Race, Solidarity, and Commerce: Work Law as Privatized Public Law

2023, Past Issues, Print, Volume 55 (2023) Issue 3 (Fall)
By Shirley Lin. Theorizing work and its regulation has held enduring appeal for legal theorists. Yet intellectual movements that wish to theorize worker coercion within a broader critique of law often sidestep race. Since Lochner, landmark opinions involving race, labor, or both, have served as showpieces for the legal liberal tenets underpinning work law’s doctrines and institutions. Each iteration of the public/private divide instantiates an ideological—but avowedly race-neutral—structure for how we study, teach, and propose to reshape work law. Scholars, judges, and lawmakers typically cede this ground, perhaps because law itself is under right-wing attack. Full Article.
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Arizona’s Short-Term Rental Dilemma: A Path to Effective Regulation After Kalway

2023, Past Issues, Print, Volume 55 (2023) Issue 3 (Fall)
By Emma Marek. The popularity of short-term rental housing has grown exponentially in recent years, especially in Arizona. Short-term rentals (“STRs”), also referred to as vacation rentals or transient lodging, are homes, condominiums, apartments, or other residential units that are rented to paying guests for short periods of time, usually fewer than thirty days. The property owner, or the “host,” typically lists their property on an online accommodation platform to advertise and offer their rental to guests. One such platform, Airbnb, reported over 59,000 active listings in Arizona in 2021, with 5,404 of those listings located within Scottsdale alone. In fact, the New York Times recently recognized Scottsdale as the “bachelorette-party capital of the West,” in part because of the huge availability and popularity of large, luxury short-term rental homes. Full…
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Immigrant Workers’ Voices as Catalysts for Reform in the Long-Term Care Industry

2023, Past Issues, Print, Volume 55 (2023) Issue 3 (Fall)
By Shefali Milczarek-Desai & Tara Sklar.  “One of my sisters told me to have some dignity and leave [my abusive workplace]. I told her that I can’t feed my kids with dignity, and that was my reality.” –Immigrant Woman Long-Term Care Aide The COVID-19 pandemic exposed a long-term care crisis that has been brewing for decades. It also offered lessons for much-needed reform to the long-term care industry. One such lesson is that both older Americans and their caregivers experience unnecessary suffering and death due to entrenched industry practices that marginalize long-term care aides, a worker population that is increasingly made up of immigrant and migrant (“im/migrant”) women. Even though im/migrant women constitute at least one-third of the long-term care workforce, their perspectives are largely absent from the legal and…
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Arizona’s Proposition 207 in Practice: Impacts of Marijuana Legalization on Public Safety and Workload for Criminal Justice System Actors A Model for Lawmakers Looking To Legalize

2023, Past Issues, Print, Volume 55 (2023) Issue 3 (Fall)
By Ashley Oddo, Shannon Johanni & Jana Hrdinová.  Marijuana-related initiatives in Arizona (and nationwide) demonstrate a progression from informal social acceptance to formal legalization after decades of prohibition. In Arizona, medical marijuana use was legalized in 2010 followed by the legalization of adult recreational marijuana use in 2020. Prior to Arizona’s legalization proponents argued that public safety would improve and resources would be freed, allowing those resources to be re-allocated to focus on addressing serious and violent crime. On the other hand, opponents claimed, in part, that legalization would result in a direct correlation with a rise in crime. What few considered was the need for carefully crafted legislation that allowed criminal justice actors to effectively and efficiently implement it. Full Article.
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Tribal Air

2023, Past Issues, Print, Volume 55 (2023) Issue 3 (Fall)
By Jonathan Skinner-Thompson. Prevailing approaches to addressing environmental justice in Indian Country are inadequate. The dual pursuits of distributive and procedural justice do not fully account for the unique factors that make Indigenous environmental justice distinct—namely, the sovereign status of tribal nations and the ongoing impacts of colonization.This Article synthetizes interdisciplinary approaches to theorizing Indigenous environmental justice and proposes a framework to aid environmental law scholars and advocates. Specifically, by centering Indigenous environmental justice in terms of coloniality and self-determination, this framework can better critique and improve environmental governance regimes when it comes to pollution in Indian Country. Full Article.
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The Need for a Comprehensive Police Data Collection and Transparency Law in Arizona

2023, Past Issues, Print, Volume 55 (2023) Issue 3 (Fall)
By Jordan Blair Woods, Ashley Oddo, Devyn Arredondo & Yan Idrissov. Policing data is vital to improving police accountability and transparency. In 2021, Arizona enacted a law requiring law enforcement agencies in the state to collect and report data on officer use of force. Although a step in the right direction, the law does not require Arizona law enforcement agencies to collect and report data on other vital aspects of policing, such as traffic and pedestrian stops or complaints of officer misconduct. This Article underscores a need for Arizona to adopt a comprehensive police data collection and transparency law. Full Article.
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Standing in Reserve: A New Model for Hard Cases of Complicity

2023, Past Issues, 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…
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Transgender Equality and Geduldig 2.0

2023, Past Issues, 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…
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Jammed from Justice: How International Organization Immunity Enshrines Impunity

2023, Past Issues, 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…
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