Following newspaper reports that President Bush's Administration had begun developing a plan for relations with a post-Castro Cuba, I began to wonder - only partially in jest - if Cuba's then seventy-seven year old dictator had responded by developing his own plan for relations with a post-Bush America. As Professor Gordon has pointed out, Castro has remained in power throughout the reigns of ten U.S. Presidents: Dwight Eisenhower, John Kennedy, Lyndon Johnson, Richard Nixon, Gerald Ford, Jimmy Carter, Ronald Reagan, George H.W. Bush, William Clinton, and George W. Bush. This despite a wide variety of sanctions imposed against the dictator's regime. This paper focuses on just one of the various sanction measures taken against Cuba: its denomination as a "State Sponsor of Terrorism," which opens it up to lawsuits under the Foreign Sovereign Immunities Act (FSIA). Herein I will argue that this sanction has failed, not just for the same reason that the other sanctions against Cuba have ...

Political Structure Equal Protection can be defined as that strand of protections provided by the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment which protects independently identifiable groups from denial of equal access to the political process. Political Structure Equal Protection is a valid rule of law promulgated by the Supreme Court while interpreting the Equal Protection Clause - a rule established by precedent which has not been repudiated. Yet two recent cases cast doubt on its continued vitality, despite the fact that it has never explicitly been repudiated. This article argues that Political Structure Equal Protection deserves continued vitality, particularly when the protections afforded minorities under conventional "suspect class" equal protection are subject to retrenchment. Part I of this article discusses the evolution of Political Structure Equal Protection. Part II of this article examines the Colorado Supreme Court's application of Political Structure ...

Laws banning miscegenation endured in the colonies and the United States for more than 300 years. When the Supreme Court declared all such laws unconstitutional in Loving v. Virginia in 1967, sixteen such statutes and constitutional provisions were still in effect. Scientific racism determined a hierarchy within the White race that placed the Teutonic at the top, the Anglo-Saxon as the heir to the Teuton, and the American as the current leading branch of that line. Prior to the Darwinian revolution, two competing scientific theories, monogenism and polygenism, were applied to justify miscegenation statutes. The "monogenists" believed that all men descended from a single ancestor and were of the same species. This theory comported with the Bible and the story of Ham, as interpreted literally by the fundamentalists. The "polygenists" saw Blacks as a separate and inferior species descended from a different "Adam," and, thus, saw slavery as qualitatively no different from the ...

The extent to which foreign corporations as well as their domestic subsidiaries can discriminate against American employees on the basis of sex, age, religion, and national origin in a manner that would be acceptable under their own laws and customs but inimical to American law is currently determined by a muddled jumble of circuit court opinions interpreting a "[w]e express no view" Supreme Court footnote. As a result, American victims of sexual discrimination have much less protection under Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 when the discriminating actor is a foreign corporation or its domestic subsidiary than they do when the discrimination is by a wholly domestic corporation. This results from the courts' interpretations of the relationship between a common Treaty of Friendship, Commerce and Navigation (FCN) provision that allows foreign corporations to hire executive-level employees "of their choice," and Title VII and its 703 bona fide occupational qualification (BFOQ) ...

I use a nearly full-text version of Moore v. Regents of the University of California, as the first case in Property and find it to be a very useful tool for introducing not only a number of key property law concepts but also a number of concepts (not all of which directly relate to property) that are revisited throughout the curriculum, as well as contrasting the more dynamic body of tort law with the slow-moving world of property law. I also find it to be a more useful introduction to twenty-first century Property than the wild animal cases. If the "New Property" theory is now old, body parts, sperm and "pre-embryos" may indeed be the "Newest Property."

It is not possible to do the same sort of legislative history of a Kentucky law that one does for a federal statute because the Kentucky legislature does not publish legislative debates or committee reports - the basic materials of a true legislative history. Nonetheless, there are a few measures that a researcher can take to better understand a legislative enactment. This article provides a simple step-by-step method for researching the limited legislative history of Kentucky statutes.

No lawyer's knowledge of Kentucky law is safe while the state legislature is in session. Everything from the rules for the taxation of small businesses to the procedures of juvenile courts is subject to change in this period and it is often important to monitor these developments on behalf of current and future clients. To do so, it is necessary to understand something of Kentucky legislative procedure. This article looks at the Kentucky legislative process, noting the myriad limits on lawmakin

No lawyer's knowledge of Kentucky law is safe while the state legislature is in session. Everything from the rules for the taxation of small businesses to the procedures of juvenile courts is subject to change in this period and it is often important to monitor these developments on behalf of current and future clients. To do so, it is necessary to understand something of Kentucky legislative procedure. This article looks at the Kentucky legislative process, noting the myriad limits on lawmaking imposed by the state constitution. These include rules restricting the length of sessions, mandates setting super-majorities for bills raising or spending state funds, and the requirement that all provisions of a bill be on the same topic. Tools for tracking legislation are also discussed.

This essay proposes a little housecleaning in the law of communications regulation. Red Lion Broadcasting Co. v. FCC, 395 U.S. 369 (1969), deserves to be transferred in its entirety from the realm of doctrine to that of history. Defenders of Red Lion and the discourse-based model of free speech jurisprudence symbolized by that decision seek to preserve one communicative niche where the public at large does absolutely nothing besides watch or listen. Appeals to civic republicanism and other lo

The basic ethics rules regarding fees are simple. The fee must be reasonable. The rules specify process and disclosure requirements to ensure that the client understands the fee. In the process of collecting the fee, the attorney always must be mindful of the general rule which states that a lawyer must not engage in conduct involving dishonesty, fraud, deceit or misrepresentation. Occasionally, attorneys who bill by the hour run afoul of these rules. Unfortunately, the result is damage not only

Through empirical research, this article examines whether judges on the United States courts of appeals are framing their opinions in gender-neutral language. Drawing on multidisciplinary sources, including the work of language scholars, psychologists, framing theorists, and legal professionals, the article explains why gender-neutral language is important and discusses ways of constructing it. The article then presents the results of a study of recent court opinions, compares data from the year

Recently I wrote a review for the Louisville Courier-Journal newspaper of Professor Elyn Saks' memoir of life while secretly suffering from schizophrenia. I did not mention the parallels between my life and Professor Saks'. I also have a successful career as a law professor. I accomplished it while harboring the secret I have the severe mental illness bipolar disorder (formerly known as "manic-depressive illness"). Why did I hide my condition for so long? Mainly I kept quiet due to the fear of stigma. Sadly, people today stigmatize more than they did fifty years ago. They need to realize that a history of mental illness is not a moral failing, and that it is a chronic condition like any "physical" disease. Although most with severe mental illness pose no threat to anyone, stereotypes unduly link violence with mental illness. The vast majority of those with mental illness like Professor Saks and me are not violent; a very small portion of the level of violence in society is ...

This essay addresses questions of truth and beauty, of poetry and fidelity, as applied to legal education and ultimately to law. After discussing how law schools can most faithfully translate their teachings to lawyers' real concerns, I shall ponder how the law itself reconciles its duty to truth with its practitioners' longing for beauty.

Materials originally presented June 20, 2008 at the Kentucky Bar Association Conference. Section II contains information on locating Kentucky cases, statutes, regulations, and ordinances on the internet. Other useful Kentucky sites are also mentioned. Section III provides information on locating various types of federal law (statutes, regulations, & cases) using free sites on the internet. Section IV gives tips on using search engines, portals, and meta-sites to locate legal information. Finally, Section V discusses using free sites to locate secondary sources on the internet.

Telecommunications mergers are at once a historical mirror and a harbinger of the legal future. Since the passage of the Telecommunications Act of 1996, no significant telecommunications merger has failed to receive regulatory approval in the United States. The Telecommunications Act of 1996 has accelerated the trend toward consolidation and concentration. Having devoted most of its energy on issues doomed to become technologically and economically obsolete, the Act failed to anticipate the technological conditions (especially the emergence of the Internet) that drove telecommunications carriers to consolidate. Nevertheless, possible avenues for reform remain open should the federal government ever conclude that the anticompetitive potential of telecommunications mergers outweighs their salutary effects.

This article offers tips for adding punch to legal writing. Among the suggestions are to prefer strong verbs, avoid nominalizations, be direct, and vary sentence beginnings and lengths. Examples illustrate how to use the tips.

Epigenetics is one of the most scientifically important, and legally and ethically significant, cutting-edge subjects of scientific discovery. Epigenetics link environmental and genetic influences on the traits and characteristics of an individual, and new discoveries reveal that a large range of environmental, dietary, behavioral, and medical experiences can significantly affect the future development and health of an individual and their offspring. This article describes and analyzes the ethical and legal implications of these new scientific findings.

Information technology's rapid change profoundly impacts legal education and legal practice. This article discusses the five key research skills that are the focus of our computer assisted legal research instruction.

Hurricane Katrina broke America's collective heart. No previous natural disaster in the nation's history inflicted a grimmer toll. The legendary city of New Orleans all but sank when its levees failed and the resulting storm surge drowned much of the city and many of its feeblest, most vulnerable residents. Katrina exposed flaws in virtually every aspect of disaster management at every level of American government. The magnitude and senselessness of the loss indicted American society for its callous disregard of social vulnerability. There is no such thing as a natural disaster. Understanding the interplay of environmental events with social conditions holds the key to the optimal application of legal tools for preventing, mitigating, and remedying natural tragedies - the grand social exercise called law among the ruins.

Red Lion Broadcasting Co. v. FCC, 395 U.S. 367 (1969), decreed a medium-specific approach to first amendment controversies involving radio and broadcast television. Although the Supreme Court has never applied Red Lion's scarcity rationale to any medium besides broadcasting, the Court has frequently resolved free speech disputes by drawing analogies to broadcasting. Red Lion declared that courts should condition constitutional protection on the technological and economic characteristics of a regulated communications conduit. It specifically concluded that broadcasting, as a conduit, merited less rigorous first amendment review because of scarcity, the historic extent of governmental involvement in broadcasting, and the ongoing public interest in access to this intensely regulated medium. Most judicial and academic objections to Red Lion have addressed scarcity. This article takes aim instead at Red Lion's prescription of conduit-specific first amendment review, urging close ...