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1 June 2025
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Journal Article
1 June 2025
Being Independent Together: Georgia Adopts Eleventh Circuit’s Two-Step Analysis in Cases Involving the Independent Source Doctrine
The exclusionary rule is a judicially created sanction applied by the Supreme Court of the United States to effectuate the intent of the protections provided by the Fourth Amendment. This rule aims to deter police misconduct by presenting a sanction barring the prosecution from presenting evidence obtained through a Fourth Amendment violation. Despite this honorable intention, however, the rule’s exceptions have arguably eroded the protections it seeks to provide. One such exception is the independent source doctrine. Tatum v. State is one of the most recent decisions by the Supreme Court of Georgia in which the court considered applying this doctrine to a case involving a Fourth Amendment violation. The decision adopted the two-step analysis utilized by the United States Court of Appeals for the Eleventh Circuit and thus marks the adoption of a new test that Georgia prosecutors must satisfy when attempting to introduce evidence under the independent source doctrine. Furthermore, this adoption could indicate the Georgia courts’ possible inclination to demand stricter standards in cases involving exceptions to the exclusionary rule.Current Articles
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Journal Article1 June 2025
Attempting to Resolve the Felon-In-Possession Prohibition Circuit Split: The Second Amendment Historical Analogue Test After United States v. Rahimi
The Second Amendment provides, “[a] well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.” The inception of this amendment was rooted in the Founding Fathers’ Enlightenment ideals and disapproval of the English Crown’s “standing armies.” In founding-era America, the militias were not composed of professional soldiers but instead of local citizens with the aim of providing common defense. The main concern surrounding the ratification was that the Second Amendment would give too much power to the federal government and result in the same centralized military power that existed in Great Britain.Journal Article1 June 2025
To Keep Our Nation Breathing: The Impact of State Legislation and the PREP Act on COVID-19 Liability Immunity Defenses for Healthcare Providers in the Eleventh Circuit
This Comment is not intended to patronize you with statistics related to the COVID-19 pandemic. The odds suggest that you or someone you love dealt with these gruesome realities in real-time. Instead, allow me to paint a picture:1 You direct hospital operations. You have built your career at a trauma hospital, so you are familiar with the stress that comes with a daily ratio of six patients to one nurse—and yet, COVID-19 brings constantly evolving challenges that no one anticipated. On a typical day, during the height of the pandemic, your consecutive twelve-hour workdays become a blur as you and your staff tackle any combination of the following challenges: find more hospital beds for the increasing volume of patients. Find more personal protective equipment (PPE)2 for your staff and, when these resources become too scarce, develop and implement policies to sanitize and reuse PPE. Intubate3 critical care patients. Anticipate the number of ventilators4 necessary to intubate infected patients and keep them breathing. Keep them breathing. Balance the personal freedoms of your beloved staff with masking and vaccination mandates. Inform families that they cannot visit their hospitalized loved ones because of a policy intended to prevent the virus from spreading. Care for their loved ones as if they were your own family. Hold their hands while they take their final breaths.Journal Article1 June 2025
You are Your Child’s Keeper: People v. Crumbley Opens the Door to Parental Criminal Liability
In the spring of 2024, James and Jennifer Crumbley, parents to Michigan school shooter Ethan Crumbley, were convicted of involuntary manslaughter after their son shot and killed four Oxford High School classmates. This decision marks the first time in the history of the United States that the parents of a school shooter have been charged criminally for contributing to the death of the shooting victims, and comes in the midst of an era where our nation is wracked by gun violence. In the quarter century since the 1999 Columbine High School shooting, a generation of children have lived under the threat of school-related gun violence. School shootings have risen substantially in frequency in the last twenty-five years. From 1997 to 2022, there were 1,453 school shootings. More than half of those—794—occurred from 2017 to 2022. In 2023, the United States saw 346 school shootings, averaging out to nearly one per day. As the frequency of school shootings has increased, the topics of gun violence and juvenile delinquency have been cyclically present in the media, election cycles, and proposed legislation. Research has raised a variety of solutions to preventing school shootings—including stricter gun laws, community programming around gun safety, and increased funding for mental health interventions. However, amid these tragic events, fingers often point not toward lawmakers or school and community administrators, but toward the parents of the attacker.Journal Article1 June 2025
A Bad Apple: Supreme Court of Georgia Delivers Loss to Educators Holding It Is Constitutional for Tenured Georgia Educators to Lose Tenure when Public Schools Convert to Charter Schools
The Supreme Court of Georgia dealt a major blow to educators in existing charter school systems with tenure rights earned under the Fair Dismissal Act (FDA) after 1993. The court’s decision in Woods v. Barnes meant a big win for existing charter school systems and public school systems that intend to convert to charter systems. In Woods, a public school teacher and the Georgia Association of Educators (GAE) sought enforcement of tenure rights afforded by the Fair Dismissal Act in a charter school system that was previously a public school system. These rights included notice of the reasons for termination and the opportunity for a hearing to challenge those reasons.Journal Article1 June 2025
Anything No Longer Goes: How the Eleventh Circuit has Settled on One Standard to Determine Deliberate-Indifference Claims
Deliberate indifference to the medical care of a loved one, or oneself, rightly causes outrage. When such an occurrence takes place behind prison walls, inmates or loved ones on their behalf, file a deliberate indifference claim under 42 U.S.C. § 1983,and they allege a violation of their Eighth Amendment right to be free of cruel and unusual punishment. However, the test for deliberate indifference has been misconstrued and misapplied for decades within the United States Court of Appeals for the Eleventh Circuit. Such a malleable test leads to different standards of proof for a plaintiff to meet, and confusion among judges and lawyers alike. Fortunately, the Eleventh Circuit in Wade v. McDade has settled the standard once and for all. In its en banc decision, the Eleventh Circuit held that a deliberate-indifference plaintiff must allege and prove more than gross negligence, which aligns with the criminal recklessness standard set by the Supreme Court of the United States for such claims.Journal Article1 June 2025
Being Independent Together: Georgia Adopts Eleventh Circuit’s Two-Step Analysis in Cases Involving the Independent Source Doctrine
The exclusionary rule is a judicially created sanction applied by the Supreme Court of the United States to effectuate the intent of the protections provided by the Fourth Amendment. This rule aims to deter police misconduct by presenting a sanction barring the prosecution from presenting evidence obtained through a Fourth Amendment violation. Despite this honorable intention, however, the rule’s exceptions have arguably eroded the protections it seeks to provide. One such exception is the independent source doctrine. Tatum v. State is one of the most recent decisions by the Supreme Court of Georgia in which the court considered applying this doctrine to a case involving a Fourth Amendment violation. The decision adopted the two-step analysis utilized by the United States Court of Appeals for the Eleventh Circuit and thus marks the adoption of a new test that Georgia prosecutors must satisfy when attempting to introduce evidence under the independent source doctrine. Furthermore, this adoption could indicate the Georgia courts’ possible inclination to demand stricter standards in cases involving exceptions to the exclusionary rule.Journal Article1 June 2025
Repugnant Verdicts for $1000: Navigating the Intersection of Double Jeopardy and Conflicting Verdicts in McElrath v. Georgia
“No man is to be brought into jeopardy of his life, more than once, for the same offense.” This ancient maxim, preserved in the Double Jeopardy Clause of the Fifth Amendment, is a hallmark of the American justice system. The Double Jeopardy Clause gives a criminal defendant the constitutional right not to be tried again for the same offense after being acquitted. This guarantee stands as “[p]erhaps the most fundamental rule in the history of double jeopardy jurisprudence.” The Supreme Court of the United States has repeatedly upheld these principles; by refusing to allow retrial following an acquittal, the Court underscores the importance of the constitutional protections afforded by the Double Jeopardy Clause. This posture, however, presents a broader tension between state autonomy and federal oversight. While states possess the authority to enact and enforce their own legislative and judicial principles, they remain bound by the Constitution. This tension requires states to carefully navigate the exercise of their traditional autonomy while remaining within the framework of the Constitution’s governing provisions.Most Popular Articles
Journal Article
1 May 1998
Maryland v. Wilson: The Fading Fourth Amendment
In Maryland v. Wilson, the United States Supreme Court held that a police officer may order a passenger of a lawfully stepped car to exit the vehicle. This "bright-line rule" allows these intrusions as a matter of course and does not require case-by-case determination.Journal Article
1 July 1976
The Economic Effects of Monopoly: A Lawyer's Guide to Antitrust Economics
Four factors were influential in my decision to write this survey paper summarizing what economists believe theoretically and have found empirically to be the major economic (and noneconomic) effects of monopoly. First, in my work as an expert witness in antitrust cases representing both private parties and public bodies, I have found a glaring lacuna in the minds of some judges, a number of lawyers and most jurors in the area of antitrust economics. Second, this feeling has been fortified by my guest lectures in antitrust law courses; while the students are bright and the teacher dedicated, an acceptable level of competence in antitrust economics had successfully evaded its pursuers. Third, my reading of several law journals has convinced me that there are a large number of legally competent antitrust lawyers who are not very familiar with antitrust economics. Finally, I was motivated by the growing realization that people do not regard antitrust violations as very serious. The July 1974 issue of SCIENCE DIGEST reported a cross-section study of Baltimore residents in which the respondents were asked to rate the seriousness of crimes from 9 (most serious) to 1 (least serious). The highest mean score recorded was "planned killing of a policeman" (8.474), and the lowest mean score was "being drunk in public places" (2.849). Of the 140 crimes listed three were of an antitrust genus. "Fixing prices of a consumer product like gasoline" ranked 126 from the top (4.629), "fixing prices of machines sold to businesses" ranked 127 (4.619), and "false advertising of a headache remedy" ranked 132 (4.083). Offenses such as "breaking a plate glass window in a shop," "refusal to make essential repairs in rental property," "shoplifting a carton of cigarettes from a supermarket," "driving while license is suspended," "lending money at illegal interest rates," "joining a riot," and "using pep pills" are each regarded as more serious than the antitrust violations! In Part I we will explore in some detail the economic (and some noneconomic) effects of monopoly. In Part II we will examine briefly public policies toward monopoly.Journal Article
1 March 2022
The Protection of Freedom of Expression from Social Media Platforms
Social media platforms have overturned the previously known system of public communication. As predicted at the outset, the spread of the public Internet that started three decades ago has resulted in a paradigm shift in this field. Now, anyone can publish their opinion outside the legacy media, at no significant cost, and can become known and be discussed by others. Due to the technological characteristics of the Internet, it might also be expected that this kind of mass expression, with such an abundance of content, would necessitate the emergence of gatekeepers, similar in function to the ones that existed earlier for conventional media. The newsagent, post office, and cable or satellite services have been replaced by the Internet service provider, the server (host) provider and the like. However, no one could have foreseen that the new gatekeepers of online communication would not only be neutral transmitters or repositories but also active shapers of the communication process, deciding on which user content on the Internet they deemed undesirable and deciding which content, out of all the theoretically accessible content, is actually displayed to individual users. Content filtering, deleting, blocking, suspending, and ranking are all types of active interference with the exercise of users’ freedom of speech and practices which also affect the interests of other users in obtaining information. All this became an even greater and more difficult-to-manage issue when, in certain sub-markets of the Internet, certain giant tech companies’ services gained a monopoly or came close to doing so. This process has emerged in connection with gatekeepers of a specific type: the most important online platforms (social media, video sharing, search engines, web stores). In this way, a new, unexpected obstacle to the exercise of freedom of speech appeared, with the result that the earlier constitutional doctrines could no longer be applied without any change. The crux of the problem is that the platforms are privately owned. In formal terms, they are simply market players which are not bound by the guarantees of freedom of speech imposed on public bodies and which may enjoy the protection of freedom of speech themselves.Journal Article
1 December 2014
Journal Article
1 March 1992
Assassination and the Law of Armed Conflict
The availability of assassination of foreign leaders as a means of achieving United States foreign policy objectives is an issue that has proven in recent years to be a recurring one. However, it does not arise in isolation; instead it is almost always part of a larger political controversy over United States foreign policy objectives and whether force of any kind should be used to pursue them. Certainly this was true with regard to the controversies that surrounded United States policy, including alleged involvement in assassination plots toward Cuba, Vietnam, the Congo, and the Dominican Republic in the 1960s, and toward Chile in the early 1970s. It is also true, though to a lesser degree, of more recent debates concerning the United States air strike against Libya in April 1986 and the role of the United States in Panama prior to the December 1989 invasion. In each case there was, or later developed, significant disagreement over the appropriateness of United States policy toward the nation involved and over the use of force to induce changes in the nature or activities of its government. Inevitably, such disagreements have tended to distract attention from the manner in which force might be applied; if the chosen objective appears not to be a legitimate one or if the use of force seems unjustified, the relative merit of an -attack on a military installation, for example, as seriously or productively considered. The recent war in the Persian Gulf has again revived the controversy and provided a new opportunity for debate. This time, however, the issue appeared more starkly framed than previously. Public doubt as to the legitimacy of the immediate objective-the ejection of Iraq from Kuwait-was for the most part absent, and although there was disagreement about the timing and amount of coercion to be used, force was generally perceived as a legitimate option. The American public perceived Iraqi President Saddam Hussein, hardly a sympathetic image, as probably the least ambiguous villain of the second half of the twentieth century. Unchallenged by any significant political opposition prior to the war, he appeared as the sole instigator of Iraq's seizure of Kuwait, as well as the cause of its intransigence in the face of international insistence that it withdraw.Journal Article
1 May 1993