Full Text PDF In Espinoza v. Montana Department of Revenue,1 the Supreme Court ruled that providing state funds to private secular schools but not private religious schools amounted to unconstitutional discrimination against religion in violation of the Free Exercise Clause.2 In this short piece, I explain how the Court’s decision is inconsistent with its prior Establishment Clause precedents on religious school funding.…
Essay
Zoom Wills
By Alberto B. Lopez
Full Text PDF Abstract This brief essay suggests that suddenly popular online meeting platforms like Zoom can be used to execute wills while people are subject to shelter-in-place orders following the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic. Although will execution ceremonies using Zoom do not strictly comply with statutory formalities, Zoom-based ceremonies satisfy the two primary curative doctrines—the substantial compliance doctrine…
Commentary
Cold Cases Freeze: Law Enforcement Locked Out of DNA Database Used for Investigative Genealogy After Consumers Object to Being Genetic Informants
By Nanci K. Carr
Full Text PDF Abstract California’s infamous Golden State Killer, Joseph James DeAngelo, a serial killer and rapist, committed a string of crimes during the 1970s and 1980s, and avoided capture for more than 40 years until genetic data available online led to his arrest. His capture caused users of popular testing services such as Ancestry and 23andMe to question whether…
Commentary
Who Wrote This?: Modern Forensic Authorship Analysis as a Model for Valid Forensic Science
By Janet Ainsworth and Patrick Juola
Introduction On September 5, 2018, the New York Times published what might be, according to one commentator, “the most significant and consequential op-ed ever published.”[1] The article, purportedly authored by a “senior official” within the Trump administration, contained a number of explosive assertions concerning the fitness of the President and claimed that the author, together with other officials in the administration,…
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A Matter of “Principal”: A Critique of the Federal Circuit’s Decision in Arthrex v. Smith & Nephew, Inc.