Category: Past Issues

49 Ariz. St. L.J. 1417 (2017). Oskar Liivak. For some time patent law has been criticized for a flood of bad patents. Patents of questionable validity are being issued with overly broad, often nebulous boundaries. A majority of the blame…

49 Ariz. St. L.J. 1453 (2017). Tyler Carlton. A victim of child sexual abuse takes the stand, and the abuse begins again—this time with the sanction of law. In some cases, abusers exercise the right of self-representation to personally cross-examine…

49 Ariz. St. L.J. 1257 (2017). Alan L. Durham. Because a patentable invention must be novel, and it must embody an advancement that would not have been obvious to persons of ordinary skill, the invention must be compared to the…

49 Ariz. St. L.J. 1193 (2017). Caroline Mala Corbin. Picture a county clerk who refuses to issue a marriage license to an LGBT couple or a city bus driver who insists on wearing a hijab. The clerk is fired for…

49 Ariz. St. L.J. 1369 (2017). Jonathan J. Koehler. Forensic science—which includes such techniques as DNA analysis, fingerprint examination, and firearms comparison—plays a crucial role in our criminal justice system by helping to convict the guilty and acquit the innocent.…

Ernest A. Young. It is humbling for an American scholar of federalism to admit that the most interesting developments in federalism are happening in Europe, not the United States. But this has been true for some time. Kicking off the…

Jonathan F. Mitchell. Modern judicial review poses a unique threat to federalism, because it enables the Supreme Court to preempt state law and impose nationwide policies by a simple majority vote and without the assent of any other institution. And…

John Kincaid. Numerous and powerful political forces have vested interests in the contemporary idea of cooperative federalism, which prioritizes an obligation of states to cooperate with federal policy initiatives in a system that is essentially prefectorial administration. These forces make impossible…

Daniel Francis. When federalism scholars write about judicial review, they routinely focus on adjudication and neglect or ignore the process of litigation. Nowhere is this approach clearer than in the literature on the “safeguards” of federalism, which contrasts the “judicial…

Jesus Fernandez-Villaverde & Tano Santos. This paper argues that institutions and political party systems are simultaneously determined. A large change to the institutional framework, such as the creation of the euro by a group of European countries, will realign after…