Notes

New York City Housing Authority (NYCHA) deprives hundreds of residents of their housing every year without affording them due process. Based on the allegedly undesirable behavior of one household member, NYCHA can begin a termination of tenancy action against an entire family. Using the threat of termination as leverage, NYCHA coerces the tenant of record into permanently excluding the “undesirable” occupant, barring them from living with or visiting their family. The excluded family member is given no notice of the termination action and no opportunity to contest their permanent exclusion.

This Note contends that authorized occupants in NYCHA housing have due process rights which mandate notice and the opportunity to be heard before they lose their home. NYCHA does not currently recognize such rights. But, as this Note will show, authorized occupants have a property interest in public housing. NYCHA’s practice of permanent exclusion deprives them of that interest. This Note suggests alternatives for NYCHA to consider instead of relying on permanent exclusion as a means of crime reduction. Ultimately, the goal of this Note is to push NYCHA to live up to its mission: to provide decent and affordable housing to low-income New Yorkers.

Antitrust and patent law exist in permanent tension, with patentholders permitted to engage in conduct that would otherwise be plainly anticompetitive. Given the over five hundred billion dollars of annual R&D investment in the United States, and given the importance of R&D for corporations’ long-term economic profits, the broad deference given in antitrust law to patentee conduct is shocking. Continuing such deference misunderstands the purpose of antitrust law and undermines the purpose of patent law. This Note focuses on one area where this tension should be resolved in favor of increased antitrust enforcement: strategic patent licensing arrangements whereby a patentee transfers a share of its monopoly profits in order to control its competitor’s R&D. Such strategic arrangements can be used in 1) a duopoly where large competitors agree to divide an existing market; and 2) a platform technology where the patent holder encourages inventions that follow on, rather than compete with, an existing patent. This Note argues that anticompetitive strategic patent licensing is currently addressable under existing antitrust doctrine. By defining a market for research and development, regulators can successfully litigate against strategic licensing without needing to extend existing antitrust doctrine. Defining a market for research and development, moreover, connects the academic push for dynamic antitrust analysis into the existing static antitrust framework, allowing courts to gain experience with dynamic analysis in a more comfortable static setting. Lastly, while this Note is broadly theoretical, this is not by choice, but a byproduct of the broad-scale secrecy surrounding patent license agreements. Accordingly, this Note calls for the FTC to use existing statutory authority to begin investigating the real-world anticompetitive uses of strategic patent licensing.

In 2018, the Ninth Circuit ruled in Martin v. City of Boise that the city’s ordinance criminalizing individuals for sleeping or camping outdoors in public space—an increasingly popular method for cities to regulate the homeless—is unconstitutional under the Eighth Amendment’s Cruel and Unusual Punishments Clause. Martin was not the first case in which a court struck down an anti-homeless ordinance under the Eighth Amendment. However, it was the first to deem it unconstitutional for a city to punish a homeless person for sleeping outside when shelters are not “practically available,” even if they technically have available beds. The court in Martin said the shelters at issue were not practically available because they were religiously coercive. This Note argues, however, that courts reviewing criminalization measures should consider whether shelters are practically available to homeless individuals for reasons beyond religious coercion. Many functional barriers to shelter deprive homeless individuals of a meaningful choice, and the Eighth Amendment prevents governments from punishing individuals for matters beyond their control. Courts should make individualized inquiries when considering the constitutionality of criminalization measures to assess whether individuals experiencing homelessness truly have a meaningful “choice” in sleeping outside. However, the constitutional infirmities behind criminalization measures, the highly factual inquiries required of courts to determine their constitutionality, and their exacerbation of homelessness underscore the need for cities to stop criminalizing homelessness.

Three-dimensional (3D) scanning technology presents cultural organizations with new opportunities to share their collections with a wider audience online, and conserve and archive art objects and antiquities for safekeeping. However, this technology can also present legal challenges when institutions like museums assert ownership, in particular employing copyright notices, over digital copies of public domain art and antiquities in their collections. The public domain comprises the collection of shared works that are free from legal barriers imposed by copyright law. When institutions attach copyright notices to public domain works, the legal language, even if unenforceable in court, chills the public’s use of these scans for far-ranging educational, artistic, and commercial purposes. This Note examines the current uses of 3D technology by cultural institutions and analyzes the current doctrine guiding copyright of digital models. It then discusses some of the reasons why, despite the best reading of the caselaw, cultural institutions continue to assert ownership over and restrict access to 3D models of public domain art. This Note proposes an American analogue to Article 14 of the European Union’s Directive on Copyright in the Digital Single Market. The proposed amendment to the Copyright Act would provide needed clarity to cultural institutions and the public, affirming that public domain works cannot receive copyright protection when reproduced in a digital format. A clear statement rule would reduce the chilling effect by discouraging copyright notices and restrictive terms of use on digital copies of public domain art and antiquities, in turn encouraging more institutions to provide open access to their digital collections.

Environmental regulation is accomplished through a system of cooperative federalism—the federal Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) sets nationwide standards for various pollutants, but the responsibility for granting permits, inspecting facilities, and punishing violations is generally delegated to state agencies. This power-sharing arrangement has frequently created tensions between the federal and state environmental agencies. Overfiling is one of the most contentious of these tensions; it occurs when the federal government files an enforcement action against a polluter for a violation of a federal environmental statute after the delegated state agency has reached a settlement with the same polluter for the same violation. While overfiling occurs very rarely, it is a critical component of the cooperative federalism arrangement, and in this Note, I propose that it should occur more frequently in order to ensure that state agencies are not using low enforcement to de facto create a more hospitable landscape for polluters and damage public health and the environment.

Advocates are hoping that employment discrimination based on sexual orientation and gender identity will soon be outlawed under Title VII. To this end, the Supreme Court is currently considering whether Title VII already prohibits those forms of discrimination, and legislators have advanced the Equality Act, a new bill that would explicitly protect lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender employees. These debates, however, typically overlook a critical question: Does Congress actually have the authority to hold state governments accountable for discriminating against LGBT workers? This Note argues that Congress does. While Congress exercises its power to enforce the Fourteenth Amendment under the constraints of the Court’s “congruence and proportionality” standard, none of the limitations set by the Court foreclose the Equality Act’s provisions imposing liability on state employers. If the Court takes congruence and proportionality seriously, those provisions should stand. This Note thus challenges the conventional wisdom that LGBT individuals are beyond Congress’s power to protect merely because the Court does not formally review anti-LGBT discrimination under heightened scrutiny. It seeks to account for the Court’s clear concern with state action rooted in animus, which indicates that classifications targeting LGBT individuals are subject to careful judicial review. Moreover, it recasts the Court’s precedents on congressional enforcement, emphasizing that the legislative record and statutory scope, rather than the applicable standard of review, determine the validity of the statute in question. Under these clarified standards, the Equality Act emerges as appropriate enforcement legislation. 

To justify its rescission of the Deferred Action on Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) employed a novel rationale: risk of litigation. DHS argued that DACA was potentially unlawful and might be disruptively enjoined by a court and that the Agency could preemptively wind down the program in light of risk that it would be forced to do so in litigation. This Note argues that agencies can and should consider litigation risk in taking regulatory action—especially given the increasing frequency of nationwide injunctions. But it proposes that an agency invoking litigation risk must examine four elements: forgone benefits prior to a predicted disruptive injunction, probability of the injunction, costs of the injunction, and contrary litigation risk. Examination of these elements here suggests that litigation risk alone did not justify the DACA rescission and that regulatory changes will rarely be justified on this sole basis. Courts must carefully scrutinize litigation risk rationales, as excessive deference to this rationale may allow agencies to evade responsibility for their policy decisions by passing blame on to hypothetical future judicial action. 

The False Claims Act is a powerful statutory vehicle for the federal government to deter fraud on its purse, a significant public policy concern. Under the Act, government contractors can be liable for violating material legal requirements of federal programs. In assessing materiality, the courts are asked to evaluate the natural tendency of a violation to influence payment. One question that has been raised in a series of cases in the health product domain is whether government’s payment, despite knowledge of a violation, necessarily means that the violation was immaterial for the purposes of FCA enforcement. The industry is asking the courts to adopt that defense—what this Note terms the “immateriality presumption from agency inaction”—at the pleading stage. To justify the presumption, the defendants argue that the nuanced judgments of the agency vested with the authority and the requisite expertise to regulate—here, the Food and Drug Administration—must prevail over both the private parties who bring actions under the statute’s qui tam provisions, as well as anyone else within the government. Using the Act’s evolution, structure, legislative history, and empirical data, this Note argues against the presumption. First, it shows that the Act’s design strikes a deliberate balance between encouraging private actors and their meaningful oversight by the government. As such, the presumption is not needed to combat unmeritorious private claims. Second, the Note argues that potential overlap between enforcement under the Act and agency oversight is valuable in several ways. The Note’s most significant contribution is in explaining why the immateriality presumption, by tethering fraud enforcement to judgments of the agencies, could be harmful to the agencies them- selves and public interest writ large. In doing that, the Note challenges the claim that the presumption honors the expertise and facilitates the discretion of agencies. 

Congress has delegated power to the Attorney General to execute the nation’s immigration laws, adjudicate individual noncitizens’ cases, and fill interpretive gaps in the statute. The Attorney General has in turn delegated this authority, by regulation, to the Board of Immigration Appeals (BIA). Most BIA decisions are administratively final, and noncitizens appeal unfavorable decisions directly to federal courts of appeals. In a small but growing number of cases, however, the Attorney General will step in to decide a case himself de novo after the BIA has ruled. This power of intervention and decision, sometimes known as the “referral and review” power or “certification” power, has drawn some praise for being an efficient use of the broad power afforded to the executive branch in the immigration context, but more often has sustained criticism for potential abuse. In this Note, I analyze this certification power through the lens of Chevron. In particular, I argue that Chevron deference to the BIA is appropriate because it serves the values of the Chevron doctrine—expertise, procedural regularity, and public accountability— but that Chevron deference to the Attorney General’s certified opinions is inappropriate. Courts have a responsibility under Step Zero not to defer to an interpretation of law unless its issuance adheres sufficiently to fundamental tenets of administrative law. Certified opinions are insufficient on all counts: Deference to the Attorney General’s interpretations of law issued in this manner serves none of the values of the Chevron doctrine. 

In administrative law, the sine qua non of agency independence lies in the enabling statute. If the statute protects the agency’s head from removal except “for cause,” then the agency is considered insulated from presidential control and classified as independent. On the other hand, if the statute is silent on for-cause tenure protection, then the agency is classified as executive. This Note questions that central assumption by relying on the history of the Federal Reserve Board of Governors, arguably one of the most independent agencies in Washington. By tracing the Board’s history from a limited institution in 1913 to the powerful central bank of today, this Note demonstrates that in at least some cases, the driving factors behind operative independence have more to do with the practical realities of governance than the formalities of administrative law. Indeed, even though the Fed’s enabling statute is silent on the issue of for-cause tenure protection, the President has never fired the head of the agency. Even President Trump has declined to go so far. This Note addresses this paradox through a detailed look at the Board’s history and the major inflection points in its rise. Throughout, this Note also highlights the active role that the Board played in its own ascendency, demonstrating the dynamic life of administrative agencies and the powerful role they can play in shaping their own futures.