Our Online Journal features original pieces written and edited by our Online staff at Columbia. They are not representative of any views held by the Columbia Undergraduate Law Review Editorial Board.
When the Class of 2023 joins Columbia’s campus later this fall, many students will have Les Goodson and Gregory Peterson to thank. In the fall of 1969, nearly 50 years ago, they too joined Columbia’s community as undergraduates, making their trek down College Walk as some of the earliest black students admitted to Columbia after the civil rights push of the 1960’s and 70’s.
Read MoreIn August 2018, a New York City bill that required data-sharing between short-term apartment rental platforms and New York law enforcement was signed into law and scheduled to take effect in February. The new legislation mandated that home-sharing companies share troves of hosts’ personal information with the New York City Office of Special Enforcement (OSE) on a monthly basis. In response, Airbnb, the largest home-sharing platform in New York, filed for a preliminary injunction before the law was set to take effect.
Read MoreBy living and aging in the United States, many Americans assume the goodness, the neutrality, and rationality of law. Some even judge the morality of others based on their adherence to these legal regulations, without critiquing the merits or source of the law itself. Others recognize that some laws unequivocally create unjust worlds and resist them actively. Few, however, question the very nature of law as a systemic means of regulating and organizing the social Normative, arising not from objective and liberal ‘truth’, but from “a human desire for reliability and pattern that protects a finite being from a chaotic world.”
Read MoreThis question posed by Mount Lemmon Fire District v. Guido is a microcosm of a much bigger issue. In recent years, the United States Supreme Court has been frequently tasked with filling in the holes left by incomplete legislation, a task of interpretation that readily encroaches on the law-writing duties entrusted to the Congress by the Constitution. Especially in the area of age discrimination regulation, the task of flushing out crucial details has been relegated to the courts. In order to properly understand this issue, some terms need to be defined.
Read MoreMany scholars have employed the “conduct/status conflation” framework to analyze how anti-homeless conduct legislation works to target and to disempower homelessness status. For example, Leonard C. Feldman claims the “status of homelessness” became “constitutionally regulable” by translating homeless status into homelessness’ “component acts,” such as public sleeping or public sidewalk sitting. [4] However, homeless status demands the exercise of component acts to maintain individual agency and autonomy.
Read MoreJury nullification is evidently a power exercised by jurors. The question remains how jurors can become informed of this right without facing legal punishments for attempting to influence a jury. Today, because of unclear and incomprehensive rulings on jury nullification, citizens have been arrested and charged with jury tampering when informing jurists of their de facto right to question a law.
Read MoreEver since the end of World War II, and increasingly since the decline of colonialism, African countries like Mali, Nigeria, and Benin have begun requesting that Western states return artworks and other cultural properties that were illegally taken. Illicit trading of cultural property is not a problem limited to African nations; Turkey sued the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Greek Orthodox Church of Cyprus sued a Dutch art dealer, and the United States enacted the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act to return Indigenous artifacts to their respective nations.
Read MoreLaw enforcement’s animosity towards rap and its refusal to recognize the genre as a complex artistic endeavor can likely be traced to racial prejudices. On one hand, law enforcement views rap negatively because this music directly threatens their authority. On the other hand, multiple studies have demonstrated that rap music “primes the negative culturally held stereotype of urban Blacks.”
Read MoreA major reappraisal of the U.S.-China trade relationship may have begun in the supplements aisle of your local health food store. The U.S. Supreme Court’s unanimous decision in Animal Science Products Inc. v. Hebei Welcome Pharmaceutical Co. 138 S. Ct. 1865 (2018) settled an international dispute spanning more than a decade over the sale of vitamin C supplements and the procedures for interpreting foreign law in U.S. federal courts.
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