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Imagine being on your way to work when suddenly, an uninsured driver collides into your vehicle. Considering all available options, you decide to initiate suit. After unsuccessfully trying to serve the defendant via certified mail,[1] you provide the defendant’s contact information and $50 service fee[2] to the county sheriff.[3] Upon further inquiry, the sheriff determines that (1) the defendant does not live at the address provided, (2) the current homeowner does not know the defendant, and (3) there is no traceable record of the defendant’s current whereabouts. Clearly, personal service did not work. So now what?

Women have been asked to faithfully march to the top of the hill, children strapped to their backs, with the promise that equality awaits if they just keep climbing. But what, if anything, are we to do when we reach the top only to find that our summit’s foundation is a false floor—forcing us back to the beginning? While hyperbolic, this imagery is far from hysteric . . . it is reality now faced by millions as COVID-19 relief childcare subsidies ended October 1, 2023.[1] At the same time, the Federal Reserve (“The Fed”) has been actively fighting inflation through a series of interest rate hikes, traditionally implemented to slow demand.[2] When inflation defies this expectation, however, the Fed seeks to accomplish its goal through other means—including workforce reduction. Regardless of intention, the Fed will likely reach their inflation reduction goal via the Congressional inaction surrounding childcare subsidies because many mothers will have to make the choice leave their careers rather than pay exorbitant childcare costs.

In its 149-year tenure, Churchill Downs has hosted some of the most spectacular moments in sports history.[1] The racetrack witnessed its most recent milestone on September 7th, 2023, when Governor Andy Beshear traveled to Louisville, KY to place the first legal sports wager in the Commonwealth’s history.[2] The Governor’s bet marks the culmination of what has been a persistent push by Kentucky residents to legalize sports gambling in the Commonwealth and signifies the start of what is set to be an integral relationship between casino entertainment companies and the horseracing industry.[3]

The Kentucky Supreme Court Rules lay out the broad purpose of the fitness component of the Kentucky Bar application.[1] Fitness, in the language of the rule, speaks to the “competence of a prospective lawyer,”[2] and the function of the fitness section of the application is to “exclude from the practice of law any person having a mental or emotional illness or condition which would be likely to prevent the person from carrying out duties to clients, Courts or the profession.”[3] Fitness is therefore about the desirability of prospective conduct. Bar examiners are not medical professionals rendering clinical judgments; their task is rather to enforce social preferences against the admission into legal practice of those who, because of some perceived and present defect, cannot carry out their professional responsibilities.

The basis of the non-delegation doctrine is straightforward and rooted in the principle of separation of powers: Congress may not fully delegate its strictly legislative powers to the executive, or some other branch of government.[1] The Court’s current test requires little to show the delegation is not strictly legislative, Congress must only provide some “intelligible principle” upon which the executive branch can rely while carrying through their delegated authority.[2] Consequently, this broad discretion has resulted in the Court’s almost constant deference to the executive’s authority.[3] Only twice in the Supreme Court’s jurisprudence, both during the height of the New Deal, has the Court found that such an “intelligible principle” was lacking.[4] This viewpoint existed almost entirely undisturbed for eighty-five years until Gundy v. United States was decided in 2019. Although the plurality decided the case along nearly identical lines as previous cases, a lukewarm concurrence from Justice Samuel Alito and a dissenting opinion from Justice Neil Gorsuch, joined by Justice Clarence Thomas and Chief Justice John Roberts, seem to suggest that the non-delegation doctrine may soon experience an overhaul.[5]

On April 1, 2023, a transgender influencer named Dylan Mulvaney uploaded a short video to her Instagram page for a Bud Light giveaway promotion.[1] Mulvaney briefly showed a photo during the video  depicting a special edition Bud Light can with her face on it, provided by Bud Light to celebrate her transition to womanhood.[2] Mulvaney’s short clip sparked a movement to boycott the American lager, which resulted in about $395 million in lost revenue in North America[3] and over $27 billion in market devaluation for Bud Light’s parent company, Anheuser-Busch Companies, Inc. [4]     

Where immense amounts of money lie, problems there will be–the story is no different with nonfungible tokens. Just like classic art, the NFT art craze is real.[1] Professionals value this market in the billions of dollars.[2] But one way the NFT market differs from classic art is that its newness makes it extremely volatile to illegalities like price gouging, money laundering, and tax evasion.[3] NFT ownership anonymity is a key contributor to these issues, which raises the question of how does one best regulate this art? One novel answer that a swath of academics might just cling to is the public trust doctrine, a legal principle deeply enshrined in natural resource law (not art regulatory law). Despite academics’ wide support of the doctrine’s general expansion, courts maintain the opposite position.[4] Courts, thus, would not extend the public trust doctrine to regulate NFT illegalities.[5]

Voting and democracy is one of the most revered parts of the American experiment. Our founders envisioned a government that was directed by the people and for the people. The most import facet of this government by the people, of course, is access to the polls and voting. Unfortunately, for many Americans it is not easy to vote, and there has been a wave of restrictive voting registration policy over the last several years.[1] In 2021 alone, nineteen states passed laws restricting access to voting, and this represents only a small fraction of the legislation that was introduced.[2] This restriction on who can vote, when they can vote, and what they must present when they arrive at the polls has far reaching impacts. Some of those impacts are well known. Public policy and lawmakers shape everything about our world and environment, including health, social, and economic policy.[3] Recent research has also indicated that that there is a strong correlation between access to voting and public health outcomes.[4] Overall, this research has indicated that states who have more inclusive voting policies combined with higher levels of civic participation have citizens who have better health outcomes.[5] Using the Cost of Voting Index[6] and health data gathered from the Behavioral Risk Factor Surveillance System and America’s Health Rankings[7], this correlation is easy to see.

Last month, the Kentucky legislature enacted Senate Bill 5, otherwise known as “An Act relating to education and declaring an emergency.”[1] The new law empowers parents to challenge – and ideally remove – materials, programs, and events that are “harmful to minors” from their children’s schools.[2]  The best part about the bill-now-law, according to one of its primary sponsors, is its purposeful ambiguity.[3] Every community can decide for itself what kind of content it considers “harmful to minors.”[4] But ambiguity invites tyranny – a community’s attempt to remove “harm” from its schools may infringe on the First Amendment rights of its students.

In the last several years, the United States has experienced an increase in voter turnout, as evidenced by the historically high participation in the most recent presidential election.[1] It seems that Americans recognize the importance of this patriotic duty now more than ever. While it is encouraging to see a surge in active voters, many individuals are still unable to participate. The basic restrictions on voting, like age and citizenship status, are widely-known, but some may be surprised to learn that one’s criminal record may result in disenfranchisement. While upon first blush it may seem reasonable to take the right to vote away from someone who has been convicted of a crime, it nonetheless takes away an important democratic right, potentially invoking a lifetime punishment with little justification.

Social media has created a new world for how people communicate and interact with one another. With the ability for users to send messages out instantly to countless individuals, public officials have recognized the value of these platforms and have begun using them for their benefit.[1] Whether it is the President of the United States or a city manager, social media allows government actors to connect with their constituents conveniently.[2] But as is often the case with technological advancements, new constitutional issues are implicated when using these platforms.[3] As a result, an objective test is needed to aid the courts when entering into the new realm of social media.

A recent Supreme Court decision makes it easier for Section 1983[i] plaintiffs alleging malicious prosecution to survive a motion to dismiss. Thompson v. Clark is a substantial shift in civil rights litigation favoring plaintiffs after years of the formidable Heck v. Humphrey decision. In April 2022, the Court in Thompson held that to satisfy favorable termination of malicious prosecution, the plaintiff need only show “the prosecution ended without a conviction.”[ii] For the 6-3 decision, Justice Brett Kavanaugh wrote the majority, including Chief Justice John Roberts and Justices Stephen Breyer, Sonia Sotomayor, Elena Kagan, and Amy Coney Barrett. Justice Samuel Alito, in dissent, along with Justices Clarence Thomas and Neil Gorsuch, contested placing malicious prosecution under the Fourth Amendment.

Due to the Fourteenth Amendment’s due process protections, “[p]ersonal jurisdiction has always constrained plaintiffs’ access to courts.” [1] States can further limit plaintiffs’ access to courts by adopting long-arm statutes.[2] Kentucky’s long-arm statute does this by enumerating nine categories of conduct where a court may exercise personal jurisdiction over a defendant.[3] One of the categories provides for personal jurisdiction over a defendant “transacting any business” in Kentucky;[4] however, there has been “little precedent interpreting the meaning of ‘transacting business’ as used in” Kentucky’s long-arm statute.[5] Therefore, understandably, Kentucky district courts have differed in their approaches to applying “transacting any business.” Kentucky district courts generally apply one of three approaches: (1) the plain meaning interpretation,[6] (2) the Michigan Court of Appeals interpretation emphasizing “any,”[7] or (3) an interpretation requiring “a course of direct, affirmative actions” in Kentucky.[8]

Mental health and substance abuse (MH/SA) problems are on the rise in the United States, in what many Americans call a “mental health crisis.”[1] According to the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration, there was an increase in adults with either a mental illness or substance abuse disorder from 2019 (61.2 million in 2019)[2] to 2020 (73.8 million in 2020).[3] Moreover, MH/SA often goes untreated,[4] with the cost of healthcare being cited as the most common barrier keeping Americans from attaining care.[5] These effects are particularly prevalent in the Commonwealth of Kentucky, where 43.7 percent of adults reported anxiety and depressive symptoms in 2021.[6] In 2020, Kentucky had the nineteenth highest suicide mortality rate of the fifty states (801 deaths, 17.6 per 100,000 people).[7] Moreover, in 2020, Kentucky had the second highest drug overdose mortality rate (1,330 deaths, 49.2 per 100,000 people).[8] This crisis has been uniquely exacerbated in Kentucky by the Opioid Epidemic, inducing the Kentucky state government’s attempts to negotiate with pharmaceutical companies and pass legislation aimed at securing drug treatment.[9] Amidst these attempts to provide MH/SA treatment to Kentuckians, there exists a barrier that often goes unnoticed— judicial shields for health insurance companies to deny MH/SA coverage on a federal level.

In December 2022, Governor Andy Beshear announced that Kentucky had been awarded a $36 million grant to partially fund universal preschool for all Kentucky four-year-olds.[i] The announcement came after several calls by the governor for the Kentucky General Assembly to enact a universal preschool program.[ii] Earlier in the same year, Beshear proposed a budget that included an additional $2 billion toward public schools, with $172 million per year funding the universal preschool program for four-year-olds.[iii] Despite the governor’s best efforts and Kentuckians’ hopes for assistance, childcare costs continue to surge—and the 2023 Kentucky General Assembly chose not to advance legislation that would significantly improve the lives and educational outcomes of children and families.[iv] House Bill 35 was sent to the House Committee on Committees following its introduction on January 3, 2023.[v] The bill did not receive a reading as legislators instead duked it out over drag and pronoun bans.[vi]

Abraham Lincoln earned the nickname “Honest Abe” due to his prioritization of honesty in every situation that he found himself in.[i] A famous statue of Lincoln sits in a chamber of the Lincoln Memorial to honor “Honest Abe” for his strong beliefs in dignity and freedom.[ii] A replica of this statue can be found in Middle Creek Battlefield in Prestonsburg, KY, where the Union army stopped a Confederate charge during the Civil War.[iii] This battlefield, however, is not the replica’s first location. Initially, this statue was purchased by a local attorney and was placed in front of his law office.[iv] Ironically, this local attorney, Eric C. Conn, was sent to prison for committing the largest Social Security fraud in American history.[v]

Non-compete agreements[1] have become a prevalent mechanism used by employers in the United States.[2] In fact, around 20% of American workers are bound by non-compete covenants.[3] Employers use these agreements to protect themselves from unfair competition practices that may result from an employee leaving to work for a competitor or establish a competing business of their own.[4] Many, however, criticize the use of non-compete agreements as oppressive on an employee’s ability to take advantage of opportunities to move upward in the workforce.[5]

In copyright law, computer codes are treated in the same vein as literary works.[1]  The definition of a literary work in 17 U.S.C. §101 describes a literary work as one made of words, numbers, or similar symbols that does not otherwise classify as an audiovisual work, which helps to rationalize the convention of treating computer code as a literary work.[2]  A computer code falls squarely into that definition as a work comprised of nothing more than letters, numbers, and various associated symbols.  Additionally, a computer code is the unique expression of a programmer’s creative endeavors which confers copyright protection upon the code, much like a writer would have copyright protection for a short story or novel.[3]  Based on these parallels, the rationale makes sense, but what about other aspects of copyright law?  Does this comparison make sense for other aspects of copyright law such as derivative works and fair use? After thinking it through, I think it may be worth taking a closer look at the copyright implications of translating computer codes, specifically source codes. The current test courts use for comparing computer codes may provide too narrow of protection, and there is a risk of programmers translating codes into new languages to prevent reinventing the wheel.  

In 1988, the Kentucky General Assembly passed a Concurrent Resolution to establish a “Family Court Feasibility Task Force.”[i] At the time, Kentucky had no Family Court System.[ii] Instead, the responsibilities commonly associated with the modern Family Court, such as divorce and child custody, were distributed among the already existing levels of the Commonwealth’s judicial system.[iii] As a result of the task force’s findings, in 1991 the Kentucky Supreme Court created a pilot project in Jefferson County to oversee the viability of developing a Family Court system within the Commonwealth.[iv] It was a resounding success.[v] Over thirty years later, with the passage of a constitutional amendment making “Family Court a permanent part of the Kentucky Constitution[vi] . . . with more than 75 percent of the vote,”[vii] the Kentucky Family Court system has indeed seen many successes.[viii] Touted under the “One Family, One Judge, One Court” mantra, Kentucky’s Family Court System espouses the promise that it allows “the same judge to hear all matters involving a particular family.”[ix] Contrary to this mantra, however, it appears that two counties, and nearly 26,000 people, are at risk of being kicked out of this judicial family called Family Court.[x]

To determine whether a product is defectively designed, the existence of a feasible alternative design that could have reduced or prevented the plaintiff’s harm may aid the court in a defective determination.[1] The more feasible the alternative is, either economically or scientifically, the more likely the court will find the product to be defectively designed.[2] Some courts have decided that, in a design defect action, the plaintiff has the burden of proving that a feasible alternative design exists.[3] Establishing proof of a feasible alternative design puts an unreasonable burden on plaintiffs which requires them to provide evidence that is usually within the knowledge of manufacturer.[4]