Judy Stinson Lecture: Suppressing Constitutional Law: Qualified Immunity & Non-precedential Opinions
This year’s guest lecturer was Sarah Ricks, Distinguished Clinical Professor of Law at Rutgers Law School, delivering a lecture titled, “Suppressing Constitutional Law: Qualified Immunity and Non-precedential Opinions.”
Suppressing Constitutional Law: Qualified Immunity and Non-precedential Opinions
Federal appellate courts label most opinions as “non-precedent.” The label is supposed to have no doctrinal impact. But in the context of qualified immunity, the non-precedential label dramatically impacts doctrine. This Article first examines the tension between qualified immunity doctrine and core common law values of predictability, consistency, and perceived integrity of the judicial process.
Restatement of Children and the Law Now Available
This first ever Restatement on the law governing children covers issues such as parental rights and state intervention in cases of abuse and neglect; the rights of students and the limits of state authority in public schools; the rights and special protections of youth in both the juvenile and criminal justice systems, from police contact to dispositions and sentencing; and children as legal persons, covering free-speech rights and the authority of minors to consent to certain medical decisions, among other things.
Recovering Strict Products Liability for the Age of AI
The rule of strict products liability in section 402A of the Restatement (Second) of Torts is widely assumed to have been formulated to address manufacturing defects. Relying on this assumption, the Restatement (Third) of Torts defines manufacturing defects as departures from the product’s design and therefore from the manufacturer’s manifest intent. Because virtually all product malfunctions stem from manufacturing defects, the Third Restatement extended this logic to define malfunctions as departures from manifest intent as well. This move effectively discards the section 402A consumer expectations test as a redundant relic from the early days of products liability.
Idaho Supreme Court Adopts Property 3d
In a property dispute, the Supreme Court of Idaho adopted § 3.4 of the Restatement of the Law Third, Property (Servitudes), as the standard for determining the reasonableness of a restraint on alienation. Smallwood v. Little, 583 P.3d 149 (Idaho 2026), dealt with a...
Tort Law at the Frontier of Artificial Intelligence
This Article offers an in-depth conceptual, normative, and doctrinal examination of tort liability for foundation model development and release. It provides a qualified defense of the tort of negligence – the common law’s broadest and most flexible cause of action – as the principal doctrinal foundation of the tort system’s governance of this novel domain.
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