Missouri Law Review

Law Review Symposium 2012: Cyberbullying Emerging Realities and Legal Challenges

As Internet usage among elementary and secondary school students skyrockets, so too have instances of cyberbullying, i.e. using online media to target and harass classmates. As schools adjust their policies to this new form of bullying (often by legislative command), important questions emerge: What are the effects of bullying, especially Internet-based bullying? How can schools best implement effective, appropriate regulation of cyberbullying in particular? Are legislation and the schools' new cyberbullying policies constitutional? If not, can they be rewritten to satisfy constitutional requirements?

This year's Missouri Law Review Symposium will explore the impacts of cyberbullying and its regulation, ranging from the psychological and emotional impacts of bullying to the constitutional and legal implications of school regulation, including the challenges faced by administrators and teachers who implement these regulations in the schools.

John Palfrey, co-director of the Berkman Center for Internet & Society at Harvard Law School, will deliver the keynote address. He will be joined by eminent academics and practitioners from around the country in a timely discussion of the numerous and complex implications of cyberbullying and its regulation.

For more information about the Symposium and to register to attend, click here.

Law Review Symposium 2011: Evolving the Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit and its Patent Law Jurisprudence

The Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit is approaching its 30th anniversary as the focal point of patent law policy in the United States. Many praise the Court for its role in unifying and strengthening patent law doctrine. Others challenge the Court’s formalism and argue that a doctrine-specific solitary circuit leads to systematic failures in the development of the law.

In many ways, the Court is operating in a power vacuum, with the U.S. Patent Office denied authority to substantively develop the law and Congress regularly withholding its guidance. Over the past few years, the Supreme Court has taken a more active role in deciding patent cases, but will that increased interest alter the jurisprudence of the Federal Circuit beyond the doctrinal holdings of the High Court?

This year’s Missouri Law Review Symposium will explore the ongoing role for the Federal Circuit as a developer of patent law policy, the structure of the Court and its jurisprudential approach, the role of the Court relative to other potential policymaking bodies, and the Court’s impact on innovation and in shaping the practice of law.

For more information about the Symposium and to register to attend, click here.

Law Review Symposium 2010: Broke and Broken: Can We Fix Our State Indigent Defense Systems?

The 2010 Missouri Law Review Symposium, Broke and Broken: Can We Fix our State Indigent Defense Systems?, will be held on February 26 at John K. Hulston Hall. The Symposium will feature Stephen B. Bright, president and senior counsel at the Southern Center for Human Rights, as its keynote speaker. Law professors and public defender leaders from around the country will participate in three discussion panels held throughout the day. For more information about the Symposium and to register to attend, click here.

Missouri Law Review launches Online Case Summaries

The Missouri Law Review has embarked on an effort to provide quick, useful, and up to date analyses of Missouri Supreme Court decisions. The case summaries viewed at the link below are concise articles meant to give a thorough understanding of the opinions covered with room for commentary from the authors. The case summary authors, in their third year of law school at the University of Missouri, both edit and write for the Missouri Law Review. We hope practitioners, academics and students alike will find these useful.

The case summaries can be viewed by clicking here.

Spring 2009 Missouri Law Review Symposium with Sandra Day O’Connor

The Spring 2009 Missouri Law Review Symposium, Mulling over the Missouri Plan: A Review of State Judicial Selection and Retention Systems, took place February 27, 2009. The Symposium featured keynote speaker Justice Sandra Day O’Connor, as well a distinguished group of nine panelists and six commentators. For more information about the Symposium, click here.

A webcast of each panel can be accessed through the Symposium home page or by clicking here.

Although a webcast of Justice O’Connor’s lecture will not be available, her remarks, in addition to articles written by the presenters and commentators, will appear in our Symposium issue, which will be printed in the fall of 2009 (Volume 74, Issue 3). Once the issue is printed, an electronic version will be posted on our website and can be accessed here.

Return to Missouri v. Holland: A Symposium on Federalism & International Law

The Missouri Law Review hosted a national gathering of scholars in its spring, 2008 symposium to explore the intersection of federalism and international law from a variety of perspectives.

In the 1920 case Missouri v. Holland, Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes famously declared, "We must consider what this country has become in considering what [the Tenth] Amendment has reserved." The Supreme Court upheld the federal government's ability to regulate, through exercise of the Treaty Power, activity that otherwise would be reserved to the states. During the era when the Court adopted an expansive view of Congress' ability to regulate through the Commerce Clause, the import of Missouri v. Holland receded. But as the Court has increasingly cabined the scope of the Commerce Clause, and in a world where everything from the death penalty, to greenhouse gas emissions, to access to medical care has become the subject of multilateral treaty regimes, the ability of the federal government to invoke the Treaty Power in regulating the states is once again central to discussions of federalism.

To listen to pod casts from the symposium, click here.

The articles for this Symposium issue were published in Volume 73, Issue 4 and are available here.

Spring 2008 Symposium Issue: A Tribute to Professor David Fischer

The Spring 2008 issue of the Missouri Law Review is a special issue entitled Symposium: A Tribute to Professor David Fischer. You can read the articles and student notes in this special issue by clicking here.