Category: 2021

Nyla Knox On average, on-duty police officers shoot and kill one thousand individuals in the United States each year. One in every one-thousand black men will be killed by law enforcement in their lifetime. In nearly every instance, though, courts…

Shannon Hautzinger Aurora. Newtown. San Bernardino. Orlando. Las Vegas. Parkland. Pittsburgh. Thousand Oaks. Virginia Beach. El Paso. Dayton. Boulder. The grim commonality that links these cities needs no explanation, yet the ease with which it comes to mind demonstrates the…

Hon. Lawrence F. Winthrop “Equal justice under law is not merely a caption on the fa ade of the Supreme Court building. It is perhaps the most inspiring ideal of our society. It is one of the ends for which our…

Judge Peter B. Swann & Sarah Pook The First Amendment to the United States Constitution provides unambiguously and without exception that “Congress shall make no law . . . abridging the freedom of speech.” Read literally, there is no room…

G. Murray Snow For this edition of the Arizona State Law Journal (Journal), the editors have invited prominent Arizona judges (both state and federal) to write on topics they know about. All of the authors are jurists of experience and…

Roslyn Silver Today, the right to vote in this country and the state of Arizona is a fundamental right of citizenship. The act of voting is one of the most elemental forms of democratic participation. But participation in our democracy…

Mary Schroeder Title VII of the Federal Civil Rights Act of 1964 was nearly ten years old before Arizona lawyers realized their state law needed to ban sex discrimination in employment. Indeed, major Phoenix law firms were openly refusing to…

Andrew D. Hurwitz Recent challenges to Arizona legislation impacting elections have typically invoked the federal Voting Rights Act (“VRA”) of 1965. But a trilogy of Supreme Court decisions has diminished the sweep of that legislation. In Shelby County v. Holder,…

Andrew W. Gould & Erica Leavitt Arizona’s courts, like most courts, have wrestled with the limits of tort liability in negligence cases. Two basic frameworks have been developed to address this issue: duty and causation. Under a duty framework, a…

Kent E. Cattani & Paul J. McMurdie Arizona’s procedure for determining whether to seek the death penalty—a decision by an elected County Attorney—was established when Arizona became a state in 1912. At that time, however, a decision to seek the…