*Christina Araviakis

Recently, voting has become a larger issue in public discourse than it has been in years past, which has made the right to vote increasingly valuable.  See Priya Khatkhate, Taking Away the Vote, A.B.A. J. Mag., Oct. 2018, at 9–10, http://dashboard.mazsystems.com/webreader/57776?page=10.  However, little attention has been given to the lack of a legal standard for determining whether disabled people who are under guardianship or conservatorship should lose their right to vote.  See id.

When Jack Vaile turned eighteen in 2016, he was looking forward to his first opportunity to vote in California.  Id.  During the same year, due to Jack’s cerebral palsy and autism, Lou Vaile, Jack’s father, was granted conservatorship over Jack by a California judge.  Id.  This was meant to help with Jack’s medical decisions.  Id.  However, in the process, the judge also took away Jack’s voting rights.  Id.  Although Jack had cerebral palsy and autism, he used an assistive device to communicate, and he had been doing his research to take part in the primary elections in 2016.  Id.  Jack’s father states, “Jack was really excited about the election process. He had done research. He was totally stoked to vote in the primaries in the election—and then I got this piece of paper in the mail. I was sick. I didn’t even know how to tell him.”  Id.  Like many other people going through the guardianship or conservatorship process, the Vailes did not know that Jack’s voting rights were on the table if conservatorship was granted.  Id. Continue reading “Voting Rights for the Disabled: The Need for a Clear Standard”

*Reginald Smallwood

Imagine that you are Native American and you are invited to a Washington Redskins (Redskins) game.  Or you are Asian and you are invited to the concert of an Asian-American band called “The Slants.”  Now imagine that you are in the mall and see a mannequin in the Urban Outfitters’ window wearing a t-shirt that says “FUCT.”  Is any one of these phrases more offensive than the others?  Should these word marks be registrable and protected by the United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO)?  In Tam, the United States Supreme Court held that the USPTO could not deny registration to disparaging trademarks.  Matal v. Tam, 582 U.S. ___, 137 S. Ct. 1744, 1747 (2017).  Now, the Court has the opportunity to determine if the USPTO can deny registration to scandalous and immoral trademarks.  See In re Brunetti, 877 F.3d 1330, 1335 (Fed. Cir. 2017).Continue reading “Scandalous and Immoral Trademarks Are (Almost) In!”

* Shannon Hayden

Legislatures and courts alike have had trouble keeping up with the ever-evolving technological advances in today’s modern world.  Vivek Wadhwa, Laws and Ethics Can’t Keep Pace with Technology, MIT Tech. Rev. (Apr. 15, 2014), https://www.technologyreview.com/s/526401/laws-and-ethics-cant-keep-pace-with-technology/.  Technology is developing more rapidly than before, causing gaps between the times that new technology emerges and when laws are actually made to address these changes.  Wadhwa, supra.

In Maryland, this delay in the development of the law has led to an issue that courts around the country are also facing: whether minors, who consensually “sext” other minors by sending photos and videos depicting sexual conduct, are involved in distributing child pornography in violation of state law.  See In re S.K., 186 A.3d 181 (Md. Ct. Spec. App. 2018); see also State v. Gray, 402 P.3d 254 (2017) (upholding the child pornography conviction of a seventeen-year-old boy who sent unsolicited images of his genitals to an adult woman); Teresa Nelson, Minnesota Prosecutor Charges Sexting Teenage Girl with Child Pornography, Am. Civil Liberties Union (Jan. 5, 2018, 11:45 PM), https://www.aclu.org/blog/juvenile-justice/minnesota-prosecutor-charges-sexting-teenage-girl-child-pornography.  The Maryland Court of Appeals will decide on this issue next year when it hears arguments in the case of In re S.K.Continue reading “Is Sexting Child Porn?  Maryland Court of Appeals Set to Decide this Term.”

*Sumbul Alam

Heightened surveillance of noncitizens in the United States has been increasing since the 1980s.  See Anil Kalhan, Immigration Surveillance, 74 Md. L. Rev. 1, 11–16 (2014).  Throughout the decades, citizens and noncitizens at the border have been subjected to more intrusive questioning, as well as searches and seizures of computer hard drives and other electronic storage media with limited, if any, judicial oversight.  Id. at 16–17.  This may promulgate extreme bias of the enforcement agent.  See id. at 20–25.  For example, soon after the 2001 terrorist attacks, the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) initiated a program of voluntary interviews for thousands of nonimmigrant Arab and Muslim men; subsequently, in 2002, the Attorney General required noncitizens from specific countries which were predominately Arab or Muslim to register in a national database.  Id. at 20. Continue reading “The Insidious Slippery Slope of Our Freedom of Speech and Expression”

*Brenton Conrad

I.  Introduction

On August 14, 2018, the United States Court of Appeals ruled in favor of the Internal Revenue Service’s (IRS) Annual Filing Season Program, which was enacted to serve as a means of combatting the growing concerns involving fraudulent tax returns.  AICPA v. IRS, No. 16-5256, 2018 U.S. App. LEXIS 22583 (D.C. Cir. Aug. 14, 2018).  This program seeks to incentivize unenrolled tax preparers (preparers not subject to any licensing requirement with the IRS) to voluntarily obtain a “Record of Completion.”   Id. at 3.  A Record of Completion grants these preparers a “limited practice right” in representing a taxpayer in the audit and tax return process and places their names on the IRS’s online directory of tax preparers.  Id. at 3, 4.  While on its face the IRS’s program may benefit taxpayers, the American Institute of CPAs (AICPA) disagrees.  Then-AICPA President Barry C. Melancon made this clear when he stated, on behalf of the association and its constituents, “[w]e believe a voluntary program would create confusion regarding the relative proficiencies of the various types of preparers.”  Isaac M. O’Bannon, AICPA Says IRS Voluntary Preparer Regulation System Doesn’t Protect Taxpayers, CPA Practice Advisor (May 21, 2014), https://www.cpapracticeadvisor.com/news/11474865/aicpa-says-irs-voluntary-preparer-regulation-system-doesnt-protect-taxpayers.  Then-chair of the AICPA Tax Executive Committee Jeffery A. Porter said that “any voluntary regime constructed would still not address the problems with unethical and fraudulent tax return prepares.”  Id. Continue reading “The Annual Filing Season Program: A Brief Examination of AICPA v. IRS and the Resulting Regulations on Tax Return Preparers”