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The United States Supreme Court decided Ramos v. Louisiana in 2020, requiring all states to convict criminal defendants by a unanimous jury. However, this case only applied to petitioners on direct, and not collateral, appeal. In this thesis, I argue that the Ramos precedent should apply to people on collateral appeal as well, exploring the implications of such a decision and the criteria that should be used to make the decision in the case before the court, Edwards v. Vannoy (2021). Ultimately, I find that because the criteria currently used to determine retroactivity of new criminal precedents does not provide a clear answer to the question posed in Edwards, the Court should give more weight to the defendant's freedoms pursuant to the presumption of innocence while considering the potential for any disastrous outcomes.
This study analyzed currently existing statute at the state, federal, and international level to ultimately build a criteria of recommendations for policymakers to consider when building regulations for facial recognition technology usage by law enforcement agencies within the United States.
To mitigate climate change, carbon needs to be removed from the atmosphere and stored for thousands of years. Currently, carbon removal and storage are voluntarily procured, and longevity of storage is inconsistently defined and regulated. Clauses can be added to procurement contracts to require long-term management and increase the durability of storage. Well-designed and properly enforced contracts can pave the way to future regulation for long-term carbon management.
But this isn’t a history of events—of names and dates and typical details. This is a history of words. In the twenty-first century, words used to discuss embryos and fetuses are split. Some people use humanizing language like “unborn children” and “human life.” Others use technical words like “embryos” and “fetuses.” I studied what words people used historically. I charted how words moved from science to the public to the law, and how they impacted court rulings on fetal personhood.
The use of certain words nudged courts to grant additional rights to embryos and fetuses. In the 1960s, writers began describing the science of development, using words like “unborn child” and humanizing descriptions to make embryos and fetuses seem like people already born. That helped build an idea of embryos and fetuses as having “life” before birth. When people began asking courts to legalize abortion care in the 1970s, attorneys on the opposite side argued that embryos and fetuses were “human life,” and that that “life” began at conception.
In those cases, “life” was biologically defined as when sperm fertilized egg, but it was on that biological definition “life” that judges improperly rested their legal rulings that embryos and fetuses were “potential human life” states had a duty to protect. It wasn’t legal personhood, but it was a legal status that let states pass laws restricting abortion care and punishing pregnant people for their behavior, trends that threaten people’s lives and autonomy in the twenty-first century.
My honors thesis focuses on the technological aspects and the legal impacts of prosthetics and advanced prosthetics. There is a lot of case law dealing with early prosthetics when it comes to worker’s compensation, airport security, prisons and sports. However, there has been little case law that has dealt with advanced prosthetics. As prosthetic limbs become more technologically advanced and intertwined with one’s identity, it is crucial that laws are made to draw a new line between person and property. The innovation of prosthetic limbs has just begun and will surely face setbacks along the way, but the benefits will be worth it once the law catches up with the rapidly advancing technology.