Law

... I want to thank the many people that read initial drafts of this paper, including, Dennis Crouch, Wilson Freyermuth, Marianne Culhane, Juanda Daniel, and Kevin Marshall. ... App. Div. 1, 2008); Blair v. Freeburn Coal Corp., 253 SE2d 547 (W.Va. ...

... friends and colleagues both in Tulsa and elsewhere including: Alfred Brophy, Jeff Powell, Johnny Parker, Maria Mansfield, Marianne Blair, Valerie Phillips, 1 ... This case is decided upon an economic theory which a large part of the country does not entertain."); Traux v. Corrigan ...

Paper reviews definitional aspects of Article 9's treatment of fixtures and encumbrances.  The article gives particular attention to case law that demonstrates the lack of uniformity that real property interests pose to commercial concerns.

When a city undertakes a development project, low income and homeless persons face risks of expulsion. Public and private developers often target low-income neighborhoods and public lands because those spaces are viewed as economically more attainable or available for development. Moreover, the legal system's preference to treat disputes as individual entitlement claims tends to relegate disputes to broad questions of entitlements rather than unpacking the impacts that property changes have on the vulnerable populations. Whether by gentrification or by enhancement of city infrastructure, developer decisions disrupt what are already unstable living environments by imposing increased costs of relocation. These changes also destabilize community relationships by separating individuals and families from their support networks, local transportation options, and local employment that they have come to rely on. In short, low-income and homeless persons find themselves even more destabilized when public and private development projects force their evacuation from where they live. This article argues that though development may be necessary, it should not be undertaken without more serious evaluation of the human impacts in relation to the space. Such evaluations should include the impact on communities, employment, education, and environment for impacted persons. Importantly, failure to take notice of these impacts continues to promote cycles of poverty that plague American cities.

Drawing on similarities in the environmental context, the article argues that a NEPA-like approach to human housing can offset externalities that homeless persons and those living in low-income housing are forced to internalize through environment changes. Amongst those impacts are the imbalance between the well-funded developer and low income populations; the view that low income properties can be classified as nuisance-type properties; and the tendency to only consider the highest best use of property as the rationale for development. The article concludes by offering model legislation that could be implemented to provide a NEPA like assessment to city development.

Medical schools must deliver a culturally competent curriculum for purposes of accreditation. This article will shed light on race, gender, and class disparities in healthcare. Specifically, I will address the marginalization of women in the historical and contemporary recounting of the  US Public Health Services  Syphilis Study' at Tuskegee. This Article contends that the  US Public Health Services  Syphilis Study at Tuskegee's failure to acknowledge the direct impact on women requires a transformative remedy to address cultural competence accreditation mandates for medical education.

Ms.Henrietta Lacks - raced by social construction and gendered by biology for all mankind stood at the crossroads of
public health care (circa 1951) in an apartheid state of reality in the United States and ploughed back into medicine.
The biological uniqueness of her cells allowed scientists and researchers to benefit society as a whole. In this essay, I
place Ms. Lacks' parts (tissue cells) back into her body to raise a claim of unjust enrichment.

I argue  that the particularized and unique experiences of enslaved Black
women have been traditionally viewed as extracting assets from her body in the form of a “crop of human labor”  in the historically referred to role as a so-called “breeder.‘  The focal point of this article is to explore a means to address the impact of continuing to tell the narrative on the development of the medical specialty of gynecology in the United States without the benefit of a “her-storical” lens. The reproductive and surgical exploitation meted upon three enslaved women, Anarcha, Betsey, and Lucy, among other un-named enslaved Black women, “othered” by  their skin based upon a construction of “race,” yet “samed” their bodies for purposes of extracting reproductive knowledge, surgical inventions, and innovations to benefit all women. 12 The story of Anarcha, Betsey,  and Lucy is the marginalized story of
how the laws of enslavement sanctioned medical experimentation and exploitation upon the bodies of Black women.

I posit that the telling of Anarcha, Betsey, and Lucy's narrative in medical schools will aid current efforts to attain cultural competency.

This Essay was written in observance of the fiftieth anniversary of the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s untimely April 1968 assignation. It highlights some of King’s most important work during the American Civil Rights Movement, in terms of its contemporary influence. As a focal thesis, this Essay respectfully argues that King’s famed Letter From Birmingham Jail, written during his April 1963 incarceration in Birmingham, Alabama, for deliberately refusing to follow what he morally deemed to be an “unjust law,” was predicated on the biblical foundation of civil disobedience exemplified in the famed story of Shadrack, Meshack, and Abednego, the three Hebrew boys who refused to obey King Nebuchadnezzar’s order to bow down to a deity made of gold. This Essay argues that the Hebrew boys’ theologically-based willingness to suffer the potentially fatal consequence for their civil disobedience, instead of complying with immoral governmental dictates, exemplifies the Judeo-Christian suffering servant theology that influenced King and permeated throughout the Civil Rights Movement.

In arguing the Hebrews’ civil disobedience set a foundation for King’s leadership in the Movement, fueled by a suffering servant theology that regards suffering as redemptive, provided it is for a moral cause, this Essay pays tribute to King’s legacy by also connecting his example of selfless sacrifice in the form of civil disobedience in Birmingham to recent contemporary social movements, like Black Lives Matter, a successor to the 1960s Civil Rights Movement, that also seeks egalitarianism and inclusion.