Internships are prime opportunities for budding professionals to gain experience and get their foot in the door. Every year, almost two million people in the United States work as interns. This number continues to rise—from 17% of college graduates in 1992, to 50% in 2008, to 62% in 2023. However, many internships are unpaid. In fact, over close to half of Class of 2023 college seniors who took part in an internship during college were not paid for their work. A fundamental problem results—while internships are meant to increase opportunity for young professionals, unpaid internships price out too many of them. Indeed, unpaid internships concentrate opportunity among the few who are able to work without pay. This Note envisions the means to an end of the majority of unpaid internships. It summarizes the history of internships and discusses the trainee exception, the legal loophole that, since 1947, has allowed employers to exploit the free labor of interns under the pretext that they are purely training them. This Note further postulates that the Supreme Court’s ruling in Loper Bright, which put an end to Chevron deference, demarcates the issue of intern pay as especially ripe for litigation—judges are now empowered to decide whether to follow an existing Department of Labor (DOL) fact sheet, which has promoted this trainee exception loophole, or propose a new test altogether. Considering these issues which plague the law that governs internships, and in light of Loper Bright, this Note subsequently proposes a novel de minimis beneficiary test: if the employer obtains even a de minimis benefit from the intern’s presence, the intern must be considered an employee, instead of an intern, under relevant employment law. This test would conciliate the sparring employment law viewpoints of recent presidential administrations. It would further provide a viable workaround for a presently fractured and paralyzed Congress. Additionally, it would rectify legal malformations tied to the current model of internships, such as the fact that interns, currently viewed under the law as non-employees, are not legally protected against gender- and race-based discrimination in the workplace—the right to be free from the same is guaranteed by Title VII of the Civil Rights Act. Ultimately, this Note aims to advocate for internships that are in line with established labor practices of the modern day. By pushing for updates to a common law stuck in a bygone era, it advances a future where budding professionals of every background can partake in the intellectual and social training that internships provide while being fairly compensated for their contributions.

Through the federal government’s university land-grant programs, which began with the Morrill Act in 1862 and continue today, Congress has systematically allocated millions of acres of land in the western United States to states to create endowments to support the public higher education of its citizens. In Arizona, land was taken from Indigenous people, communities, tribes, and nations by treaty, act of congress, executive order, and force to accomplish this. As a result, by the time of statehood in 1912, the state of Arizona had accumulated approximately 850,000 acres of land around the state on behalf of higher education including the University of Arizona, then the state’s only university and its designated land-grant institution. Today, the Arizona State Land Department still holds and manages 688,706 acres of land in trust for the benefit of public higher education. All three of Arizona’s public universities receive distributions from the revenue generated by these trust lands. The goal of this paper is to explore and analyze the University of Arizona’s historical and ongoing enrichment from land taken from Indigenous peoples by the federal government and transferred to the territory and, later, the state of Arizona for the benefit of institutions of higher education in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. A comprehensive understanding of Arizona’s history and the state’s current holdings and financial benefits is required to examine the policy implications and moral and legal obligations that Arizona and its universities have to Indigenous peoples in Arizona.

Recent constitutional challenges to Regional Fishery Management Councils have trimmed away various minor powers that council members previously possessed to regulate coastal fisheries. Currently, district and appellate courts have shown restraint by refusing plaintiffs extreme remedies that threaten to disrupt the unique system of appointments that allow for state and tribal governments to negotiate for regulatory plans suitable for their unique local circumstances. With the ascendency of Unitary Executive Theory at the Supreme Court, this Note examines how an increasingly powerful Office of the President may negatively impact the profitability, sustainability, and inclusivity of coastal fisheries.

The Republic of Cuba’s “Códiga de las Familias,” passed in 2022, marked a watershed moment in the country’s history, both in the mass involvement in the Code’s creation and in the Code’s enshrinement of rights for the island’s gay, disabled, women, elderly, and youth populations. Most prescient are the “alimentos,” or “nourishments” in this context, that citizens owe one another. This recent triumph is ripe for comparison with the country approximately 90 miles to Cuba’s north: the United States of America. Case law and material conditions for analogous populations in the United States are troubling. Jurisprudence in the United States rests upon a common notion of individual rights being asserted, a “bundle of sticks” from which one may exclude others rather than a series of duties one owes to their fellow countrymen. The scope of this paper is to argue that the Cuban Family Code and Cuba’s institutions provide greater exercise in the democratic process for its citizens than the United States through mass organizations, leading to better outcomes for Cuba’s LGBTQI+, elderly, youth, and disabled populations. A conclusion will follow and discuss prospects for how to improve both procedural and substantive outcomes for these marginalized groups in the United States.

This article investigates four instances of the transplantation of English commercial law (broadly defined) into a different legal environment. The financial centers in Dubai (UAE), Abu Dhabi (UAE), Doha (Qatar), and Astana (Kazakhstan) have adopted a legal regime based on English Common Law, despite their national civil law and Islamic traditions. This choice on the face of it seeks to create an attractive business environment through optimal protection of market participants’ rights. This research appraises comprehensively, through a comparative perspective, the unique institutional and regulatory model adopted and practiced by the four zones: the Dubai International Financial Center (DIFC), Abu Dhabi Global Market (ADGM), Qatar Financial Center (QFC), and Astana International Financial Center (AIFC). There are three dimensions of comparison: (1) comparing the centers’ rules and regulations with their U.K. counterparts to reveal the degree of legal transplantation; (2) comparing the centers’ rules and regulations with their domestic counterparts to explore a potential regulatory gap between the two systems; and (3) comparing the four different regimes to reveal their potentially different experiences. Through a rigorous comparative examination of the experiences of the four zones, this research provides fresh perspectives to the need for robust law in economic and financial development, through legal transplantation to achieve such purpose. The four zones have provided an excellent natural experiment for these enduring theoretical debates.

Current legal frameworks fail to adequately criminalize international environmental destruction, necessitating a clearly defined international crime against the environment. While the Stop Ecocide Foundation’s proposed Article 8ter aims to establish “ecocide” as such a crime, its formulation remains flawed. This essay is both critical and constructive: it not only analyzes the limitations of Article 8ter but also seeks to resolve them by developing and proposing a new crime of ecocide.