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Recent Print Edition:
Articles
Articles
Volume 110, Issue 1
Law, Fact, and Appellate Review
Adam N. Steinman
For centuries, courts have been called upon to distinguish between law and fact. That distinction played a key role in recent Supreme Court decisions on two critical components of appellate review. Dupree v. Younger considered an important question regarding what a party must do at trial to preserve an issue for appellate review. . . .
Taxing Nannies
Ariel Jurow Kleiman, Shayak Sarkar & Emily Satterthwaite
Nannies in the United States often work long hours for low wages and fear retaliation if they complain. This precarity is exacerbated by nannies working informally, or “off the books,” keeping their work secret from state and federal tax agencies, as well as employment and labor agencies. Yet we have little understanding of how nannies navigate the tax reporting that renders them formal or informal. . . .
Innovating Accessible Health Care
Jessica L. Roberts
Compared to people without disabilities, people with disabilities experience significant health disparities. The recent move toward virtual health care—like online appointments, patient portals, and remote patient monitoring—offered an opportunity to address those inequities. Virtual health care can reduce costs, increase access, streamline communication, and improve the management of chronic conditions. . . .
The Vehicle Monitoring and Collection Technology Era
Stacy-Ann Elvy
Vehicle monitoring and collection (“VMC”) technology, including starter interrupt devices that remotely disable vehicles, and other GPS tracking devices are used in consumer vehicle agreements in subprime transactions. Subscription-based models supported by VMC features, such as over-the-air software updates that remotely disable or enable vehicular functions, have also appeared in the non-subprime automobile context as well. . . .
The Common Law’s Resistance to Gender Violence
Victoria Nourse
Over twenty years ago, Congress developed a “mountain of evidence” that state criminal and civil remedies against sexual assault and battering were inadequate. The Supreme Court rejected that evidence in United States v. Morrison, striking down a federal civil rights remedy for sexual assault and battering. Since then, there have been many civil cases of sexual assault and battering against high-profile individuals, including the recent E. Jean Carroll lawsuit against a former President. . . .
Criminalizing Transgender Care
Lewis A. Grossman
Since 2021, twenty-four states, in extraordinarily quick succession, have enacted statutes banning physicians from prescribing puberty blockers and cross-sex hormones to minors for treatment of gender dysphoria. Although the Food and Drug Administration has not approved these drugs for this use, off-label prescribing is a common practice, and leading medical organizations all agree that this off-label use of puberty blockers and sex hormones is an essential component of transgender medical care. . . .
Notes
Student Notes
Volume 110, Issue 1
Envelopes, Errors, and Elections: Revitalizing the Civil Rights Act’s Materiality Provision in the Age of Vote by Mail
West Oliver Connors
This Note examines the interplay between the Civil Rights Act’s materiality provision—which prevents the denial of the right to vote on the basis of immaterial errors—and the widespread adoption of vote by mail. The materiality provision’s text suggests a wide applicability and possibly a prominent role in protecting absentee votes which would otherwise be discarded. . . .
Temporary Custody Orders Pending a Modification: From Grantham to Granting Them
Rachel A. Schmit
There is a longstanding policy in Iowa that once child custody has been determined, it should rarely be upset and only for the most important reasons. Because of this policy, parents seeking modifications of their custody arrangements were not entitled to temporary custody orders while their modification was pending. That was until 2005, when the Supreme Court of Iowa recognized the courts’ authority to issue temporary custody orders in the landmark case of In re Marriage of Grantham. . . .
When Culture Meets Coverture: Utilizing Student Federal Aid to Help Indian H-4 Immigrants Escape Abuse
Maitri K. Patel
This Note explores the intersection of American immigration law, gender dynamics, and access to higher education through federal student aid, focusing on Indian women who immigrate on an H-4 visa and suffer from domestic abuse at the hands of their H-1B sponsor. Specifically, this Note investigates how widening access to higher education through the expansion of qualifications for student federal aid can serve as a transformative tool in enabling these individuals to escape. . . .
A Statutory Proposal for the Expedited Development of Iowa’s Treatment Courts
Jacob Wendell
Treatment courts are an alternative to incarceration that focus on the rehabilitation of defendants suffering from substance addiction by utilizing the concept of therapeutic jurisprudence. Treatment courts have been studied extensively and were found to reduce recidivism and produce net cost-savings when compared to traditional incarceration. . . .
Recent Online Edition:
Recent Online Edition:
How the Supreme Court Ghosted the PHOSITA: Amgen and Legal Constructs in Patent Law
Timothy R. Holbrook & Mark D. Janis
This Essay is an invited response to The Ghost in the Patent System: An Empirical Study of Patent Law’s Elusive “Skilled Artisan,” by Professors Laura Pedraza-Fariña and Ryan Whalen. In their piece, Pedraza-Fariña and Ryan Whalen offer an empirical study and use it to argue for a new conception of the Person Having Ordinary Skill in the Art (“PHOSITA”), patent law’s nod to the “reasonable person” construct. . . .
The Game, the Players, and the Board
Bruce E. Boyden
109 Iowa L. Rev. Online 105 (2024)
Christopher Seaman and Thuan Tran’s fascinating article, Intellectual Property and Tabletop Games, raises important questions about the role of intellectual property (“IP”) in developing and distributing innovative products. The market for tabletop games, Seaman and Tran argue, is able to sustain a high level of creativity at a high up-front cost, all while protected by some but not all of the IP rights that other industries’ outputs receive. Is that evidence of IP’s necessity or its superfluousness? . . .
Interpreting Textualist Slogans
Guha Krishnamurthi
109 Iowa L. Rev. Online 15 (2023)
Slogans are a blunt instrument—they may convey something of the truth, but they rarely do so undented. So too is the case with the influential textualism slogans “the text is [the] law,” “only the text [is] the law,” and “[o]nly the written word is the law.” In his insightful Article, Professor Erik Encarnacion shows why these statements are false, as they are category errors. He then observes that these slogans are unnecessary to establishing the core theses of textualism and that these slogans misunderstand and confuse features of textualism. And he is right about all of that. . . .
Should the Recent Timbs and Dobbs Decisions Revive Interest in the Excessive Fines Clause as the Constitutional Basis . . .
N. William Hines
109 Iowa L. Rev. Online 46 (2024)
In a series of cases in the early 1990s, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that the Due Process Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment implicitly enabled federal courts to review state punitive damages awards for unconstitutional arbitrariness and excessiveness. Before settling on the Due Process Clause as the basis of federal regulation of punitive damages, in a 1989 decision the Court considered and rejected the claim that the Excessive Fines Clause of the Eighth Amendment, as incorporated into the Fourteenth Amendment, could provide the constitutional foundation for federal regulation of state punitive damages awards. . . .
The Racism of Immigration Crime Prosecution
Ingrid V. Eagly
109 Iowa L. Rev. Online 27 (2023)
Eric Fish’s Article, Race, History, and Immigration Crimes, explores the racist motivation behind the original 1929 enactment of the two most common federal immigration crimes, entry without permission and reentry after deportation. This Response engages with Fish’s archival work unearthing this unsettling history and examines how his research has informed a series of legal challenges seeking to strike down the modern federal border crossing law as violating the Equal Protection Clause of the Constitution. . . .
Does DARC Really Matter?: A Response to Wright & Moore
Troy A. Rule
109 Iowa L. Rev. Online 1 (2023)
Danaya Wright and Ethan Moore’s Article, DARC Matters: Repurposing Nineteenth-Century Property Law for the Twenty-First Century, is a valuable contribution to a growing body of legal academic literature focused on property law obstacles to the deployment of commercial drone technologies. Wright and Moore rightly acknowledge landowners’ long-held rights to exclude objects from the low airspace immediately above their land–rights that some major retailers have aggressively sought to weaken in recent years to facilitate drone delivery services. . . .