Tightrope Walking: Balancing Theatre Teachers’ Academic Freedom of Expression with the Implementation of Florida’s Stop Woke Act and Don’t Say Gay Bill

Florida’s Individual Freedom Act (IFA) and Education Equality Act (EEA), better known as the Stop Woke Act and the Don’t Say Gay bill, respectively, are contentious topics in the United States today. One side argues that parents have the ultimate right to choose what their child learns and how a teacher should deliver that instruction while believing that lessons that address systemic racism divide children and make them feel uncomfortable. The other side argues that our students will be unprepared when they graduate high school to contribute to our multi-racial society and will suffer from a limited worldview. From the national news coverage about Florida’s refusal to include AP African American Studies as a course offered in high schools to the pictures of elementary school classroom libraries being covered up with rolls of blue paper, Florida has become the center of a national discussion about the role our teachers play in educating our young, the restraints which parents and school boards wish to place on the ideas expressed, and the way content is presented in the classroom

Genre Discovery 2.0

Ten years ago, I proposed the “genre discovery approach” for teaching new legal writers how to write any legal document, even ones they had never encountered before. Using the genre discovery approach, a writer studies samples of a genre to identify the genre’s conventions so that they can write the genre. From the seed of Genre Discovery 1.0, the approach’s potential has blossomed into a robust pedagogical system: Genre Discovery 2.0. Genre Discovery 2.0 is more effective than Genre Discovery 1.0 because it more explicitly integrates metacognition into its pedagogy. Metacognition, “the concept that individuals can monitor and regulate their own cognitive processes and thereby improve the quality and effectiveness of their thinking,” is not innate—it must be taught. The legal writing professoriate has embraced metacognition to teach our students to be conscious of their learning. Some legal writing professors have contributed strategies for teaching metacognition to law students. Most current metacognitive teaching strategies include overlays atop an underlying assignment. In other words, these strategies require two steps to teach metacognition: the underlying task itself and then the separate metacognitive task that overlays the main task. This learning process is inefficient because it requires multiple steps. It is also less effective because the metacognitive activity is divorced from the underlying assignment, requiring students to make a cognitive leap from one assignment to the other. The push for metacognition in legal education has come from the upper levels of legal education reform. This article shows that metacognition is the best way to prepare our students to be practice ready. This article argues that Genre Discovery 2.0 is the ideal way to teach legal research and writing to new legal writers because it integrates metacognition into its pedagogy rather than teaching metacognition as a separate overlay. By integrating metacognition, Genre Discovery 2.0 fulfills the promise of its predecessor by giving new legal writers the skills they need to not only learn how to write in law school but to learn how they learn and how to be lifelong learners

Echoes of the Zong Confronting Legal Realism in the Arguments for Reparations from the Atlantic Slave Trade and ModernDay Human Trafficking

This Article is based on the premise that modern day human trafficking, like the transatlantic slave trade, violates jus cogens norms, and thus the practice was and still is a violation of US laws under customary international law. The analysis will examine the laws that were applied to chattel slavery in England and her colonies through the lens of some seminal slavery cases to unearth the tyranny of interpretation in human trafficking reparations and liability claims under the current Supreme Court jurisprudence and the Alien Tort Statute (“ATS”). The featured cases will reveal that the same philosophies undergirding the jurisprudence of the slave trade still informs the US Supreme Court’s application of liability for human trafficking in the global supply chain

It is Time for Family Courts to be More Aware of Parental Mental Illness and Substance Abuse

Since the COVID-19 pandemic and previous years, the mental health and substance abuse crises in Florida are growing at an unprecedented rate.1 With substantive due process rights under the Fourteenth Amendment as a substantial roadblock, the Florida courts are reluctant to adequately address the mental health and substance abuse needs of individuals.2 This issue is especially difficult in cases involving the termination of parental rights, leaving children in damaging environments with unfit parents suffering from severe mental illness and substance abuse.3 To prevent children from growing up under negative conditions and developing mental health problems as well, the Florida courts ought to place heavier weight on mental illness and substance abuse factors when assessing parental capacity. The Commission on Mental Health and Substance Abuse seeks to push Florida’s mental health law reform, so individuals can have better access to mental health services.4 However, reform alone is not enough to ensure adequate mental health treatment since necessary extension of such treatment is determined by mental health courts.5 This Note advocates for a bright-line standard for Florida courts to evaluate mental illness and substance abuse factors in determining whether to terminate parental rights, while considering the severity of the mental condition. Accordingly, prioritizing a child’s best interests and relevant judicial knowledge over the subject matter become an important role in termination proceedings