The faculty at Charleston School of Law are renowned nationwide for their research and scholarship. Below are publications of Faculty Scholarship from December 2024 and January 2025:
Abstract: Academic law librarians have been instrumental in shaping technology competence in ABA-accredited law schools. Law librarians, leveraging expertise in information management, research methodologies, and technological literacy, foster innovation in legal pedagogy. In formal credit-bearing classes and informal non-credit-bearing training, law librarians facilitate the integration of cutting-edge tools and empower their communities with digital skills. This Article emphasizes and highlights how law librarians promote hard and soft legal technology skills across the curriculum to assist law schools in developing a rigorous program of legal education per ABA Standard 301. The Authors draw upon case studies and data from their Legal Technology Longitudinal Study to shed light on the contributions of law librarians in developing technology competence at ABA-accredited law schools. Additionally, the Authors provide their definition for technology competence. They recommend legal educators adopt this definition to ensure law schools create a rigorous program of legal education. Lastly, the Authors advocate that when law schools recognize, support, and actively include law librarian contributions throughout the curricula, they promote the cultivation of newly licensed lawyers who are prepared for the technological demands of the modern-day practice of law.
This course will explore how various countries respond to the idea of Child Rights, with a specific focus on children involved in Criminal Justice Systems, either as youth offenders, victims, or as children of abuse and neglect. There are 196 countries that have signed the UNCRC which has 54 articles that cover all aspects of a child’s life. Arguably – some of these very articles may come into conflict with separate jurisdictional statutes, codes, and common law interpretations. This course will explore those tensions, and ask students to consider how their own jurisdiction could benefit or hinder child welfare by making adjustments.
The goal of this weeklong course is to have students understand the fundamentals regarding confessions and self-incrimination in the United States and then compare those protections to guarantees under the Spanish Constitution and international human rights conventions. The course will begin with discussions on the due process voluntariness doctrine in the United States, and cases involving use of both psychological and physical torture to obtain confessions, including Spano v. New York and Brown v. Mississippi. The course will then shift to the groundbreaking case of Miranda v. Arizona in the United States and subsequent cases clarifying the circumstances in which Miranda can be invoked and waived. The course will address the Spanish Constitution and international human rights conventions and confessions. The course will wrap up with a discussion on interrogation techniques used in both the United States and Europe in addition to reforms to prevent false confessions. Students will read excerpts from law review articles, news articles and other sources, including short video clips to reinforce the material the students are reading.
Abstract: Donated bodies are essential to the advancement of medical and scientific research, discovery, which may ultimately save many lives in the future. However, the supply and demand for donated bodies is often inharmonious. Thus, bodies have over the years been acquired through illegal and questionable means and then sold or leased. Those who used illegal and often murderous means of acquiring bodies for medical research have been referred to as body Burkers and criminal laws were passes to not only regulate but end these practices. Today, those who acquire, sell, and lease donated bodies are called body brokers and they exist and operated in a largely unregulated world. This Article reviews the history of the body acquisition business by voluntary, involuntary means, illegal activity and ultimately unscrupulous activity that falls into a grey unregulated area. This Article explores current legal regulations for the donation of bodies for medical and scientific purposes and the exclusion of any regulatory framework to include body brokers who acquire donated bodies and then sell them often without the consent or knowledge of the donor’s families. It traces the lack of effectiveness of the Uniform Anatomical Gift Act and state laws in policing modern body brokers activities. It posits two solutions: expand existing federal regulations to encompass body brokers or approve new federal legislation that creates uniform regulatory supervision of body brokers; consider new and possibly radical solutions to fill the void of body broker regulation through the extension and application of contract law to body broker transactions. This Article concludes that, without new meaningful regulation of body brokers, we have made little legal progress from the early days of grave robbing and murderous body Burkers because today’s body brokers continue to commit atrocious acts on donated bodies with impunity.
Children’s Hospice Day is Monday, February 10 to raise awareness and funds for hospices that treat children with life-limiting illnesses.
Mindful Mondays will be held at 12:00 p.m. on February 10 at 12:00 p.m. in Room 221. Lawyers Helping Lawyers will provide practical tips for putting mindfulness into action.