Ohio State Law Journal

Congratulations to our Fall 2024 Double Check Editing Award winners: Jonathan Cutri, Morgan Kukovec, Kayla Vonder Embse, and Ethan Garvin! ?? These talented individuals demonstrated remarkable meticulousness throughout our second editing round of the year. Fantastic job, everyone! ??

Congratulations to our Fall 2024 Accuracy Check Editing Award winners: Justin Lee, CPA, Reema Rao, Sayan Trisal, and Ian B.! ?? Each recipient has shown exceptional attention to detail and commitment to excellence throughout our first editing round. Well done! ??

We are thrilled to introduce the 2024–2025 Editorial Board and welcome our 44 new Staff Editors to the Ohio State Law Journal team. This year's team is comprised of some of the brightest legal minds, and they are dedicated to continuing our tradition of excellence in legal scholarship. Here's to a fantastic year of collaboration, innovation, and scholarly achievement!?? ??

The war in Ukraine ushered in a new generation of critical sanctions scholarship. In her article, Elena Chachko argues that sanctions are not merely a form of opportunistic virtue signaling by the world’s powerful. They serve important functions in the global order as one of the few remaining non-military avenues for articulating international norms. Read more: https://lnkd.in/dHs5SGiU.

In her paper, Heidi Gilchrist addresses the question whether the international community can harness the incredible moral outrage at the unprovoked Russian invasion of Ukraine to hold Russia accountable. She further considers the negative side to the outrage and selective outrage, including the extreme amount of coverage and aid given to the suffering of the white population of Ukraine while other black and brown groups have not received the same aid and coverage. Read more: https://lnkd.in/gjUwtBFk.

Within thirty minutes of the Ukraine War’s outbreak, Ukrainian military leaders rushed to call their American allies: the California National Guard. In her article, Julia Spiegel examines the range of U.S. state and local responses to Russia’s 2022 invasion of Ukraine. She offers several reasons why U.S. states and localities may see it in their self-interest to engage in foreign affairs and considers the primary constitutional constraints on subnational foreign affairs actions. Read more: https://lnkd.in/gdp5cNBw

Does the ascendance of the artificially intelligent corporation threaten the integrity and legitimacy of democracy? In his article, Michael R. Siebecker argues that the proliferation of AI combined with the increasing dominance of corporations in our society calls for revamping basic principles of corporate governance. In particular, he examines whether interpreting corporate fiduciary duties through the lens of political “discourse theory” could better ensure corporate practices meaningfully align with the preferences of shareholders and other corporate stakeholders. Read more: https://lnkd.in/giFP-vaT

In his essay, Bijal Shah questions separation-of-powers functionalism’s capacity both to further its own conventional purposes, and to support administration that benefits people. He considers how separation-of-powers functionalism may lead to underexamined moments of branch aggrandizement. Shah argues disentrenching concerning practices by making modest shifts to the relationships between the constitutional branches and agencies could inspire the development of an internally consistent functionalism, and perhaps even a functionalism that furthers justice.?Read more: https://lnkd.in/d5wJyPGW

As the defense in the criminal trial of January 6th insurrectionist leader Guy Reffitt illustrates, in the age of deepfakes, it is easier than ever for lawyers to exploit juror suspicions about what is real and what is fake. In her article, Rebecca Delfino examines the nascent "deepfake defense" - built around the premise that the audiovisual material introduced as evidence against the defendant is claimed to be fake. She argues the deepfake defense is a new danger to our legal system’s adversarial process and truth-seeking function and proposes reconsidering the ethical rules governing candor, fairness, and the limits of zealous advocacy. Read more:

Recent innovations in financial technology, or “FinTech,” are enabling the fractionalization of investment securities, such as shares of stock and bonds. In their article, Steven Schwarcz & Robert Bourret explain how this fractionalization can fundamentally expand financial inclusion both for investors and for businesses, including small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs). Using the fractionalization of investment securities as a model, they also counter the argument that FinTech-enabled transactions should not need regulation because they are governed by mathematical algorithms under so-called smart contracts. Additionally, they derive and test a regulatory framework to identify and help to mitigate the risks caused by fractionalization. In the process, they also explain and de-mystify smart contracts, decentralized finance (“DeFi”), and other fundamental, but often confusing, concepts associated with FinTech. Read more: