Beginning in 1981 and continuing into the mid-1990s, The Alledger was the student newspaper of the Boston College Law School. The Alledger published both serious and satirical articles on topics related to student life at the law school. Frequent topics include the arrival and departure of faculty members, profiles of candidates for leadership positions in student government, and previews of lectures given by noteworthy speakers.

The publication consistently poked fun at the law student experience, making professors and classmates alike the targets of good-natured parody. The Alledger featured an annual April Fool’s Day issue which consisted entirely of satirical articles.

The Alledger is a record of the school’s history, offering evidence of an increasingly competitive environment for law schools in the form of extensive coverage of a 1995 dispute related to the U.S. News and World Report law school rankings. The newspaper also recorded changes in the demographics of the student body, as well as frequent discussion of tuition increases and the financial relationship of the law school to the university. Moreover, the humorous and frank tone of The Alledger provides real insight into the lives of law students in the 1980s and 1990s.

The Alledger was digitized from the collection of the Boston College Law School Library. Issues missing from this collection are not owned by the law library; due to frequent inconsistencies in the numbering of issues, the law library is not sure how many issues are missing from this collection.

The Alledger

Boston College Law Review is Boston College Law School's flagship scholarly publication.

The Review, ranked in the top 25 law journals by Washington & Lee, publishes eight issues each year featuring articles and essays by prominent authors addressing legal issues of national interest.

In addition to articles written by outside academics, the Review prints the work of its student staff, many of whom publish notes during their third year. The Review’s second-year staff members also prepare short comments on recent federal circuit court decisions, which may be published in the Review's Electronic Supplement.

Visit the Boston College Law Review website at <a href="http://bclawreview.bc.edu">bclawreview.bc.edu</a>.

Boston College Law Review

Boston College Law Library collects the publications of Law School faculty, and, when possible, makes them available through this collection. Organized by year and tagged with authors and subject areas, this resource reflects the school and the library’s commitment to open access while at the same time serving as a valuable institutional record.

Boston College Law School Faculty Papers

Boston College Law School Lectures and Presentations

Front Matter

For fifty years, people who can become pregnant have relied on the ability to access abortions as a part of ordinary, safe, and quality medical care. Abortions are low-risk medical procedures that provide people who can become pregnant with the ability to control their health and well-being. The Supreme Court stripped women of their reproductive freedom in holding that the constitutional right to privacy does not extend to abortion. This means that legislatures can subject women to the host of physical and fiscal consequences of pregnancy. Alternative legal strategies are needed to secure women’s ability to participate equally in society. Property rights protect property owners from undue interference at the hands of both private and public actors. This Note argues that providing women with a legally recognized property interest in their uteruses comports with a modern understanding of bodily autonomy, accords with present day uses of women’s reproductive capacities, and protects their personhood from undue governmental interference.

My Uterus, My Choice: Abortion Bans and Property Interests in the Female Body

The non-regression principle is a budding international jurisprudential precept holding that legal protections of public welfare and individual rights, once established, cannot be subjected to erosive roll backs. Over the last decade, several international jurists began to apply the doctrine in the more specific context of environmental law. France has explicitly incorporated the principle by statute, while Brazil has similarly adopted it by Supreme Court decision. Implementation of environmental non-regression comes at a crucial time. The non-regression principle is a promising tool for achieving climate solutions and, given the existential threats posed by human climate disruption, implementing the principle, domestically and abroad, is of crucial importance. It is particularly critical the United States acts decisively—it is the second largest polluter on earth.

An important question, then, is whether the non-regression principle could take root in the United States. This Note uses a potential methane pollution restriction as an example of how an anti-backsliding provision could realistically be made part of this nation’s post-Paris Agreement efforts to limit climate change. Statutes like the Energy Policy and Conservation Act and Clean Air Act already contain limited restrictions on regression, known as anti-backsliding provisions. These are first steps, but wider implementation is necessary to achieve the goals of the 2015 Paris Agreement on climate change. Broad constitutional and regulatory adoption of the non-regression principle in the near term are likely politically impractical in the United States. A statute codifying environmental non-regression may have the necessary legal foundation to withstand political challenges in court and become a significant legal tool in achieving crucial climate and environmental protection.

Protecting America from Itself: Can the Emerging Principle of Non-Regression Help the United States Resolve the Existential Threat of Climate Disaster?

Described as the “Wild West” by some commentators, the world of cryptocurrency is rapidly expanding faster than regulators can catch up. Because of this asymmetric growth, consumers are at risk of investing in fraudulent and deceptive platforms. Adding endorsements by celebrities, professional athletes, and social media influencers to the equation creates additional pitfalls for consumers. A lack of due diligence on the part of endorsers leads to significant damages and losses for trusting consumers. Regulating cryptocurrency and its advertisements is a relatively new area of the law. Nevertheless, parallels exist between the lack of due diligence in advertising cryptocurrency and in advertising health and medical products without substantiating the claim. Regarding the latter type of endorsement, the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) has cracked down on deceptive advertisements that cause harm to consumers. Current lawsuits allege that celebrity endorsers of cryptocurrency companies engaged in deceptive trade practices, violating state versions of the Federal Trade Commission Act. Historically, the FTC has only found the parent company liable in similar cases, rather than individual endorsers. This Note argues that increased regulation and enforcement actions by the FTC against individual endorsers is the most effective method to curtail deceptive advertising.

Consumers Caught in the Cryptocurrency Crisis: Why Celebrity Endorsers Should Not Escape Liability

On February 24, 2022, Russian troops invaded Ukraine. Over a year later, the war has claimed tens of thousands of lives and led to the displacement of millions. In Spring 2023, both Ukrainian and Russian forces prepared new offensives, while the United States committed to providing Ukraine with military tanks—a move that Russian officials had previously warned would constitute direct involvement in the war. While countries debated how to respond, we also witnessed the privatization of foreign policy as hundreds of companies around the world similarly sought to assist Ukraine or punish Russia using the tools of national foreign policy—humanitarian aid and economic sanctions. Companies assisted Ukraine by donating millions of dollars to relief organizations or offering aid directly to those fleeing the war. Other companies punished Russia by closing stores, postponing investments, and exiting the country altogether.

This Article explains that these individual business decisions illustrate a broader phenomenon of corporate foreign policy, which refers to business policies that use the traditional tools of national foreign policy to influence a government’s conduct towards another government or international organization. It develops a market framework to explain that corporate foreign policies result from the interaction of two sets of factors: demand factors, such as the preferences of governments, consumers, and investors; and supply factors, which refer to organizational, contractual, and regulatory factors that enable or inhibit the capacity of companies to meet those preferences. Supply factors would include: the business model used for Russian operations; contract provisions that enable suspension of performance obligations; availability of political risk insurance and international investment dispute resolution to absorb losses; and organizational preparedness for crisis response.

This Article makes three primary contributions to the study of foreign policy and international business transactions. First, it provides an analytical framework for understanding, evaluating, and even predicting whether companies will use a particular foreign policy in a crisis. Second, it uses this framework to analyze whether companies may similarly exit from China because of fears of conflict in the region. Third, the framework offers practical guidance to both policymakers and business executives on using foreign policy effectively in future crises. For policymakers, this framework explains that economic sanctions imposed by governments can encourage a second wave of private sanctions imposed by companies that magnify the economic, social, and political consequences of the former. This Article’s framework helps policymakers to predict the nature, breadth, and strength of these private sanctions so that they can better evaluate if and how to use sanctions. For executives, this Article explains the relevance of business models, contract design, and strategic partnerships for preparing for the next crisis. Many of these decisions are made decades before a crisis arises but can inhibit a company’s ability to respond when it does. It is therefore important to evaluate these decisions now in order to respond effectively in the future.

Corporate Foreign Policy in War

In many parts of the United States, the bail system is strikingly unfair in imposing burdensome, and often unmeetable, financial conditions on pretrial liberty even for low-risk defendants. Reforms that reduce or eliminate cash bail and lower pretrial detention rates have made progress in recent years but now face growing opposition, even in generally progressive jurisdictions such as San Francisco and New York City. One source of this opposition is rising concern about crime—particularly crime associated with the unhoused, who disproportionately suffer from mental illness, including substance abuse disorder. This is not a coincidence: one effect of a cash-bail system, underappreciated in the legal literature, is to incapacitate (for example, “get off the streets”) indigent, mentally ill defendants. Mentally ill individuals are arrested—often for low-level misdemeanors—and repeatedly cycle through the criminal justice system where they often fail to meet traditional pretrial release conditions. Indeed, three U.S. jails serve as the country’s largest psychiatric “treatment” facilities for mentally ill defendants. Pretrial justice systems that routinely jail the mentally ill thus serve as deeply inadequate substitutes for adequate mental health treatment. They mask the need for a more effective alternative, over-stretch the capacity of jails and prisons, and negatively impact mentally ill defendants through inadequate care. But despite the manifest shortcomings of this approach, it provides at least short-term relief to those affected by crime. And bail reforms that make it more difficult to “solve” the problem of mentally ill defendants by locking them up without providing alternative solutions—or at least identifying the underlying pathologies—are at risk of significant opposition, failure, or retrenchment.

As a first step toward addressing the mutually destructive relationship between pretrial justice and mental health treatment, this Article argues for a disaggregation of mentally ill and traditional defendants within the pretrial criminal justice system in all respects: in arrest decisions, in pretrial screening, in judges’ determinations of pretrial release and conditions for release, and in data collection and reporting. Moreover, bail reformers should call for increased mental health funding to accompany reductions in pretrial detention. This will address only a small facet of the nation’s massive mental health crisis. But it will help to produce a more just bail system for all and move toward ending the cycling of mentally ill defendants through the U.S. criminal justice system.

Welcome to LIRA@BC Law!

Featured Collections

The Alledger

Boston College Law Review

Boston College Law School Faculty Papers

Boston College Law School Lectures and Presentations

Recent Additions

Front Matter

My Uterus, My Choice: Abortion Bans and Property Interests in the Female Body

Protecting America from Itself: Can the Emerging Principle of Non-Regression Help the United States Resolve the Existential Threat of Climate Disaster...

Consumers Caught in the Cryptocurrency Crisis: Why Celebrity Endorsers Should Not Escape Liability

Corporate Foreign Policy in War

Bail and Mental Illness

Welcome to LIRA@BC Law!

Featured Collections

.repo-96qggn{color:inherit;text-align:left;font-weight:500;line-height:2.3rem;font-size:1.8rem;overflow-wrap:break-word;-webkit-box-orient:vertical;display:-webkit-box;-webkit-line-clamp:4;overflow:hidden;hyphens:auto;}.repo-96qggn:hover{color:inherit;}The Alledger

Recent Additions

The Alledger