This Essay thus addresses the ethicality and constitutionality of what seems like an unavoidable future: the availability and advantages of advanced AI counsel to represent clients.
Past issues of the South Carolina Law Review can also be found on the USC's Scholar Commons website.
This is a minimally edited transcript of Dean William C. Hubbard’s opening remarks given on March 17, 2023 at the South Carolina Law Review’s annual Symposium. Dean Hubbard is the Dean of the University of South Carolina School of Law.
This Article will acknowledge this growing trend toward practice-based lawyer norms, point out how it allows interaction between the existing place-based norms and the new practice-based norms, and compare this movement with the existing regulatory conditions outside the US.
This Article reviews the findings of the statewide assessment and related efforts in other states and identifies strategies for improving access to civil legal assistance in South Carolina.
From all directions, unmistakable signals show that the American legal profession and the business of law is currently in the midst of great change. A tour d’horizon reveals two broad categories of change—those driven by economics and those driven by regulatory reforms.
This Note presents a comprehensive review of student practice rules in all fifty states and proposes rule changes in South Carolina to empower law students to serve as navigators in specific areas of need.
Part II of this Comment addresses the facts, procedural history, and holding of In re Anonymous Applicant for Admission to the South Carolina Bar; the process of being admitted to the South Carolina Bar; and the character and fitness requirement of the South Carolina Bar Application. Part III analyzes the questions on the Application for Admission to the South Carolina Bar that require information about mental health, prior convictions, and expunged offenses; makes recommendations on how to amend questions that are discriminatory or overly broad; examines the predictive power of the information solicited by the application; and compares other states’ character and fitness evaluations to South Carolina’s character and fitness evaluation. Part IV concludes by highlighting the difficult task of protecting the legal profession charged to the Character and Fitness Committee and by urging the South Carolina Supreme Court to make progressive changes to the character and fitness portion of the Application for Admission to the South Carolina Bar.
This note will examine the Eighth Amendment implications of South Carolina’s adoption of the firing squad as a means of execution. Readers of this Note should consider how the implementation of a firing squad as a method of execution will impact the physical and emotional experience of an inmate forced to experience it, which includes: a lack of medication as a sedative or for pain, the scientific inability to gauge the level of pain experienced from a gunshot wound, the unknown length of time from the initial gunshot wound to pronouncement of death, and the potential for a botched execution. More broadly, readers should further consider how a firing squad will affect those tasked with physically performing the procedure and how the implementation of this execution method could influence other state legislatures to introduce a similar method due to the nationwide shortage of lethal injection drugs.
The case described in the following Section illustrates several problems with South Carolina’s current regime. Part II provides a brief background of the relevant law in the United States and identifies the primary models in use today. Part III discusses each of South Carolina’s problems in turn while highlighting the relative benefits of alternative models.
Part II of this Note starts with a background of the opioid epidemic in the United States and the epidemic’s connection to the criminal justice system. Part III identifies recent trends in federal courts, suggesting correctional facilities that fail to provide inmates access to their prescribed opioid-agonist medications are likely violating the Eighth Amendment and the ADA. Additionally, Part III argues that even inmates without prescriptions may have viable claims under the Eighth Amendment in the future. Part IV then discusses the three states that have made the most progress in providing every inmate with OUD access to MAT medications and the key aspects of each state’s program. Part V argues South Carolina’s current approach to the use of MAT medications in state and local correctional facilities is problematic.
Part II of this Note will provide information explaining state takeover, discussing how state takeovers impact education quality and achievement outcomes generally, and the major determinants of education quality. Part II will also give an overview of South Carolina’s state takeover statute. Part III will start by establishing what South Carolina’s duty regarding education is and how the state is falling short in meeting it. Then, Part III will analyze state takeover as a remedy to improve underperforming school districts. Part IV will conclude by arguing that state takeover with no clear plan to address the major determinants of education quality is an inadequate remedy.
Part II provides background information about the Act, a brief history of South Carolina’s shoreline stabilization efforts, and summaries of two recent beachfront erosion cases at DeBordieu Colony. Part III utilizes the DeBordieu Colony cases as a springboard to provide several recommendations for mitigating erosion issues along South Carolina’s coastline. Finally, Part IV concludes by summarizing possible suggestions for South Carolina to better address beach erosion in the coming decades.
Certificate of Need (CON) laws have maintained a stubborn presence in the American healthcare landscape since the 1970s as a last-ditch plug against unnecessary expenditures. This Note will demonstrate that CON programs are no longer a valid instrument to achieve these goals given decades of change in both legislative and economic policy.
Part II of this Note outlines the current NIL landscape and a minor’s capacity to contract in South Carolina. Next, Part III of this Note addresses several major issues facing minors wishing to conduct NIL activities. Part IV of this Note then discusses some ways in which the state of South Carolina can act to protect its minor-athletes, educational institutions, and businesses in NIL agreements. Ultimately, Part V of this Note concludes that South Carolina should allow high school student-athletes to enter into NIL deals but should regulate these deals to safeguard the interests of its minors, institutions, and businesses.
Part II of this Note will discuss the doctrine of separation of powers generally. Part III will describe a history of retroactive passage issues across decades of caselaw in South Carolina and will show a concerningly similar pattern of activity by the general assembly and the judiciary’s response to the general assembly’s attempts to pass retroactive legislation. Part IV will analyze the Burns v. Greenville County Council decision. Finally, in Part V, this Note will briefly discuss the constitutionality of S. 233 before concluding.
At its inception, § 5-7-145 could have enhanced beach lifeguarding and served as an effective model for protecting beach visitors. Instead, the statute facilitated the continuance of an unaccepted model of lifeguarding that resulted in the fatal drowning of three individuals. The South Carolina municipality that authorized that dual-role model continued to do so without facing repercussions after the drownings.
Public education in the U.S. is arguably more racially segregated now than it was in 1954, when the U.S. Supreme Court declared in Brown v. Board of Education “that in the field of public education the doctrine of ‘separate but equal’ has no place.” Although scholars may differ in the extent they believe that racial integration might be necessary for educational equality, most agree that educational segregation, whether imposed by law, socioeconomics, or happenstance, is not likely to reverse in any meaningful way in the near future.
NFIB v. Department of Labor, OSHA suggests that a revitalized, more coherent separation of powers doctrine may be emerging at the Supreme Court. This more coherent doctrinal approach appears to include both a more exacting application of the nondelegation doctrine, as it is presently understood, and a more assertive judicial role in reviewing agency interpretations of their own statutory authority. Based on a close reading of NFIB, we offer two insights regarding how the Court might treat a key aspect of separation of powers going forward, specifically the protection of the legislative power vested in Congress by Article I of the Constitution.
Read the full article from Randolph May and Andrew Magloughlin [pdf]
This Article examines the self-defense exception to the attorney–client privilege and lawyers’ duty of confidentiality in ways intended to be useful to courts, lawyers, and scholars alike. It begins in Part II with a brief overview of the attorney–client privilege and lawyers’ duty of confidentiality under Model Rule 1.6(a). Although the attorney–client privilege and lawyers’ duty of confidentiality under Model Rule 1.6(a) and state equivalents sometimes overlap, they are separate and distinct doctrines. Lawyers must understand their obligations under each.
Faced with these fundamental limits on rape law reform, this Article further provides recommendations for reforms that may help keep some bias from entering the legal system and concludes that the way to improve case processing is to ensure that law enforcement and prosecutors operate free of inaccurate generalizations about rape.
States can put the Supreme Court’s affirmation of the government edicts doctrine, explained in Georgia v. Public.Resource.Org, Inc., into practice by working with publishers to provide free and consistent access to legal information for all citizens, perhaps most importantly for the benefit of America’s incarcerated litigants, many of whom do not have meaningful access to the Internet for the purposes of performing legal research.
This Article provides a renewed perspective on tort damages, namely howthe law of damages should develop to improve fairness in the civil justicesystem. A guiding principle in this regard is to promote damages that reflectreality, not an exaggerated, highly subjective, or hypothetical alternate reality. The Article is intended to assist judges, and in appropriate situations, statelegislatures, in developing balanced modern tort remedies
Read the full article from Victor Schwartz and Christopher Appel [pdf]
This Article focuses on the history and current reality of lieutenant gubernatorial vacancies, exploring the absence of explicit succession provisions and the adoption of these provisions following the Twenty-fifth Amendment, and surveys how lieutenant-gubernatorial vacancies are currently filled. It then argues that states without explicit succession provisions should adopt them and discusses what factors might be considered in drafting these provisions.
This Article examines the existing American frameworks for the disposition of human remains. Classified as “quasi-property,” no one can truly have an ownership interest in them. This piece proceeds by highlighting the shortcomings of the quasi-property designation. It asserts that the needs of the living, which generally trump the interests of the dead, include honoring and protecting the tangible remains of our ancestors. For this reason, the legal status of human remains must change.
This Article accepts that originalism is a powerful and popular (and controversial) method of constitutional interpretation. To the extent we have to reckon with originalism, placing union preservation as the lodestar of the originalists’ constitutional interpretation can make originalism a little more faithful to the historical moment it holds sacred and thus add greater legitimacy to judicial opinions at a time when we need it most.
This Article provides a foundational basis for a timely and relevant discussion in the legal profession beginning with the review of enforcement of Standard 316.