Volume 98, Number 6

Since the Founding era, governments have banned guns in places where weapons threaten activities of public life. The Supreme Court reaffirmed this tradition of “sensitive places” regulation in District of Columbia v. Heller, and locational restrictions on weapons have become a central Second Amendment battleground in the aftermath of New York State Rifle & Pistol Association v. Bruen. Liberals have criticized Bruen for requiring public safety laws to mimic founding practice, while conservatives have criticized it for licensing regulatory change not within the original understanding. In this Essay we argue that Bruen’s analogical method looks to the past to guide change in weapons regulation, not to foreclose change. We illustrate the kinds of sensitive-place regulations Bruen authorizes with examples spanning several centuries, and close by demonstrating—contrary to recent court decisions—that a 1994 federal law prohibiting gun possession by persons subject to a domestic violence restraining order is constitutional under Bruen.

Where some imagine the past as a land of all guns and no laws, this Article shows how weapons regulation of the past can guide public safety regulation of the present. Governments traditionally have protected activities against weapons threats in sites of governance and education: places where bonds of democratic community are formed and reproduced. We argue that Bruen’s historical-analogical method allows government to protect against weapons threats in new settings—including those of commerce and transportation—so long as these locational restrictions respect historical tradition both in terms of “why” and “how” they burden the right to keep and bear arms.

At the heart of this Article is a simple claim: That Bruen’s analogical method enables public safety laws to evolve in step with the gun-related harms they address. Bruen does not require the asymmetrical and selective approach to constitutional change practiced by some in its name. Just as Bruen extends the right of self-defense to weaponry of the twenty-first century, it also recognizes democracy’s competence to protect against weapons threats of the twenty-first century.

We apply these principles to demonstrate the constitutionality of the federal law prohibiting gun possession by people subject to a domestic violence restraining order, which the Supreme Court is currently considering in United States v. Rahimi.

This Article examines how the rapid deregulation and rampant possession of firearms is likely going to impact policing, and the constitutional law that governs it. For the longest time, lawful gun carry, concealed or open, was exceedingly rare. For a police officer to see a gun was both to see danger, and a crime in progress. This link among guns, danger, and unlawful possession has shaped much of the law of policing. But now, this understanding of the world is in its last stages of unraveling.

In nearly all states, guns are no longer unlawful to own and carry by default. In many, they are barely regulated. Recent Supreme Court Second Amendment decisions like New York State Rifle & Pistol Association v. Bruen serve only to hasten where state laws already were headed. For police, however, the harm guns can do exists irrespective of what the law has to say about the legality of carrying them. As a result, the nation’s gun laws are on a collision course with the practice and law of policing. This Article explores how the constitutional law governing policing is changing and will change in the face of gun legalization.

Part I of this Article explains the ubiquitous role guns play in the life of a police officer, and what actions guns lead police to take. Part II is about the legal doctrine of policing, both before and after firearm legalization. It details how the law shaped what police could do in order to protect themselves and others, and how that law is changing to accommodate legalization. Police now must operate in a terrain that increasingly is uncertain as to their lawful authority, and that in many instances may put them or others in jeopardy. Part III examines how the shifting laws of guns and policing might impact police behavior, likely resulting in ad hoc carve-outs for police authority that—if history is any guide—overwhelmingly will be imposed on Black and Brown communities.

Two decisions in 2022, issued only a day apart, represent a dramatic and deadly escalation of the Supreme Court’s politicized jurisprudence. In New York State Rifle & Pistol Association, Inc. v. Bruen, the Court declared that the Constitution has always protected a right to armed self-defense in public as well as in the home. In Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, it decreed that the Constitution has never protected a right against forced childbirth. What unites the two cases, beyond the radical political extremism displayed by the conservative Supreme Court majority, the indefensibly selective and incoherent use of history, and the broad rejection of longstanding precedent, is the full transformation of American constitutional law into what Achille Mbembe calls “necropolitics.” At the heart of the Bruen and Dobbs decisions is nothing less than life and death, and specifically the question of who gets to decide who lives and who dies. Expanding the right to guns means expanding white men’s use of deadly force against women and racial minorities. Eliminating the right to abortion means leaving women at the mercy of the death, injury, and other suffering inflicted by forced childbirth. Taken together, the two cases demonstrate that the Supreme Court has embraced the use of the Constitution as a tool of racial patriarchy.

On June 22, 2022, the Supreme Court issued its opinion in New York State Rifle & Pistol Association v. Bruen, striking down New York’s over 100-year-old law requiring individuals seeking to carry a firearm concealed in public to show a special need for self-protection. Holding that New York’s law violated the Second Amendment, the Court rejected the means-end scrutiny that lower courts had previously used to determine whether firearms restrictions comported with the Second Amendment, explaining that the appropriate test for evaluating the constitutionality of a firearms restriction is whether it is consistent with the Second Amendment’s text and historical understanding. The plain text of the Second Amendment, however, does not explicitly say private citizens have a right to carry firearms in public. Instead of acknowledging this, the Court focused on the fact that the text of the Second Amendment draws no distinction between the possession of firearms in the home and the possession of firearms in public. The Court then proceeded to cherry pick which historical sources it found relevant, rejecting sources that supported upholding the New York law and finding persuasive only those that supported its conclusion that individuals have a Second Amendment right to carry firearms outside the home. One result of Bruen is that states now have fewer tools to limit the number of individuals who can lawfully carry a firearm in public.

To reduce gun violence in public, legislators can try to regulate firearms on the front end by limiting those who can carry firearms in public. Alternatively, legislators can try to regulate firearms on the back end by discouraging those who choose to carry in public from unjustifiably using their firearms to injure or kill others. Since Bruen limits “front-end” regulation, it is a particularly opportune time to explore the effectiveness of “back-end” regulation.

This Article argues that lawmakers should add reform of back-end laws to their arsenal of tools to deal with the epidemic of gun violence that afflicts our country. While a variety of laws can be amended to discourage the unjustifiable use of firearms, this Article focuses on just one body of law that is uniquely situated to discourage the unjustifiable use of firearms: the law of self-defense. Self-defense law is uniquely positioned to inform whether and when an individual chooses to use their firearm to threaten, injure, or kill another person in light of the Supreme Court’s declaration in Heller that self-defense is at the core of the Second Amendment. The Article examines a few ways the law of self-defense can be strengthened to discourage the unjustifiable use of firearms in public.

Last Term, the U.S. Supreme Court decided a significant Second Amendment case after more than a decade of waiting. The Court’s majority coalition attempted to prevent judges from using deferential means-ends scrutiny and redirect their attention to enacted text, old examples, and analogies thereto. Yet the Court condemned outlier “may-issue” firearm licensing and, at the same time, preserved popular “shall-issue” licensing. That split result seems incompatible with some of the majority’s surface-level methodological commitments. Actually, to craft its holding, the majority deployed a wider range of considerations than text, history, and analogy, even apart from any extra-legal policy preferences that might have mattered. Such methodological inclusiveness is typical in modern constitutional adjudication, of course. But this case raises hard questions about which of the apparently legal considerations used to decide constitutional cases are themselves “constitutional” and which are not, along with how to understand the relationship between them. Perhaps “constitutional considerations” are so inclusive as to not be so special, or else “non-constitutional considerations” are no less supreme than their companions. Dilemmas appear either way, and for us all.

For a wide range of individual rights, the government can justify certain restrictions on the right in at least four kinds of ways: (1) by showing that the restriction is outside the scope of the right, as defined by text, original meaning, and other factors; (2) by showing that it only modestly burdens the exercise of the right; (3) by showing that it serves sufficiently strong countervailing government interests; or (4) by showing that the government has special power as proprietor when it comes to behavior that uses its property.

Bruen rejected countervailing-government-interests arguments for the Second Amendment, and focused on scope arguments. But it also seemed to endorse some kinds of modest burden arguments, and didn’t foreclose the possibility of government-as-proprietor arguments. This Article discusses these matters broadly, and also applies the analysis to various particular kinds of gun restrictions

In the wake of the Supreme Court’s decision in New York State Rifle & Pistol Association v. Bruen, more Second Amendment challenges will turn on courts’ answers to factual questions about history—answers courts may formulate based on the historical evidence compiled by the parties to the dispute. These answers will become precedents that tell us what types of regulations the Second Amendment does and does not permit. What happens to those precedents when new historical evidence comes to light? This Essay argues that the Court should be willing to revisit its precedents when historical evidence demonstrates error in an earlier decision. Revisiting erroneous precedents coheres with the Bruen Court’s theory of constitutional meaning, and it answers the dissent’s concern about the imperfect nature of the historical inquiry that occurs in litigation.

In the wake of the Supreme Court’s decision in New York State Rifle & Pistol Ass’n v. Bruen, courts are now confronted with new questions about where guns can be restricted and what justifications support those regulations. This Essay urges that the development of the doctrine governing location-based prohibitions should focus as much on the why as the where. Instead of simply isolating each location and considering the historical pedigree of gun restrictions in that place, judges should evaluate the reasons behind the sensitive places doctrine itself. We aim to recenter these first order questions to avoid haphazard doctrinal development that threatens to leave Second Amendment law incoherent and unpredictable.

Judges developing the doctrine will need to avoid several hazards. Among them: pitching historical analogies too narrowly, neglecting sensitive location mobility, and excessively focusing on locational features rather than regulatory justifications. Whatever values ultimately underpin the doctrine, they should direct the shape of location-based challenges. Whether the doctrine is grounded in safeguarding the exercise of other constitutional rights, protecting the vulnerability of specific populations, recognizing the inhibited judgment or discretion of those gathered, or other values altogether, this Essay shows why justificatory and constitutional foundations must be set before the doctrinal structure is completely built.

In Haiti, critical legal empowerment (CLE) offers a lens to reimagine the promise of the law in a system that has historically excluded the majority population from its protection. Beginning with the belief that tout moun se moun—all people are people—CLE requires the dismantling of doctrines and rules that create different categories of people and also demands that all-powerful actors be held accountable for rights violations under the law. In Haiti, this means that the Haitian state and, crucially, its international “partners” be made responsible to those who have been excluded not only from, but by, the law.

This Article traces the thread of legal oppression and resistance in Haiti, examining efforts by Haitian communities to make demands of the law and the legal system based on the insistence that all Haitians have equal rights, that tout moun se moun. These demands do not stop with equality, however. They also include affirmative claims of dignity and life-affirming autonomy from the state, spaces where subsistence farmers can protect unique Haitian lifeways. This insistence—on the protection of life, freedom from abuse, and extension of basic rights to subsistence—including land, food sovereignty, and clean water—is ongoing but also radically incomplete. Only once the law can encompass these rights as against powerful actors who deprive both individuals and collectives of their rights and dignity will the promise of the Haitian revolution finally be fulfilled.

As the world violently shifts and adjusts to peril, the legal profession has not been exempted from the challenge to transform itself. Within a legal empowerment practice, the question of relevance invites legal advocates and professionals to adapt and respond to the unmet legal needs arising from deepened states of inequality. This Article summarizes the experience and contributions of legal empowerment work in Puerto Rico during and after significant catastrophes. Analyzing how states of emergency and failed recovery processes affect the exercise of human dignity in Puerto Rico provides the legal profession perspective on the urgency to defend legal empowerment mainly when crises occur. Despite its importance during and after emergencies, access to justice is rarely considered an essential component of disaster preparedness or response. Unlike food, medicine, and debris removal, the capacity of individuals and communities to understand and traverse legal processes is not contemplated amidst the chaos. Survivors of emergencies who subsequently become victims of resulting economic fallout, law enforcement, and other social issues are left behind and fall through the abyss of underserved justice. A people-centered, legal empowerment approach to lawyering has proven valuable and feasible to address and respond to the acute disparities amplified during emergencies. It is also a call to a broadly defined justice community—the judiciary, agencies, lawyers, law students, and law schools—that is also at risk of peril if transformations fall short.

Most scholars who study felon disenfranchisement trace its roots back to Reconstruction. Southern states drew up laws to disenfranchise people convicted of felonies as an ostensibly race-neutral way to diminish the political power of newly freed Black Americans. Viewed against this historical backdrop, the onset of mass incarceration in the current era expands the impact of a practice intended to be both racist and punitive from the start.

This account is true, but it is incomplete. Non-criminal mass institutionalization has also played—and continues to play—a role in systematic disenfranchisement. Marshaling a wealth of archival and historical evidence, from newspapers, legislative debates, congressional hearings, and court cases, I reveal that institutional disenfranchisement is not just about mass incarceration—a singular phenomenon sparked by the Civil War that happens solely within the carceral state and targeted only freed Black people. Institutional disenfranchisement began much earlier, included more spaces than the prison, and initially targeted white men. Indeed, the more familiar prison disenfranchisement had a shadowy twin within the welfare state. Civil death includes more ghosts than previously imagined.

Who is a member of the political community? What barriers to inclusion do immigrants face as outsiders to this political community? This article describes several barriers facing immigrants that impede their political belonging. It critiques these barriers not on the basis of immigrants’ rights but based on their rights as current and future members of the political community. This is the second of two Essays. The first Essay focused on voting restrictions impacting Asian American and Latino voters. The second Essay focuses on challenges to including immigrants, Asian Americans, and Latinos in the 2020 Census. Together, the Essays critique the exclusion of immigrants from the political community because this exclusion compromises representational equality.

The 2020 election season placed remarkable pressure on the U.S. election system. As the COVID-19 pandemic ravaged a politically polarized nation, American voters challenged a range of election regulations, looking to the courts for relief from laws that made voting particularly onerous during extraordinary circumstances. An examination of election law jurisprudence over this period reveals, among other things, the judiciary’s repeated reliance on a single case: Purcell v. Gonzalez. While its holding is less than clear, the decision in Purcell, at its core, governs the appropriateness of judicial intervention in election disputes on the eve of a political contest. The Court could have elucidated Purcell’s true meaning during this unique election cycle but, instead, it seems to have made matters worse. This Article argues that the Supreme Court’s repeated invocation of Purcell during the 2020 election cycle introduced an empty vessel for unprincipled decisionmaking and inconsistent rulings that only served to aggrandize election-related concerns, ultimately harming the nation’s most vulnerable voters. Part I describes the facts in Purcell, and what one might contend is its central holding. Part II highlights the chief deficiencies of the case, revealing a fundamental incoherence in its reasoning that augments the potential for government actors—including courts—to exploit Purcell in the lead up to an election. Part III examines more closely the judiciary’s application of Purcell in the 2020 primaries and general election, revealing the dangers it poses to voting rights and the democratic process.

How can self-governance work in a diverse society? Is it possible to have a successful multiracial, multiethnic democracy in which all groups are represented fairly? What kinds of electoral and governing institutions work best in a pluralistic society? In the United States today, these are not just theoretical concerns but fundamental inquiries at the core of an urgent question with an uncertain answer: How does American democracy survive?

This Article looks for an answer by placing the United States in a broader context of multiracial, multiethnic democracies around the world. The basic argument is straightforward: The majoritarian politics of single-winner electoral districts and the two-party system it produces is bad for both minority representation and, by extension, for democracy itself. A more inclusive and stable democracy requires a proportional system of voting and more than two parties. This Article thus proceeds in three parts. Part I takes a broader look at the theory of multiracial, multiethnic democracy, with a particular focus on the role of parties and elections in sustaining or undermining multiracial, multiethnic democracy. Part II looks more closely at minority representation in the United States through the lens of the American party and electoral system and its deep inadequacies in supporting multiracial, multiethnic democracy. Part III argues that proportional representation is the logical solution for the United States if it wants to have a chance at being a stable multiracial, multiethnic democracy.

Many judges and scholars have read Section 2 of the Fourteenth Amendment as evidence of the Constitution’s commitment to universal representation—the idea that representation should be afforded to everyone in the political community regardless of whether they happen to be eligible to vote. Typically, this analysis starts and stops with Section 2’s first clause, the Apportionment Clause, which provides that congressional seats are to be apportioned among the states on the basis of “the whole number of persons in each State.” Partly for this reason, the Supreme Court’s lead opinion in Evenwel v. Abbott rejected the argument that “One Person, One Vote” requires states to equalize the number of adult citizens when drawing legislative districts, affirming that states can draw districts with equal numbers of persons.

But skeptics of the universal representation theory of the Fourteenth Amendment, most notably Justice Alito, have complained that this analysis is flawed because it ignores Section 2’s less-known and never-enforced second clause: the Penalty Clause. Under the Penalty Clause, states that deny or abridge otherwise qualified citizens’ right to vote are penalized with a reduction of their congressional representation. Any theory of representation drawn from the Fourteenth Amendment, the skeptics argue, must grapple with all of Section 2.

This Article takes up that call and explains how the Penalty Clause is not only consistent with but also reinforces the Fourteenth Amendment’s broader commitment to universal representation. Contrary to common misconceptions about the Penalty Clause, the Clause is structured so that the state as a whole loses representation in Congress, but no individual within the state is denied representation. In other words, the Penalty Clause does not operate by subtracting those wrongfully disenfranchised from a state’s total population prior to congressional apportionment. Rather, it imposes a proportional reduction derived from the percent of the vote-eligible population denied the vote that is scaled to an offending state’s total population. The Penalty Clause thus does nothing to upend Section 2’s advancement of universal representation. If anything, the Penalty Clause actually reinforces Section 2’s commitment to that idea. By reducing a state’s representation proportionally, it contemplates the representational interests of nonvoters, a key feature of the universal representation theory.

Questions about the state legislative role in determining the identity of presidential electors and electoral slates, and the permissible extent of a departure from regular legislative order, have recently reached peak prominence. Much of the controversy, including several cases to reach the Supreme Court, has concerned the constitutional delegation of power over pre-election rules. But a substantial amount of attention has also focused on the ability of state legislatures to appoint electors in the period between Election Day and the electors’ vote.

An asserted legislative role in the post-election period has two ostensible sources: one constitutional and one statutory. The constitutional provision—the portion of Article II allowing states to appoint electors in the manner the legislature directs— has received substantial scholarly and judicial attention. In contrast, there has been no prominent exploration of the federal statute, 3 U.S.C. § 2, despite text similar to the constitutional provision. This piece is the first to explore that federal statute as an ostensible basis for a legislature’s appointment of electors beyond the normal legislative process, in the aftermath of an election that has “failed to make a choice.” After reviewing the constitutional controversy, the Essay canvasses the history of the statute and its context. And it discovers a previously unreported historical anomaly, which might well affect construction not only of the statutory text, but also the constitutional predicate, in the event of a disputed presidential election.

The threat of extreme and punishing partisan gerrymandering has increased exponentially since 2019 when the Supreme Court held partisan gerrymandering claims nonjusticiable. Although the Court was unanimous in recognizing that partisan gerrymandering can undermine the fair functioning of the electoral process, neither Rucho’s majority nor its dissent acknowledged the unique harm partisan gerrymandering visits upon the operation of our multiracial, multiethnic democracy when coupled with the upsurge of conjoined racial and partisan polarization. The Court’s failure to establish a limiting principle for the degree to which partisanship can usurp the redistricting process means that there is no federal guidance to cabin partisan gerrymandering and no measure to take account of the race-driven effect of the group lockout that partisan gerrymandering often produces. Absent this critical instruction from the Supreme Court, lower courts, civil rights advocates, and affected voters must turn to racial gerrymandering jurisprudence to discern first principles to guide a judicial response to partisan gerrymandering’s particular relation to and compounded effect on account of race. Fortunately, there is a through line from Rucho to the Court’s racial gerrymandering jurisprudence that plausibly permits federal courts to address hybrid racial and partisan gerrymandering claims and parse pure partisanship from punishment—if they are willing.

The right to vote is foundational to our democracy, but it lacks a strong foundation. Voting rights litigants are constantly on their heels, forever responding to state-imposed impediments. In this regard, the right to vote is decidedly reactive: directed and defined by those seeking to limit the right, rather than by those who advocate for it. As a consequence, the right to vote is both deeply fragile and largely impersonal. It is fragile because voters must reckon with flimsy electoral bureaucracies that are susceptible to meltdown from both intentional efforts to limit the franchise and systemic strain. The right to vote is impersonal because, with few exceptions, it is shaped through litigation, rather than comprehensive consideration of voters’ circumstances and needs.

To address these weaknesses, this Article champions the idea that a robust right to vote must be constructed. Unlike most other rights, the right to vote relies on governments to build, fund, and administer elections systems. This obligation is not ancillary to the right to vote; it is foundational to it. Drawing from state constitutional law, electoral management theory, federalism scholarship, and rarely examined consent decrees, we argue that a constructed right to vote incorporates three essential features: electoral adequacy (including the right to adequate funding of elections, the right to competent management, and the right to democratic structures), voting rights legislation tailored to individuals’ experiences, and voting rights doctrines that require states to build their elections systems in rights-promoting ways.

We may be witnessing the emergence of a new kind of vote dilution claim. In a barrage of lawsuits about the 2020 election, conservative plaintiffs argued that electoral policies that make it easier to vote are unconstitutionally dilutive. Their logic was that (1) these policies enable fraud through their lack of proper safeguards and (2) the resulting fraudulent votes dilute the ballots cast by law-abiding citizens. In this Article, I examine this novel theory of vote dilution through fraud facilitation. I track its progress in the courts, which have mostly treated it as a viable cause of action. Contra these treatments, I maintain that current doctrine doesn’t recognize the claim that electoral regulations are dilutive because they enable fraud. However, I tentatively continue, the law should acknowledge this form of vote dilution. Fraudulent votes can dilute valid ones—even though, at present, they rarely do so.

Under my proposed approach, vote dilution through fraud facilitation would be a cognizable but cabined theory. Standing would be limited to voters whose preferred candidates are targeted by ongoing or imminent fraud. Liability would arise only if a measure is both likely to generate widespread fraud and poorly tailored to achieve an important governmental interest. And relief would take the form of additional precautions against fraud, not the rescission of the challenged policy. In combination, these points would yield a mostly toothless cause of action under modern political conditions. Should there ever be a resurgence of fraud, though, the new vote dilution claim would stand ready to thwart it.

In this piece, I examine the political branding of Asian immigrants by comparing the rhetoric used in the political platforms of the Democratic and Republican parties from 1876 to 1924 to the language deployed in U.S. Supreme Court opinions during the same time period. The negative verbiage repeated at national political conventions branded the Chinese as a threat to labor, immoral, unassimilable, diseased, and invaders. Interestingly, the Republican authors of their political platforms were multiracial, and yet they produced rhetoric as harshly anti-Asian as their Democratic counterparts, who included ex-Confederate soldiers and even KKK members. And disappointingly, the Supreme Court picked up this derogatory language found in both parties’ political platforms and continued to echo it in cases that diminished the rights of Chinese and other Asian immigrants. This history is then linked to the present day through the example of the negative impact of politicians’ calling the contemporary COVID-19 pandemic “Kung Flu.”

Sandra Mayson, in her article Dangerous Defendants, points out the ways in which pretrial detention on the basis of public safety risk violates the “parity principle”—a measure of decisionmaking fairness that evaluates whether individuals of like risk are treated alike. As Mayson convincingly argues, if public safety risk is what justifies detention of those who have been arrested, it should also justify preventative detention of similarly risky people who remain in the community at large. In other words, merely having a person in custody does not logically change the analysis of the risk they present or what should be done with them.

In this Article, I argue that psychological factors, not assessments of risk, can explain why the parity principle is violated. A person in custody and a person in the community may present the same level of public safety risk, but the human brain typically uses heuristics, not calculations, to make decisions. Our brains want to minimize losses and regret. Whenever something bad happens, our brains automatically generate counterfactuals—the “if only I had done X” hypotheticals that allow us to imagine (and believe in) a world where tragedy would have been avoided. Counterfactuals that eliminate harm are easy to generate when someone is in custody, but hard to generate when someone is at large, and our brains conflate ease of generation with real-world probability. Counterfactuals, then, may help explain why the pretrial, public safety default seems to be to keep someone locked up, “just in case”—and why this desire is resistant to information and argument.

This Article adds an important dimension to the ongoing debates about whether judicial discretion or actuarial tools should govern pretrial release decisions. Judicial discretion may be biased towards incapacitation by operating on the “gut level” of psychology—even if the harms of detention outweigh the benefits. Across the United States, jails contain thousands of prisoners who could be released safely, who could resume work and the rest of their lives, but who remain incarcerated because of the fear that one of them might commit a sensational crime. The insights of this Article may also apply more generally to a host of similar problems, including parole release, executive clemency, diversion programs, and the removal of children from potentially abusive parents, and suggest that policymakers and reformers be cognizant of the way in which current criminal justice thinking is short-sighted, overly reactive, and biased towards incapacitation. By applying theories of the counterfactual proposed by Neal Roese and other behavioral psychologists, the Article provides an explanation for why, even when regulations change, judicial decisions to release arrestees may remain low. It suggests that experimental research specifically targeting judicial counterfactual thinking should be conducted.

In criminal law, the venerated rule of lenity has been frequently, if not consistently, invoked as a canon of interpretation. Where criminal statutes are ambiguous, the rule of lenity generally posits that courts should interpret them narrowly, in favor of the defendant. But the rule is not always reliably used, and questions remain about its application. In this article, I will try to determine how the rule of lenity should apply and whether it should be given the status of a canon.

First, I argue that federal courts should apply the historical rule of lenity (also known as the rule of strict construction of penal statutes) that applied prior to the 1970s, when the Supreme Court significantly weakened the rule. The historical rule requires a judge to consult the text, linguistic canons, and the structure of the statute and then, if reasonable doubts remain, interpret the statute in the defendant’s favor. Conceived this way, the historical rule cuts off statutory purpose and legislative history from the analysis, and places a thumb on the scale in favor of interpreting statutory ambiguities narrowly in relation to the severity of the punishment that a statute imposes. As compared to the modern version of the rule of lenity, the historical rule of strict construction better advances democratic accountability, protects individual liberty, furthers the due process principle of fair warning, and aligns with the modified version of textualism practiced by much of the federal judiciary today.

Second, I argue that the historical rule of lenity should be deemed an interpretive canon and given stare decisis effect by all federal courts. If courts consistently applied historical lenity, it would require more clarity from Congress and less guessing from courts, and it would ameliorate some of the worst excesses of the federal criminal justice system, such as overcriminalization and overincarceration.

In this Article we argue that data sharing is an activity that sits at the crossroads of privacy concerns and the broader challenges of data governance surrounding access and use. Using the Sidewalk Toronto “smart city” proposal as a starting point for discussion, we outline these concerns to include resistance to data monopolies, public control over data collected through the use of public infrastructure, public benefit from the generation of intellectual property, the desire to broadly share data for innovation in the public interest, social—rather than individual— surveillance and harms, and that data use be held to standards of fairness, justice, and accountability. Data sharing is sometimes the practice that generates these concerns and sometimes the practice that is involved in the solution to these concerns.

Our safe sharing site approach to data sharing focuses on resolving key risks associated with data sharing, including protecting the privacy and security of data subjects, but aims to do so in a manner that is independent of the various legal contexts of regulation and governance. Instead, we propose that safe sharing sites connect with these different contexts through a legal interface consisting of a registry that provides transparency in relation to key information that supports different forms of regulation. Safe sharing sites could also offer assurances and auditability regarding the data sharing, further supporting a range of regulatory interventions. It is therefore not an alternative to these interventions but an important tool that can enable effective regulation.

A central feature of a safe sharing site is that it offers an alternative to the strategy of de-identifying data and then releasing it, whether within an “open data” context or in a more controlled environment. In a safe sharing site, computations may be performed on the data in a secure and privacy-protective manner without releasing the raw data, and all data sharing is transparent and auditable. Transparency does not mean that all data sharing becomes a matter of “public” view, but rather that there is the ability to make these activities visible to organizations and regulators in appropriate circumstances while recognizing the potential confidentiality interests in data uses.

In this way, safe sharing sites facilitate data sharing in a manner that manages the complexities of sharing while reducing the risks and enabling a variety of forms of governance and regulation. As such, the safe sharing site offers a flexible and modular piece of legal-technical infrastructure for the new economy.

In recent years there have been increasing calls by patient advocates, health law scholars, and would-be data intermediaries to recognize personal property interests in individual health information (IHI). While the propertization of IHI appeals to notions of individual autonomy, privacy, and distributive justice, the implementation of a workable property system for IHI presents significant challenges. This Article addresses the issues surrounding the propertization of IHI from a property law perspective. It first observes that IHI does not fit recognized judicial criteria for recognition as personal property, as IHI defies convenient definition, is difficult to possess exclusively, and lacks justifications for exclusive control. Second, it argues that if IHI property were structured along the lines of traditional common law property, as suggested by some propertization advocates, prohibitive costs could be imposed on socially valuable research and public health activity and IHI itself could become mired in unanticipated administrative complexities. Third, it discusses potential limitations and exceptions on the scope, duration, and enforceability of IHI property, both borrowed from intellectual property law and created de novo for IHI.

Yet even with these limitations, inherent risks arise when a new form of property is created. When owners are given broad rights of control, subject only to enumerated exceptions that seek to mitigate the worst effects of that control, constitutional constraints on governmental takings make the subsequent refinement of those rights difficult if not impossible, especially when rights are distributed broadly across the entire population. Moreover, embedding a host of limitations and exceptions into a new property system simply to avoid the worst effects of propertization begs the question whether a property system is needed at all, particularly when existing contract, privacy, and anti-discrimination rules already exist to protect individual privacy and autonomy in this area. It may be that one of the principal results of propertizing IHI is enriching would-be data intermediaries with little net benefit to individuals or public health. This Article concludes by recommending that the propertization of IHI be rejected in favor of sensible governmental regulation of IHI research coupled with existing liability rules to compensate individuals for violations of their privacy and abusive conduct by data handlers.

Is contracting for the collection, use, and transfer of data like contracting for the sale of a horse or a car or licensing a piece of software? Many are concerned that conventional principles of contract law are inadequate when some consumers may not know or misperceive the full consequences of their transactions. Such concerns have led to proposals for reform that deviate significantly from general rules of contract law. However, the merits of these proposals rest in part on testable empirical claims. We explore some of these claims using a hand-collected data set of privacy policies that dictate the terms of the collection, use, transfer, and security of personal data. We explore the extent to which those terms differ across markets before and after the adoption of the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR). We find that compliance with the GDPR varies across markets in intuitive ways, indicating that firms take advantage of the flexibility offered by a contractual approach even when they must also comply with mandatory rules. We also compare terms offered to more and less sophisticated subjects to see whether firms may exploit information barriers by offering less favorable terms to more vulnerable subjects.

In previous work, I wrote about how trade secrecy drives the plot of Roald Dahl’s novel Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, explaining how the Oompa-Loompas are the ideal solution to Willy Wonka’s competitive problems. Since publishing that piece I have been struck by the proliferating Oompa-Loompas in contemporary life: computing machines filled with software and fed on data. These computers, software, and data might not look like Oompa-Loompas, but they function as Wonka’s tribe does: holding their secrets tightly and internally for the businesses for which these machines are deployed.

Computing machines were not always such effective secret-keeping Oompa Loompas. As this Article describes, at least three recent shifts in the computing industry—cloud computing, the increasing primacy of data and machine learning, and automation—have turned these machines into the new Oompa-Loompas. While new technologies enabled this shift, trade secret law has played an important role here as well. Like other intellectual property rights, trade secret law has a body of built-in limitations to ensure that the incentives offered by the law’s protection do not become so great that they harm follow-on innovation—new innovation that builds on existing innovation—and competition. This Article argues that, in light of the technological shifts in computing, the incentives that trade secret law currently provides to develop these contemporary Oompa-Loompas are excessive in relation to their worrisome effects on follow-on innovation and competition by others. These technological shifts allow businesses to circumvent trade secret law’s central limitations, thereby overfortifying trade secrecy protection. The Article then addresses how trade secret law might be changed—by removing or diminishing its protection—to restore balance for the good of both competition and innovation.

With data rapidly becoming the lifeblood of the global economy, the ability to improve its use significantly affects both social and private welfare. Data standardization is key to facilitating and improving the use of data when data portability and interoperability are needed. Absent data standardization, a “Tower of Babel” of different databases may be created, limiting synergetic knowledge production. Based on interviews with data scientists, this Article identifies three main technological obstacles to data portability and interoperability: metadata uncertainties, data transfer obstacles, and missing data. It then explains how data standardization can remove at least some of these obstacles and lead to smoother data flows and better machine learning. The Article then identifies and analyzes additional effects of data standardization. As shown, data standardization has the potential to support a competitive and distributed data collection ecosystem and lead to easier policing in cases where rights are infringed or unjustified harms are created by data-fed algorithms. At the same time, increasing the scale and scope of data analysis can create negative externalities in the form of better profiling, increased harms to privacy, and cybersecurity harms. Standardization also has implications for investment and innovation, especially if lock-in to an inefficient standard occurs. The Article then explores whether market-led standardization initiatives can be relied upon to increase welfare, and the role governmental-facilitated data standardization should play, if at all.

EU data protection law is playing an increasingly prominent role in today’s global technological environment. The cornerstone of EU law in this area, the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), is now widely regarded as a privacy law not just for the EU, but for the world. In the conventional wisdom, the EU has become the world’s privacy cop, acting in a unilateral fashion and exercising de facto influence over other nations through its market power. Yet, understanding the forces for convergence and divergence in data privacy law demands a more nuanced account of today’s regulatory environment.

In contrast to the established narrative about EU power, this Article develops a new account of the diffusion of EU data protection law. It does so through case studies of Japan and the United States that focus on how these countries have negotiated the terms for international data transfers from the EU. The resulting account reveals the EU to be both collaborative and innovative.

Three important lessons follow from the case studies. First, rather than exercising unilateral power, the EU has engaged in bilateral negotiations and accommodated varied paths for non-EU nations to meet the GDPR’s “adequacy” requirement for international data transfers. Second, while the adequacy requirement did provide significant leverage in these negotiations, it has been flexibly applied throughout its history. Third, the EU’s impressive regulatory capacity rests on a complex interplay of institutions beyond the European Commission. Not only are there a multiplicity of policy and lawmaking institutions within the EU, but the EU has also drawn on non-EU privacy innovations and involved institutions from non-EU countries in its privacy policymaking.

Finally, this Article identifies two overarching factors that have promoted the global diffusion of EU data protection law. The first such factor regards legal substance. Public discourse on consumer privacy has evolved dramatically, and important institutions and prominent individuals in many non-EU jurisdictions now acknowledge the appeal of EU-style data protection. Beyond substance, the EU has benefited from the accessibility of its omnibus legislative approach; other jurisdictions have been drawn to the EU’s highly transplantable legal model. In short, the world has weighed in, and the EU is being rewarded for its success in the marketplace of regulatory ideas.

As the federal campaign finance laws have withered, leading to the rise of super PACs and other forms of largely unregulated spending, the parties have remained subject to stringent legal restrictions and must contend with other factors adverse to their competitive position in the electoral landscape. Certain of the limitations they have encountered affect their ability to fund, control, and manage core institutional functions. One such function is the conduct of presidential debates, now largely financed, planned, and operated by the news media organizations and nonprofit organizations. The candidates, especially front-running candidates and party nominees, also have some say in the conduct of debates. But the parties occupy the periphery of these major campaign events that bear directly on how they present themselves and showcase their candidates to the electorate. Empowering parties through modest legal reforms to play more of a role in the debate process would be one limited but potentially important step in bolstering their standing and capabilities.

While the debate over the role of political parties is longstanding and not completely resolved amongst scholars, most reform groups are skeptical that stronger parties are the solution to contemporary problems in the American political system. Looking at the effects of past reforms and related court rulings, we maintain that many of them strengthened the hand of party activists, independently financed candidates, and donors in the nomination process at the expense of elected officials and national party officials. This has not only fueled partisan polarization due to pres- sures from party activists and donors, but it also removed any ability of the party to conduct what some have termed “peer review.” Instead of focusing on reversing past party reforms, however, we propose taking a different tack. We ask what changes might make the political parties more effective umbrella organizations that promote coalition building and better governance in this period of high polarization. Toward that end, we propose some changes that might incentivize American political parties to serve that function better. The parties themselves would have to adopt some of these reforms. Others might require that reform groups and the courts be willing to give political parties a more privileged role in campaign finance.

The institutional design through which democracies choose nominees who compete to become a nation’s chief executive is among the most consequential features in the design of democratic elections. Yet there is surprisingly little scholarship that explores this issue in detail. This Article provides both historical perspective on the evolution over time of the nomination process in the United States and comparative perspective on how other major democracies structure this process. The central organizing theme of this piece is the contrast between nomination processes that entail a central role for “peer review”—in which party leaders have a central voice in the selection of their parties’ nominees—and purely populist selection methods, in which ordinary voters completely control the selection of nominees and party figures have no special role. The first half of the Article is historical and focuses on the United States. In the 1970s, the United States shifted almost overnight from the methods that had been used for nearly 200 years to select party nominees, in which official representatives of the political parties played the major role in deciding the parties’ candidates for President, to a purely populist mode (primaries and caucuses) for selecting presidential nominees. The consequences of this dramatic transformation have manifested themselves in recent presidential nomination contests. In this Part, we seek to show both how radical the change was that was made in the 1970s and yet how accidental, contingent, and inadvertent this transformation was. The “framers” of these changes did not actually intend to create the system with which we ended up, in which the primaries and caucuses completely determine the parties’ nominees. The second half is comparative and explores how other major democracies structure the process of choosing party leaders and candidates for chief executive. This part shows that the U.S. system is an extreme outlier among major democracies: In no other democracy is the selection completely controlled by the mass of ordinary voters. Most other democracies use systems of pure peer review to select candidates for chief executive; or use systems that mix elements of peer review with popular participation; and in other ways continue to give official representatives of the parties much greater say than in the United States over the selection of the parties’ nominees for chief executive.

As Americans, we take for granted that those we entrust with significant authority have been judged by their peers to be competent at the task. Peer review is a concept commonly accepted in most professions. For instance, in medicine “peer review is defined as ‘the objective evaluation of the quality of a physician’s or a scientist’s performance by colleagues.’” That is why we license plumbers, electricians, manicurists, doctors, nurses, and lawyers. We do this in most aspects of life—except politics. In 2016, Americans nominated and then elected Donald Trump, the most unqualified (by virtue of traditional measures of experience and temperament) person ever elected to the Office of the President of the United States, in a system without peer review. This Article is an argument for the restoration of some modicum of peer review in the modern nominating system of both major political parties.

For many centuries, political communities have contrived nominating systems that seek to attain similar goals across different countries—protecting the community from overly ambitious and powerful leaders, and uniting rather than dividing communities at election time around leaders with broad-based appeal. They have done so by resort to procedures that recur almost invariably—procedures framed to avoid plurality victories in multicandidate contests and to insulate nominators’ decisions from outside influence, including the influence of fellow voters’ decisions. One is struck by how painstakingly our forebears worked out the problems of nominations over time, with recurring themes and methods, which (ironically in this age of information) find no echo today in our own presidential nominating system.

Given the widespread dissatisfaction with both major-party nominees in 2016, it is natural to ask if the American presidential nomination process is to blame for producing two such candidates as Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton. But when the dynamics of these two nomination races are examined, there is little evidence that the outcomes would have been affected by any plausible changes in the process. Hillary Clinton did gain an advantage from the Democratic rule that awards automatic delegate status to elected and party officials, but she also won a clear majority of the votes cast by ordinary voters in presidential primaries and of the delegates selected through primaries and caucuses. And though there is evidence that the leadership of the Democratic National Committee favored her nomination and wanted to aid her candidacy, there is little that the committee actually did—or could do—to make such an outcome more likely. On the Republican side, Donald Trump did not win because the Republican process was, in effect, taken over by independents. Trump won a solid plurality of the votes cast by primary voters who identified as Republicans. A different set of delegate allocation rules and a large contingent of Republican superdelegates might have slowed Trump’s road to the nomination, but, given his dominance of the primaries, probably would not have changed the final result. The only rules changes that might have aided both Clinton’s and Trump’s opponents were if more states had used a caucus-convention system instead of a primary to select their national convention delegates. Both Bernie Sanders and Ted Cruz fared substantially better in caucuses than in primaries. But given ample evidence that caucuses have a significantly smaller and less representative turnout than primaries, it is unlikely that either party—or their rank-and-file members—would have endorsed a substantially greater use of caucuses.

“Ad hoc procedure” seems like an oxymoron. A traditional model of the civil justice system depicts courts deciding cases using impartial procedures that are defined in advance of specific disputes. This model reflects a process-based account of the rule of law in which the process through which laws are made helps to ensure that lawmakers act in the public interest. Judgments produced using procedures promulgated in advance of specific disputes are legitimate because they are the product of fair rules of play designed in a manner that is the opposite of ad hoc.

Actual litigation frequently reveals the inadequacy of procedures created according to this traditional model. To fix the procedural problems that arise in such cases, litigants, judges, lawyers, and legislatures can design procedure on the fly, changing the “rules of the road” as the case proceeds. Ad hoc procedure-making allows the civil justice system to function when ordinary procedure fails, but it challenges the rule-of-law values reflected in the traditional model of procedural design. Instead of being created by lawmakers who operate behind a veil of ignorance, ad hoc procedure is made by actors seeking specific outcomes in pending cases. The circumstances in which ad hoc procedure is created raise concerns about lawmakers’ motivations, the transaction costs of one-off procedural interventions, the wisdom and fairness of those interventions, and the separation of powers.

This Article introduces the phenomenon of ad hoc procedure and considers its place in a world where much procedure continues to be made through the traditional model. Focusing on ad hoc procedural statutes, the Article contends that such statutes’ legitimacy—or lack thereof—depends on different factors than ordinary civil procedure. Unable to claim legitimacy from the circumstances in which it is crafted, ad hoc procedural legislation must instead derive legitimacy from the need to address a procedural problem and the effort to produce substantively just outcomes.

The class action has emerged as the settlement instrument of choice in mass harm cases such as the Volkswagen emissions scandal or the Deepwater Horizon aftermath. But the class action has also reemerged in the mass tort context, most notably in the NFL Concussion litigation. After seemingly collapsing following the Amchem and Ortiz Supreme Court decisions of the 1990s, the class action device is getting an important second life in courts today.

This Article argues that the new class action has a feature that should increase its doctrinal acceptability: forms of active class member participation. What we term the “participatory class action” emerges from two developments. The first is the technological transformation in the means of communication with class members, and among the class members themselves. The second is that the current class action almost invariably arises from the initial aggregation and centralization of large numbers of individual suits and putative class actions in the Multidistrict Litigation (MDL) process. As a result, classes are comprised not simply of lawyers and absent class members, but of hundreds or even thousands of individual claims, with individuals capable of monitoring the class and represented by independent counsel.

With over forty percent of the actively litigated civil cases in federal courts now in the MDL dockets, the transformation in mass resolution is well underway. In these new consolidations, the assumptions of older law about absent class member passivity break down. In the popular typology in academic examination of class actions, class action law should insist on the loyalty of agents and the importance of individual ability to exit as guarantors of systemic legitimacy. In the participatory class action, voice emerges as a critical element, with the capacity of the normally silent class members to assert their interests and their views. As with the need for class action law to move from first-class mail to Twitter, so too must the law embrace the implications of real participation by those represented in the assessment of representational propriety.

Decisions about class certification and arbitration have depressed private enforcement class actions, reducing deterrence and enforcement of important substantive rights. Until now, the consequences of these procedural decisions for the separation of powers have not been well explored. An aggressive Supreme Court and an inactive Congress have increased the importance of federal administrative law—for example, administrative attempts to regulate arbitration. Moreover, a reduction in private enforcement compounds the importance of public enforcement. State and federal enforcers may piggyback on (successful or unsuccessful) private suits, and they may employ new tactics to maintain deterrence. While proponents of a robust regulatory state may take solace in these executive rejoinders, they are not without costs. Specifically, executive action may be less transparent, less durable, and more susceptible to political pressures than its alternatives.

In a 2013 article, I explained that the Supreme Court and federal circuits had cut back significantly on plaintiffs’ ability to bring class actions. As I explain in this article, that trend has subsided. First, the Supreme Court has denied certiorari in several high-profile cases. Second, the Court’s most recent class action rulings have been narrow and fact specific. Third, the federal circuits have generally rejected defendants’ broad interpretations of Supreme Court precedents and arguments for further restrictions on class certification. One explanation for this new trend is that defendants have been overly aggressive in their arguments, losing credibility and causing courts to push back. Another is that courts are retreating from the view that pressure on defendants to settle is itself a reason to curtail class actions. It remains to be seen, however, whether this trend is the new normal, or merely a respite from the decline of class actions.

The 1966 revision of Rule 23 has shaped our political and legal imagination. Building on the 1950 ruling of Mullane v. Central Hanover Bank and Trust Company, which approved the possibility of binding absentees nationwide through representative litigation, Rule 23 expanded the groups eligible for class treatment. Aggregation responded to felt social needs—for banks to pool trusts, school students to enforce school desegregation injunctions, and consumers to pursue monetary claims too small to bring individually.

Key to the legitimacy of doing so for Rule 23’s drafters was “the homogeneous character” of claims, permitting an identity of interests between the representative and absent members of the class. The 1966 Rule 23 put judges in charge twice: first, to determine the shape of the class and the adequacy of the representation and second, if a compromise was proposed, to assess again whether representative plaintiffs had proffered a fair and adequate resolution.

Rule 23 gave a limited role to absentees, many of whom were in mandatory classes from which no exit was possible. Added on late in the drafting was a mandate to provide notice at the outset that class actions were pending. That notice was required only for a subset of cases; individuals with monetary stakes were given formal opportunities to “opt-out”—even if, as a practical matter, individual lawsuits were not likely feasible.

While not producing a mass of opt-outs, notice requirements have pushed the processes of class actions into the public realm. Class actions gained a visibility not only because of the stakes and the judicial decisions on certification and settlement but also through mass mailings that brought the idea of class actions into the homes of millions of potential beneficiaries of lawsuits.

Aspirations and utility thus combined to reframe constitutional understandings of the “process due” by legitimating the authority of courts to deal in the aggregate without individuals affirmatively consenting to participate when cases began. But what fifty years of experience with class actions and related forms of aggregation— including multi-district litigation (MDL) and bankruptcy—have made plain is that an aggregate litigation’s life-span often continues after settlement or trial. New information can emerge about difficulties in effectuating relief, as can conflicts among claimants, whose “homogeneous character” may diminish after resolution. Thus, aggregate litigation in practice has come to have three phases—certification, resolution by settlement or trial, and implementation of remedies.

Critics of class actions, aiming to disable their use, rely on problems of implementation to argue against certification at the outset, and they invoke due process rights of both defendants and absent plaintiffs. A new law of due process is also emerging in the arena of personal jurisdiction—as the Supreme Court circumscribes the ability of courts to decide claims involving non-resident defendants. I bring that doctrine into discussions of class actions, first because the Supreme Court expanded the ability to aggregate litigants in 1950 through expanding jurisdiction and second because the Court’s decisions reflect unease with adjudicative authority not founded on relationships among the forum and those whose rights are decided. The concern about ensuring that defendants are “at home” parallels class action notice, as both seek forms of affiliation between litigants and the jurisdictions deciding their rights.

The Supreme Court has used its new personal jurisdiction law to circumscribe the scope of courts’ reach. Here I propose to borrow its concerns for the opposite purpose—to build affiliations so to expand the authority of courts during aggregation’s third phase. Aggregation’s pooling of resources has new importance today, as tens of thousands of civil litigants appear in state and federal courts without lawyers. Revising its practices is one way for democratic polities to help all classes of persons have access to court-based remedies.

In 1950 in Mullane, the Supreme Court approved what has been called “jurisdiction by necessity” to license state courts to determine the rights of all claimants when lawsuits had a nexus with the forum and notice was provided. In this century, the Court should likewise recognize the necessity of giving judges jurisdiction to oversee aggregation post-settlement so as to monitor implementation, respond to conflicts, and assess distributional equities. And, just as the 1966 Rule drafters turned to notice as a means of doing “something” to connect litigants with courts, notice can again be put to work during aggregation’s third phase to provide the “publicity” (to borrow from Jeremy Bentham) that makes connections possible and that forces the practices of courts, lawyers, and auxiliary personnel before the public.

Testing the Constitution

We live in the age of empiricism, and in that age, constitutional law is a relative backwater. Although quantitative methods have transformed entire fields of scholarly inquiry, reshaping what we ask and what we know, those who write about the Constitution rarely resort to quantitative methodology to test their theories. That seems unfortunate, because empirical analysis can illuminate important questions of constitutional law. Or, at least, that is the question to be tested in this Symposium.

We brought together a terrific group of scholars with a unique assignment. We paired distinguished constitutional thinkers with equally accomplished empiricists. We asked the law scholars to identify a core question, assumption, or doctrine from constitutional law, and we asked the empiricist to take a cut at answering it, or at least at figuring out how one might try to answer it. We understood that their answers might be preliminary at best, that the questions might be resistant to easy answers. This is so, in part, because empiricism is as much a means of refining questions as it is a way of answering them.

The balance of this Foreword is, in a sense, an introduction to the idea that more serious empirical analysis can further both constitutional law scholarship and constitutional law decisionmaking. Hence our title: Testing the Constitution.

Attorneys General as Amici

An important strain of federalism scholarship locates the primary value of federalism in how it carves up the political landscape, allowing groups that are out of power at the national level to flourish—and, significantly, to govern—in the states. On that account, partisanship, rather than a commitment to state authority as such, motivates state actors to act as checks on federal power. Our study examines partisan motivation in one area where state actors can, and do, advocate on behalf of state power: the Supreme Court. We compiled data on state amicus filings in Supreme Court cases from the 1979–2013 Terms and linked it up with data on the partisanship of state attorneys general (AGs). Focusing only on merits-stage briefs, we looked at each AG’s partisan affiliation and the partisanship of the AGs who either joined, or explicitly opposed, her briefs. If partisanship drives amicus activity, then we should see a strong negative relationship between the partisanship of AGs opposing each other and a strong positive relationship between those who cosign briefs.

What we found was somewhat surprising. States agreed far more often than they disagreed, and—until recently—most multistate briefs represented bipartisan, not partisan, coalitions of AGs. Indeed, for the first twenty years of our study, the cosigners of these briefs were generally indistinguishable from a random sampling of AGs then in office. The picture changes after 2000, when the coalitions of cosigners become decidedly more partisan, particularly among Republican AGs. The partisanship picture is also different for the 6% of cases in which different states square off in opposing briefs. In those cases, AGs do tend to join together in partisan clusters. Here, too, the appearance of partisanship becomes stronger after the mid-1990s.

Oliver Wendell Holmes’s notion of the marketplace of ideas—that the best test of truth is the power of an idea to get itself accepted in the competition of the market— is a central idea in free speech thought. Yet extant social science evidence provides at best mixed support for the metaphor’s veracity, and thus for the view that the truth of a proposition has substantial explanatory force in determining which propositions will be accepted and which not. But even if establishing an open marketplace for ideas is unlikely to produce a net gain in human knowledge, it may have other consequences. We illustrate how to empirically study the consequences of establishing or restricting a communicative domain. Our focus is on time, place, and manner restrictions, and we examine two potential natural experiments involving speech buffer zones around polling places and health care facilities providing abortions. Using a regression discontinuity design with geocoded polling information for over 1.3 million voters in two high-density jurisdictions (Hudson County and Manhattan), we provide suggestive evidence that speech restrictions in Hudson County reduced turnout amongst voters in the buffer zone. By failing to cue voters of the election, speech restrictions may have unanticipated costs. And using difference-in-differences and synthetic control matching with state-level data from 1973 to 2011, we illustrate how one might study the impact of speech restrictions around health care facilities. Although the evidence is limited, Massachusetts’s restrictions were accompanied, if anything, by a decrease in the abortion rate. Buffer zones might channel speech toward more persuasive forms, belying the notion that the cure for bad speech is plainly more speech.

An Empirical Study of the Roberts Court

Constitutional law casebooks, generations of constitutional lawyers, and the Justices themselves say that the Court is more likely to depart from precedent in constitutional cases than in other types. We test this assumption in cases decided by the Roberts Court and find, at odds with earlier studies, that the data provide inconclusive support for it. Other factors, especially criticism of precedent by lower courts and lawyers, are more consistent and stronger predictors of the Court’s decisions to depart from precedent. These findings have interesting implications for lawyering, teaching, and judging in the constitutional law context.

Supreme Court doctrine grants special protection against laws that “chill” protected speech, most prominently via the overbreadth doctrine. The overbreadth doctrine permits persons whose own speech is unprotected to challenge laws that infringe the protected speech of third parties. The Court has not generally applied overbreadth and the other speech-protective doctrines to other constitutional rights even though other rights could also be subject to a chilling effect. The case law simply assumes that the chilling effect only acts on the exercise of speech, and that this justifies treating speech differently from other rights.

We tested these assumptions with respect to abortion rights. By comparing abortion rates with state laws over a two-decade-plus period, we found a statistically significant correlation between laws forbidding late-term abortions and the reduction of not only late-term but also “near-late-term” abortions, i.e., abortions in the roughly one month before the period in which abortions are forbidden. That effect persists even after controlling for potentially confounding variables, such as the number of abortion providers and pro-life public opinion. Moreover, the effect is not limited to the year of enactment or associated with failed policy initiatives, suggesting that the impact is due to the law itself rather than associated publicity. These findings are consistent with, and strongly suggestive of, a chilling effect on abortion providers and/or women seeking abortions. This result undermines the implicit assumption that the chilling effect is unique to laws regulating speech and vindicates the general proposition that laws can chill the exercise of constitutional rights beyond their literal coverage.

Testing the Harm of Campaign Spending

In its landmark campaign finance decision Citizens United v. FEC, the Supreme Court found that favoritism or influence over elected officials gained by wealthy campaign contributors does not—in the absence of outright corruption—give rise to the sort of constitutional harm that would justify restrictions on campaign spending. The Court was also insistent that any perceptions of ingratiation would not undermine the electorate’s faith in democracy. This paper challenges the doc- trinal and empirical underpinnings of those assertions. We argue that a loss of faith by the electorate implicates a central constitutional value and is a sufficiently compelling interest to justify campaign finance regulation. We also demonstrate empirically that the Court should not have been so confident that the elecorate’s faith in democracy is unaffected either by the appearance of influence or access due to campaign spending or by independent expenditures.

Over the last few years, numerous states and school boards have passed laws aimed at limiting curricula related to diverse communities. Anti-Critical Race Theory and “Don’t Say Gay” laws have threatened to restrict the teaching of race and LGBTQ issues in K-12 schools. These laws are troubling from a policy standpoint because inclusive curricula ensure that students receive a proper education and are taught in a supportive school environment. They are also likely an infringement upon a student’s First Amendment right to receive information, first recognized in Board of Education v. Pico, and, as such, courts have begun to entertain constitutional claims against curricular restrictions. However, there is no binding precedent on this issue, and the circuits are split as to what standard they should use when addressing these challenges.

This Note argues that courts should follow the approach developed by the Ninth Circuit in Arce v. Douglas. Courts should extend Pico beyond its library context to hold that students have a First Amendment right to receive information in the curriculum they are taught. In evaluating whether a curriculum decision violates this right, courts should apply the standard laid out in Hazelwood School District v. Kuhlmeier: Courts should first require that state and local educational bodies justify that their curriculum restriction decisions were motivated by a “legitimate pedagogical concern” and courts should then inquire if such restrictions are “reasonably related” to that concern. This standard properly respects the deference states and localities are due in educational matters, while protecting students’ constitutional free speech rights. The standard also follows basic requirements of constitutional law: requiring justifications, reasonableness in those justifications, and proper process.

The American criminal justice system is exceptional, characterized by uniquely high sentences and uniquely large numbers of incarcerated individuals. This regime is perpetuated by a political system that fetishizes Americans’ short-term pushes for increased punitiveness when crime rates increase. Drawing on political process and representation reinforcement theories, this Note argues for a novel statutory solution that would help place a brake on retributive short-term preferences, while prioritizing criminal statutes that would challenge mass incarceration. This Note posits that by adopting state budgetary laws that mirror PAYGO budgetary rules and statutes, state legislatures can control the spiraling costs of administering local prison systems without jeopardizing legislators’ political futures. Criminal sentencing PAYGO, like Minnesota’s famous sentencing guidelines, would force policymakers to view criminal sentencing as a complete system, requiring tradeoffs and compromises. Through criminal sentencing PAYGO, states and their citizens can realize democratic and criminal justice administrative gains.

Assisted reproductive technology (ART), which encompasses fertility treatments in which eggs or embryos are handled, is a frontier of family law and reproductive justice, and developments in abortion jurisprudence may shape its borders. Abortion restrictions and other laws regulating pregnant people are often framed with rhetoric emphasizing fetal personhood or fetal rights. Now that abortion is legally unshielded from criminalization, the consequences of Dobbs will reach, as did fetal-personhood laws before, even those who are not seeking abortions. As commentators have observed, this collateral damage threatens to touch potential parents seeking to use ART. Yet so far, the most abortion-restrictive states tend to carve out protections for ART from their laws regarding fetuses. This Note argues that states touting fetal personhood protect ART users—while persecuting people who partake in a multitude of other types of conduct thought to harm fetuses—because ART furthers the creation of white, affluent families that suit these states’ normative values. Fetal personhood, then, is a tool for social control. Advocates of reproductive freedom should surface this truth in efforts to stave off the proliferation of fetal-personhood laws at the state and federal levels.

The United States pays half-a-trillion dollars to defense contractors every year. Although the U.S. military could not operate without profitable contractors, excessively profitable contracts reduce manufacturing output and can imperil soldier safety. Stretching back to the founding, there is a long history of the executive branch compelling ex post modifications of military contracts to a lower price than the parties agreed to at signing. Sometimes authorized by Congress (but not always), this executive practice of “downward revisions” has fallen into disuse. Nevertheless, at least one statute might authorize this practice today: Public Law 85-804. Commonly understood to provide higher payments to defense contractors, this Note argues that Public Law 85-804 should be interpreted in light of its text and history to authorize downward revisions to excessively profitable defense contracts. Such an interpretation could save soldiers’ lives and lower defense costs during today’s challenging fiscal and geopolitical times.

Climate change is here. Anthropogenic warming is currently increasing temperatures, the devastation of storms, and the incidence of droughts. If humanity continues on its current path, the next fifty years will see millions die due to extreme weather events, along with a drastic increase in the number of climate refugees seeking haven. In the face of this crisis, government inaction at all levels has fueled the flames. Private actors and state and municipal governments have stepped into the breach, bringing suits against polluters for the harms to their localities and citizens. The challenge that this Note seeks to address is how to take these dire predictions of the future, and damages of the present, and translate them into workable, reliable legal evidence that can be used in a court of law. While most courts have declined to allow suits to proceed on threshold questions, they will soon have to deal with scientific evidence of climate change as these suits grow more numerous and the plaintiffs more resourceful.

This Note serves as a plea to judges to approach climate modeling methods in the same way they approach comparable types of evidence. Under Federal Rule of Evidence 702, climate science should be admissible as sufficiently reliable, by a preponderance of the evidence. Climate science exists somewhere between pure science and specialized expert knowledge, due to the subjective nature of the discipline. While climate science may not be seen as sufficiently “scientific,” if climate scientists are considered a group of experts, the discipline should easily pass muster under lower court interpretations of the Supreme Court’s Kumho Tire decision. By comparing climate science to criminal forensic methods, the case for admissibility becomes obvious. Thus, if judges take their roles seriously as neutral, consistent referees of justice, the admissibility of climate science should not be a serious hurdle for plaintiffs.

In the early days of our Republic, federal judges explicitly relied on general law—an unwritten set of gap-filling principles—to drive their decisions. This practice ceased after Erie Railroad Co. v. Tompkins, in which the Supreme Court formally abandoned the concept of general law. But the current Supreme Court, with its emphasis on originalism, has revived general law by interpreting several constitutional provisions as codifying the general law of the Founders. To determine the content of the Founders’ general law, it conducts an inchoate version of the general law analyses of the past: It surveys a large corpus of legal and historical sources from multiple jurisdictions, none of which are authoritative, and from them distills a general principle which provides the rule of decision in the case at hand. The Court’s sub-silentio adoption of the general law analytic method is troubling for originalists and non-originalists alike.

This Note has three basic aims, all of which are novel contributions. First, it delineates the precise methodology used by seventeenth- and eighteenth-century judges to determine the content of the general law. Second, through careful study of Second Amendment and Confrontation Clause jurisprudence, it recognizes the deep similarities between the historical and modern originalist general law analytic processes. And third, it outlines the practical difficulties and internal tensions that arise from the Court’s originalist revival of general law.

Plastic pollution is a pervasive and growing problem. Plastic products pose significant risks to public health and the environment throughout their lifecycle—from production and consumption to disposal or recycling. In response, the Earth Island Institute, a California-based non-profit environmental group, filed a novel lawsuit in 2020. Earth Island alleges that several major plastic product producers created a public nuisance with their products in California. While Earth Island’s case is still pending, it represents the frontier of using public nuisance law to address mass harms.

Drawing on lessons from public nuisance cases against the opioids industry and fossil fuel producers, this Note comprehensively considers how public nuisance liability for plastic pollution would work in theory and in practice. Two possible framings of today’s “public plastic nuisance” are the negative effects of plastic pollution on (1) public waterways and lands and (2) the public’s access to clean air and water. Both framings are consistent with historical and traditional conceptions of public nuisance law. This Note explains how public nuisance claims based on these framings would be viable in another state facing the widespread effects of plastic pollution: New York.

In the absence of comprehensive regulation of plastic products throughout their lifecycle, public and private litigants both can and should use the “public plastic nuisance” theory. Litigation offers an avenue for holding the plastic industry accountable for pollution related to their products. Moreover, the prospect of public nuisance liability could pressure the plastic industry to change its business practices for the benefit of public health and the environment. Earth Island’s case should therefore provide a roadmap and foundation for future plastics litigation.

For nearly sixty years, litigants have challenged congressional and state redistricting maps, raising claims of partisan gerrymandering. Each time, the Supreme Court would hear and reject the challenge but continued to entertain the possibility that a claim of partisan gerrymandering could succeed. Then, in 2019, the Court in Rucho v. Common Cause took the dramatic step of holding that claims of partisan gerrymandering were nonjusticiable political questions. This both walked federal courts out of the picture and signaled the Court’s tacit approval of gerrymandering. The decision came down at a time when gerrymandering was at an all-time high—in 2020, only 7.5% of the seats in the House of Representatives were “competitive.” Now, despite clear attempts by lawmakers to subvert democracy through partisan gerrymandering, federal courts can no longer police district maps for partisan imbalance. Though some states have created independent redistricting commissions to draw district maps, these commissions are neither common enough nor strong enough to withstand political tendencies to gerrymander.

Time and time again, litigants and scholars have searched for (and failed to find) a substantive standard by which partisan gerrymandering claims might succeed. This Note offers a new approach, grounded in classic legal principles: process instead of substance. Identifying both normative reasons for why process can better protect against partisan gerrymandering and highlighting instances in certain states where bolstering and, crucially, enforcing the processes by which district maps are drawn has helped mitigate gerrymandering, this Note argues that states (and litigants) should turn to process-based arguments to counter gerrymandered maps. Through process, states can strengthen their redistricting procedures and commissions, allowing for the creation of more balanced, competitive maps. Democracy hinges on competitive elections, and we need solutions to the problem of partisan gerrymandering; this Note offers a new framing of the problem and a path forward.

Unlike in most other industrialized democracies, in the United States, most elections—at the federal, state, and local levels—are conducted using the plurality voting system, also known as first-past-the-post (FPTP) voting. As a number of scholars and advocates have argued, there is an alternative voting system, well suited to American democratic traditions, that would provide for proportional representation: the single transferable vote (STV). This Note focuses primarily on state and local elections, arguing that the courts should both endorse the use of STV in these elections as constitutional and adopt STV in state and local elections as a remedy for a variety of legal harms.

A person is killed by law enforcement. There’s outrage. Hurt communities cry for reform. Things change on the margin. People move on. And the story repeats.

Every year, hundreds of individuals die at the hands of police officers despite repeated attempts at reform. This senseless cycle has caused many to question the efficacy of reform in favor of a more revolutionary proposal—police abolition.

Police abolition is a worthy and necessary ambition, but one that needs practical steps to achieve it. To that end, this Note excavates the history of failed attempts at police reform and finds a nugget of hope among the wreckage—The Jurisdiction-Stripping Consent Decree.

The Jurisdiction Stripping Consent Decree reimagines police litigation through the lens of abolitionism by using existing tools at the disposal of the Department of Justice to force police departments to reduce their domain of power in society through court-enforced consent decrees.

By engaging in radical civil rights litigation through non-reformist reforms of police departments’ most invidious abuses, the Jurisdiction-Stripping Consent Decree can put America on a viable path towards police abolition.

The relationship between policing and automobiles is long and complicated. Law enforcement’s ability to stop and search a vehicle comprises a distinct line of Fourth Amendment jurisprudence. But searching a vehicle no longer means what it did even twenty years ago. Today, automobiles collect data on us from when we open the car door to the moment we turn off the engine. Much of this information is retained in an automobile’s hardware and funneled to third party companies, who can share at their discretion. Law enforcement agencies have made use of auto data, obtaining it without a warrant both by extracting auto data from the vehicle itself and by contacting the companies collecting the data firsthand to ask that they share the information. The constitutionality of such a practice may seem up for debate, given the disagreements among lower courts over how auto data fits into a larger web of Fourth Amendment jurisprudence. This Note brings together two strands of Fourth Amendment case law—the automobile exception and the third-party doctrine—and argues that an animating principle motivating the Supreme Court’s recent digital search cases provides a clear answer to the auto data confusion: Police need a warrant before they can access auto data, because auto data, much like cellphones and cell site location information, reveals automatically collected diaristic information.

Under Rule 23(a) of the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure, a class action must meet four requirements before it can be certified: numerosity, commonality, typicality, and adequacy of representation. But courts infer an antecedent requirement to these four—that of ascertainability, the idea that the court must be able to define the class as an entity that exists prior to allowing it to litigate on behalf of absent parties. While the idea behind this requirement is uncontroversial (surely, a court should ensure that a class exists prior to certifying one), the Third Circuit has staked out an unusually stringent, atextual position, requiring that a putative class present an “administratively feasible” method for identifying its members prior to certification. That requirement, nowhere present in the text or purpose of Rule 23, presents a near-insurmountable barrier to small-dollar consumer class actions, thus undermining the intent of Rule 23 to ensure that such claims can be pursued. Despite predictions that the Third Circuit would back down from its position, and despite at least five circuits’ explicit rejection of the heightened ascertainability requirement, the Supreme Court has yet to weigh in on this glaring rift in class action jurisprudence. After the Eleventh Circuit’s 2021 rejection of the heightened requirement, the time is ripe to once again ask whether this outlier position is defensible.

By examining dozens of cases that apply the ascertainability standard, both within and without circuits that endorse the heightened requirement, this Note affirms that ascertainability in its current form is a scattershot cudgel that undermines small-dollar consumer class actions. Across several factors newly identified by this Note that figure prominently in ascertainability analyses, the requirement adds nothing but inconsistency to the class certification analysis. This Note endorses the position that, absent Supreme Court intervention, an amendment to Rule 23 clarifying that the class must merely be defined objectively would both rectify the circuit split and restore the Rule 23 inquiry to its textual and policy roots: to ensure that small-dollar claims, too little in value to pursue independently but no less meritorious, can be maintained.

Bankruptcies now dominate mass-tort litigation. Defendants file for bankruptcy because the class action and multi-district litigation devices have failed to deliver parties meaningful finality, and new legal tools—nondebtor releases, complex claims-processing schemes, and the Texas Two-Step—have made bankruptcy a more attractive forum for resolving mass-tort liabilities. Troublingly, litigants, courts, and scholars struggle to consistently evaluate a reorganization plan’s legitimacy. This Note takes a novel approach, arguing federal preclusion law and due process principles of exit, voice, and loyalty provide the best framework for evaluating a mass-tort bankruptcy. Bankruptcy resolutions are generally “otherwise consistent” with due process because they substitute claimants’ exit rights for voice rights. Whether a reorganization plan violates due process depends not on the formal legal tools mass-tort debtors deploy but on whether those tools infringe upon claimants’ voice rights or undermine aggregate litigation’s core goals of finality and equitable redress. This Note concludes that bankruptcy remains a valuable forum for resolving complex mass-tort crises and identifies several cases that can guide future stakeholders.

The role of stare decisis in constitutional law is a ubiquitous one. It shows up almost everywhere, leaving controversy and chaos in its wake. Yet despite the prominence of stare decisis, its jurisprudence remains perpetually unsettled. The Supreme Court identifies several factors that affect the strength of prior precedent. However, these factors are not consistently defined or even wholly agreed upon. How can something as crucial as the law of stare decisis have such scattered precedents? Something more, something deeper, is going on here. A hint of this deeper issue comes out in contentious cases like Payne v. Tennessee, Planned Parenthood v. Casey, and Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, where the Justices speak to or acknowledge democratic disagreement and its effect on the Supreme Court’s legitimacy. But to understand these cases as the Court simply confronting its own legitimacy, while partly correct, is much too narrow. A closer inspection of these opinions reveals more than just a simple debate about democratic disagreement. It is a debate about what role democratic disagreement should play in stare decisis and, therefore, in the Supreme Court as an institution. Thus, it is no wonder that stare decisis, as a doctrine, is unsettled. Stare decisis has become the battleground for America’s oldest contest: departmentalism or judicial supremacy.

This Note argues that stare decisis is much better understood when one analyzes the doctrine in connection with the broader discussions surrounding departmentalism and judicial supremacy. In doing so, this Note develops in three Parts. Part I examines the necessary background of stare decisis and its relationship to interbranch conflict. Part II surveys the three cases of Payne, Casey, and Dobbs, paying particular attention to how the Justices in these cases are, in truth, guided by their views of departmentalism or judicial supremacy. Part III further highlights the relationship between disputes over stare decisis and departmentalism versus judicial supremacy and provides the reader with a potential theoretical framework to explicitly incorporate the concept of departmentalism within precedent. Departmentalism and judicial supremacy will forever be negotiated. Ultimately, in stare decisis, a home has been found for this great American debate.

Autonomous vehicles are now driving people around in cities from San Francisco to Phoenix. But how to regulate the safety risks from these autonomous driving systems (ADS) remains uncertain. While state tort law has traditionally played a fundamental role in controlling car crash risks, this Note argues that the development of novel data tracking and simulation tools by the ADS industry has led to a regulatory paradigm shift: By leveraging these tools for regulatory analysis, the federal National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) could iteratively adapt and improve its regulatory standards after each crash. While many scholars have advanced proposals for how state products liability can adapt to ADS crashes, this Note is the first to propose such a model of “crash-adaptive regulation” for NHTSA and to show that this model will prove superior to tort liability in controlling ADS crash risks. In presenting this new regulatory model, this Note engages with two rich theoretical debates. First, it compares the efficacy of tort liability and agency regulation in controlling ADS crash risks. Second, it evaluates whether ADS safety standards should be set at the federal level or at the state level. It concludes that ADS’ technical characteristics call for an agency regulatory scheme at the federal level and urges NHTSA to build the technological and operational expertise necessary to operate a crash-adaptive regulatory regime.

The National Labor Relations Board (NLRB or Board) is charged with enforcing the keystone statute of U.S. labor law, the National Labor Relations Act (NLRA or Act), including its prohibition against employers’ firing workers in retaliation for union organizing. In a time of rising labor agitation, however, the NLRB’s procedures for remediating such alarmingly frequent discharges are woefully inadequate. This Note examines the perennially underutilized section 10(j) of the NLRA, which provides for injunctive relief in discriminatory discharge cases where the Board’s own slow-moving administrative procedures would defeat the purpose of the Act, and explains why current 10(j) procedures are plagued by delay and failure. It then proposes an alternative administrative procedure for 10(j) cases—including a delegation of prosecutorial discretion, quick evidentiary hearings, and review of Administrative Law Judge determinations by the Board—that would address many of the section’s shortcomings. The Note considers the salutary consequences of implementing this alternative procedure through notice and comment rulemaking before concluding by demonstrating how this procedure would enhance the Board’s enforcement of the Act. Ultimately this Note argues that section 10(j) can, through long-overdue procedural reform, become a robust guarantee of the statutory rights of workers that are at the heart of the NLRB.

More than a decade ago, the Supreme Court discarded its old notice pleading standard and replaced it with a “plausibility” standard in the landmark cases Bell Atlantic v. Twombly and Ashcroft v. Iqbal. A deluge of commentary followed, much of it critical of either the perceived informational imbalance that the standard created or the broad discretion that the decisions were understood to grant to district court judges. This Note identifies a pattern that appears to be emerging in the lower courts in which parties can satisfy their pleading burden by relying in part on “institutional facts”—that is, findings made by competent entities that implicate the factual allegations in the complaint. This Note argues that, as a matter of doctrine, this practice has yet to be recognized, but it should be applauded and encouraged as both intuitive and judicially tractable.

Torres v. Madrid is a seminal Supreme Court decision that was decided during the 2021 Supreme Court term. Torres centered on whether a woman who was shot in the back by the police but managed to escape was seized under the Fourth Amendment. This was a decision that garnered widespread attention because it was decided during a national reckoning with police violence following the George Floyd protests. The Court ultimately held that Ms. Torres was seized the instant the bullet punctured her body. This was a win for the civil rights groups as it allowed Ms. Torres to pursue a remedy, but the decision did not go far enough. This Note focuses on a special class of seizures called attempted and “touchless” seizures, and argues that recognizing both attempted and touchless seizures under the Fourth Amendment will open the door to redressing a broader range of police misconduct.

Within the literature on legal scholarship, academics have studied citation practices. For example, scholars have examined which authors, journals, and articles are most cited. But no one has examined which parts of articles scholars cite. Understanding which parts of articles scholars cite is not only intrinsically interesting, but also could inform how authors structure articles. This Note presents the results of a unique, hand-coded dataset of thousands of pinpoint citations. In brief: Authors are more likely to cite the beginning of articles but split their remaining citations roughly evenly. This pattern holds across flagship journals of variously ranked law schools and articles of varying length, but it is less pronounced for self-citation. While cynical explanations—that cite-worthy content is concentrated at the beginning, or authors tend not to thoroughly read the articles they cite—of the data is possible, a better explanation serves as a modest rebuttal to certain criticisms of legal scholarship.

While the Violence Against Women Act (VAWA) has long been venerated as a major legislative victory for those subjected to sexual and gender-based violence (S/GBV), VAWA is less often understood as the funding boon that it is for police, prosecutors, and prisons. A growing literature on the harms of carceral feminism has shown that VAWA has never ensured the safety of Black and Brown women; queer, trans, and gender-nonconforming people; sex workers; drug users; poor, working class, homeless, and housing insecure people; migrants; and others who do not fit the “everywoman” archetype; nor has it recognized their right to protect themselves from violence.

I contribute to this literature in three ways: First, drawing from the rich narrative traditions of critical race theory and critical legal studies, I tell untold and undertold stories of state violence against victims of S/GBV. Second, I weave together knowledge produced by scholars across disciplines, as well as by transformative justice organizers and practitioners, to situate my illustrations in a landscape of carceral violence. Third, I build on the written work of those scholars, organizers, and practitioners to propose transformative justice approaches to S/GBV. Specifically, I propose that we use VAWA to meet the demand that all criminalized survivors be freed by incentivizing the expanded use of state executives’ clemency powers, as well as by expanding the use of clemency at the federal level. I also argue that an anti-carceral VAWA must include financial reparations for criminalized survivors, as compensation for the harms that the state has inflicted on them through unjust prosecutions and imprisonment, as well as for the violence they have been forced to endure in prisons, jails, and the custody of police officers.

Courts cannot predict the future, but their decisions are binding precedent on future generations. Technological changes—that courts could have never predicted—break down this system of stare decisis. What made sense yesterday no longer makes sense today. Leveraging an understanding of technology, the rule of law, and stare decisis, this Note proposes a new approach to copyright fair use decisionmaking that involves utility-expanding technologies, or tools that radically change the use of and access to copyrighted works. When applying past precedent, courts should carefully contextualize prior decisions’ analyses of the first and fourth fair use factors within the precedent’s time and perform a similar analysis for the current case in the current era. The more that the factual circumstances diverge between the two cases, the less weight the court should give to the past precedent. Moreover, when generating precedent on utility-expanding transformative fair uses, courts should narrow their fair use decisions to the dispute before the court and only rule on the specific technology in question—helping ensure that the balance between advancing technological interests and protecting the rights of content creators does not become rooted in shortsighted thinking from a materially different past.

Public law, specifically constitutional due process law and administrative law, operates against a background presumption of no liability for omissions. To state the inverse, the majority rule is that liability applies only in the case of affirmative government actions. While this was not always the case, following DeShaney v. Winnebago County Department of Social Services and Heckler v. Chaney in the 1980s, the Court has generally closed off plaintiffs from litigating government failures-to-act. Scholars have pointed at the philosophical absurdity of delineating government acts and omissions, given that in a state as regulated as ours, everything is, at bottom, an affirmative choice. But the federal judiciary has remained fairly unmoved. Against this overriding presumption of no omissions liability, however, the courts have eked out several exceptions in which they are willing to find liability for inaction. While scholars have pointed to reasons why the judiciary has been reluctant to find liability for omissions, this Note looks at why the judiciary has been willing to find liability in certain cases. It identifies the overarching reason to be administrability, motivated by two characteristics that the court either creates or constructs. First, when the court identifies or constructs an affirmative component of an omission, it is more willing to find liability. Second, when there is an ex ante regulation or statute limiting government discretion, the court is similarly persuadable. This Note identifies seven categories across public law that fall into these two areas and in which omissions liability (at least in some way) exists: state-created danger doctrine, special relationships, Monell liability, a blurred line between procedural and substantive due process, abdication of agency statutory duties, failure to perform ministerial duties, and a refusal to initiate rulemaking. As its final contribution, this Note argues that scholars, litigants, and courts should seek to broaden public omissions liability, given that society is plagued with protracted crises resulting from government inaction. Relying on the proxies for administrability that the courts are already comfortable with, the final Part marries administrability with accountability and creates broader categories for each exception to tackle contemporary ills.

This Note argues that the Supreme Court has recently created a subsidized equality right in the Free Exercise Clause—by perceiving previously constitutional state action as discrimination against religion—and that this right’s logic is inconsistent with how the Court articulated funding rights in the abortion context prior to its decision in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization. This Note’s goal is two-fold. First, it will explain the legal principle driving the change in Free Exercise Clause doctrine: an energized equality. Although the expanding anti-discrimination principle is having transformative effects in the law of religious exemptions, this Note’s primary aim is to explore the implications of this change in the religious funding context, as much public commentary already has focused on legal developments in the former category. This Note’s second goal is to demonstrate how the Court’s articulation and application of this energized equality principle in religious funding cases reflect its political prioritization of free exercise rights. In these cases, on the basis of religious equality, the Court is willing to recognize violations of free exercise rights, whereas in nearly identical factual scenarios not explicitly involving religion, it is blind to inequality. This Note focuses on abortion funding pre-Dobbs as an example to demonstrate this logical inconsistency.

In the American criminal justice system, individuals from marginalized communities
routinely face longer terms and greater rates of incarceration compared to their
nonmarginalized counterparts. Because the literature on mass incarceration and
sentencing disparities has largely focused on the experiences of Black and Hispanic
individuals, far less attention has been paid to the overincarceration of Native peoples.
Yet there are clear indications that Native peoples are both overrepresented
within the criminal justice system and subject to unique sentencing disparities as
compared to other ethnicities. While these issues are partly motivated by traditional
drivers of criminal behavior, including access barriers to housing, employment, and
education, this Note argues that there is a greater systemic issue at play: the
enduring legacy of colonialism. Accounting for—and correcting—this legacy in the
criminal justice system is a complex task, though not an impossible one. For
example, over the past twenty years, the Canadian criminal justice system has
implemented a novel, remedial sentencing approach to address the overincarceration
of Aboriginal offenders: the Gladue approach. Recognizing the extent to
which the Canadian legal system has failed to account for the unique needs, experiences,
and circumstances of Aboriginal offenders, the Gladue approach mandates
an individualized and contextualized approach to sentencing, one which prioritizes
community-based alternatives to incarceration and emphasizes restorative justice.
This Note proposes two legal pathways by which to transplant the Gladue
approach to the American criminal justice system. In so doing, it offers the first
comprehensive analysis of the normative and constitutional implications of
applying the Gladue approach to the sentencing of Native peoples within the
United States. While the approach has challenges and shortcomings, it is nevertheless
a powerful tool by which the American criminal justice system can begin to
reckon with its colonial past and present.

One of the things courts across the nation struggled with throughout the COVID-19
pandemic was the conflict between preserving defendants’ rights under the
Confrontation Clause of the Sixth Amendment and implementing the safest public
health measures. Measures like masking or virtual testimony recommended by
public health officials threatened to abridge defendants’ rights. This Note has two
primary contentions. First, it will argue that the wide variation in the ways courts
chose to resolve this tension revealed a fundamental issue in our Confrontation
Clause jurisprudence: Courts have never actually defined the underlying right. In
fact, this Note will argue, that the “confrontation right” is more appropriately
understood as a bundle of distinct rights which must be carefully prioritized.
Second, this Note will argue that the standards used to adopt these modifications
were insufficiently rigorous. It proposes, therefore, that it is time for the legislature
to intervene as they have in other situations involving modified confrontation, and
to provide courts with a structured procedure for authorizing modified witness testimony
during times of emergency.

Green industrial policy, an aspirational headline with the 2019 Green New Deal
Resolution, has continued to gain steam and take shape. Green industry was a core
focus of presidential platforms during the 2020 election. Federal agencies have
demonstrated an increased willingness to revamp their purchasing power—that is,
their procurement policy—to buy green products and stimulate emerging green
industrial sectors. In general, these policy shifts toward green industry typically tout
three primary goals: to develop the domestic manufacturing base and to strengthen
both environmental and labor protections. For instance, in November 2021, as part
of the larger Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act, Congress took aim at the
failure of supply chains to meet adequate environmental and labor standards by
enacting a domestic content preference-scheme for infrastructure programs
receiving federal financial assistance. The nationalist orientation of this kind of
policy, however, often runs afoul of the nondiscrimination spirit of World Trade
Organization disciplines.

This Note evaluates how trade disciplines can enable a green-industrial strategy in
government procurement while abiding by WTO disciplines, offering a few options.
While countries continue to aggressively deploy green industrial policies to attain
environmental benefits, these strategies must be carefully structured to avoid cooptation
by populist, protectionist goals. As such, this Note considers the implications
that arise when this form of green industrial procurement supports the advancement
of global welfare—and when it does not. In particular, this Note explores how
refining the traditional relationship between international trade rules and green industrial initiatives can produce mutually beneficial results. On the one hand,
trade rules can be interpreted to permit environmental and labor-conscious decisionmaking while protecting against protectionist discrimination. On the other, this
Note proposes that procurement decisionmaking should incorporate supply-chain
disclosure or cost-accounting of environmental and labor impact, which, when justified
under the existing public morals discipline in WTO trade agreements, forms a
method of government engagement that can enable a more robust international
trade regime.

This Note describes how the tax system treats inmates, an intersection that has
been relatively understudied by both tax and criminal justice scholars. The Note
provides a detailed account of how inmates earn income through prison labor
(what goes in) and the benefits denied to inmates (what comes out, or rather what
often does not come out). The Note then asks why the tax system denies inmates
Earned Income Tax Credit (EITC) and Social Security benefits. Traditional tax
principles of equity, efficiency, and administrability do not justify the denials. This
Note argues that the underlying culprit is that the tax system is being used to levy
additional punishment on inmates. This has particularly insidious effects on communities
of color given the connections between mass incarceration, poverty, and
race. The Note proposes statutory repeal of the benefits exclusions and mandatory
filing for inmates as a way of making the tax system better reflect the economic and
social realities that inmates face, while simultaneously moving the system closer to
fundamental tax principles.

Beginning in the late twentieth century, the Supreme Court gradually restricted the
range of punishments that could be imposed on children convicted of crimes. The
seminal cases Graham v. Florida, Miller v. Alabama, and Montgomery v.
Louisiana banned the imposition of mandatory life without parole sentences on
children who were under eighteen at the time of an offense and held that those
juveniles must be given a “meaningful opportunity to obtain release based on
demonstrated maturity and rehabilitation.” Some courts have extended the logic of
these cases to invalidate life with parole sentences based on extremely long parole
ineligibility periods, but no court has held that the practical unavailability of release
within the current parole system makes any life sentence—regardless of its parole
ineligibility period—functionally equivalent to life without parole.

Building on recent scholarship about the constitutional role of parole release in
juvenile sentencing, this Note points out that the Graham trilogy creates a substantive
Eighth Amendment right for juveniles to be released upon a showing of
maturity and rehabilitation, not merely a right to be considered for release. This
Note exposes the failure of state parole systems to vindicate this right by systematically
refusing to grant parole to juveniles. Because release on parole is a statistical
improbability for juveniles sentenced to life with parole, this Note concludes that
those sentences are actually unconstitutional sentences of de facto juvenile life
without parole.

In 2020, the Department of Education issued a final Rule pursuant to notice-and-comment rulemaking which created the most far-reaching regulation on sexual harassment in educational institutions under Title IX to date. This Rule significantly limited the availability of administrative remedies for those experiencing sexual harassment in their educational institutions. While much has been said regarding the propriety of the substantive policy decisions advanced by the Department’s regulation, relatively little attention has been paid to the cost-benefit analysis (CBA) employed in the Rule. The Rule’s CBA found that the regulations would result in a net cost of tens of millions of dollars. In justifying their commitment to these cost-unjustified regulations, the Department relied only on a few non-quantified benefits. To make matters worse, the Department also disclaimed any responsibility to consider whether the Rule’s deregulatory policies would leave sexual harassment under-deterred. The 2020 Rule was arbitrary and capricious by reason of its faulty CBA. The Department’s failure to consider the costs associated with the Rule’s under-deterrent effects was an abrogation of their obligation to uphold Title IX’s preventative purpose.

The search doctrine has long been in a state of disarray. Fragmented into different sub-doctrines, Fourth Amendment standards of constitutional protection vary based on how the government acquires the information in question and on how courts define the search that occurred. As trespass-based searches, reasonable expectation of privacy searches, consent-based searches, third-party searches, and private searches each trigger different levels of protection, the doctrine has become what more than one Justice has termed a “crazy quilt.” This Note argues that unriddling the Fourth Amendment is easier than it might appear with the aid of the concept of knowing exposure, first discussed in Katz v. United States. An undercurrent across different strands of the search doctrine, the knowing exposure principle holds that what one “knowingly exposes to the public” is beyond the scope of Fourth Amendment protection. As the Court grapples with the search doc- trine in an age of unprecedented exposure to third parties, most recently in Carpenter v. United States, it should seek to unify the standard for searches around the foundational question of what renders one’s exposure “knowing.” Turning to Carpenter’s modifications to the third-party doctrine, this Note suggests a unified theory of knowing exposure that can apply across different kinds of searches, centering on whether the exposure is (1) knowing, (2) voluntary, and (3) reasonable.

A specter is haunting The Hague—the specter of American federalism. On July 2, 2019, the Hague Conference on Private International Law finalized the Hague Judgments Convention. The Convention seeks to establish a global floor for judgment recognition and promote seamless recognition and enforcement of judgments between signatories. Although virtually all observers in the United States recognize the value and importance of ratifying the Convention, stakeholders cannot agree on how to implement it: by federal statute or by uniform state law. Proponents of a so-called “cooperative federalism” approach to implementation, principally led by the Uniform Law Commission (ULC), have previously derailed U.S. ratification of the Hague Convention on Choice of Court Agreements (COCA) by insisting that principles of federalism required implementation through uniform state law. This argument is wrong as a matter of doctrine and policy. It is time to put it to rest once and for all.

This Note is the first piece of scholarship to squarely address the “cooperative federalism” argument as applied to the Hague Judgments Convention. It makes two principal arguments. First, it identifies the principles that ought to guide the implementation of a treaty on foreign judgments recognition and concludes that federal implementing legislation optimizes these interests. Implementation primarily by
uniform state law is inferior and poses serious disadvantages. Second, the ULC’s primary legal objection to the implementation proposal for the COCA outlined by the State Department—that the doctrine of Erie Railroad Co. v. Tompkins prohibits federal courts sitting in diversity jurisdiction from applying federal rules of decision prescribed by federal statute—was meritless in 2012, and it is meritless now. If any objections remain to implementing the Judgments Convention by federal statute, they are about turf and ideology. To the extent that the relevant stakeholders want to accommodate those political objections, this Note concludes by briefly outlining areas for compromise.

Supreme Court “companion cases” are decisions released on the exact same day that address substantially similar legal or factual matters. The list of consequential Supreme Court decisions that the Justices have resolved as part of a set of companion cases is lengthy: It includes NLRB v. Jones & Laughlin Steel Corp., Korematsu v. United States, Brown v. Board of Education, Terry v. Ohio, Roe v. Wade, Miller v. California, and Gregg v. Georgia. Although it is not surprising that important topics like civil rights and abortion generate significant amounts of litigation, the Supreme Court’s practice of conducting plenary review of multiple similar cases and issuing separate decisions resolving each one should give us pause. The Justices have a number of other procedural tools available for disposing of similar matters for which parties seek review. Options include granting certiorari for only one of the cases, vacating and remanding some of the matters, issuing at least one summary disposition, consolidating the cases, or releasing the decisions at very different times. The Court sidesteps these alternative approaches when it issues companion cases. Yet previous scholars have not devoted adequate attention to this practice as a distinct procedural mechanism, with unique characteristics that may motivate its usage. This Note fills that gap by studying some of the Court’s most famous companion cases and taxonomizing them into four categories—coordinate hedges, contested hedges, extensional reinforcements, and applicative reinforcements—based on factors including the voting behavior of the Justices and the constitutive decisions’ relationships to each other. The Note leverages that taxonomy to frame its analysis of why the Court chose to issue companion cases given all the procedural alternatives. This Note concludes by discussing how the practice of deciding certain sorts of companion cases—in which a majority of the Justices agree that they should resolve similar cases in ostensibly contradictory ways—may improve the Court’s legitimacy by accentuating its responsibility and capacity to collaboratively identify subtle distinctions between comparable cases that compel different outcomes.

In the tempestuous process of defining communities of interest for legislative redistricting—a process that will inevitably spark disagreement, dissatisfaction, and dissent—deferring boundary-setting to a physical, objective metric established by a community itself would appear to be a safe harbor, insulating line-drawers from criticism. The eruv—a physical structure encircling a Jewish community which
allows observant Jews to carry items outside the home on Shabbat—presents redistricters with an attractive way to craft districts that give political voice to the Jewish community. However, this Note argues that rather than serving as a safe harbor, this use of the eruv in redistricting presents a constitutional hazard, as it may run afoul of the Establishment Clause. The Supreme Court’s Establishment Clause jurisprudence clearly forbids a state from “delegat[ing] its civic authority to a group chosen according to a religious criterion.” The use of an eruv as a basis for redistricting, this Note argues, is precisely such a delegation: The state delegates its power to determine the boundaries of a community and the resultant district lines to religious authorities and a religious community, bucking the neutrality commanded by the Establishment Clause. While the precise shape of a particular district and the inputs leading to its creation will determine the presence of an Establishment Clause violation, the potential for such a violation in the case of eruv-based districts—and the concomitant potential for the politicization of religion and increased political division—has heretofore gone unnoticed.

In Matter of Thomas & Thompson, former Attorney General William Barr argued that states have no role to play in immigration matters and thus, state adjustments to a criminal sentence post-conviction will not be given effect for adjudicating deportability based on criminal grounds under section 101(a)(48)(B) of the Immigration and Nationality Act without an underlying substantive or procedural flaw in the original criminal case. The former Attorney General incorrectly assumed that states cannot be involved in immigration decisionmaking. Not only is it constitutionally permissible for the federal government to delegate certain immigration powers to the states, but the immigration code does so in many places. Careful examination of the text and legislative history of section 101(a)(48)(B) reveals that whatever sentence the state deems operative counts for immigration purposes—even if state law considers the operative sentence a later adjustment—implying that Matter of Thomas & Thompson put forth an erroneous interpretation.

Despite its critical importance, the fulfillment of the human right to water is far from the reality for many today. One in three people do not have access to safe drinking water and more than half of the world’s population does not have access to safe sanitation. Achieving the international community’s commitment of universal access to safe water and sanitation by 2030 would cost states approximately$150 billion per year. Meeting those funding needs inevitably entails private, and often foreign, investment. When investments do not go as planned, foreign investors may turn to international arbitration for relief. While intended to protect investments, this legal regime has allowed investors to challenge regulatory measures that further human rights and to wield undue power over states. This Note analyzes investment-treaty disputes involving drinking water to understand how states have invoked, and tribunals have considered, the human right to water. The cases show an important evolution on the part of tribunals. Nevertheless, almost all of the tribunals fall short of integrating the human right to water in their analysis of substantive treaty claims. Interestingly, the cases also reveal that, despite invoking human rights defenses, states engage in actions that are difficult to justify as furthering the right to water. In turn, this Note argues that the “fair and equitable treatment” standard can and should include relevant human rights law as part of “investors’ legitimate expectations.” Such an integration creates opportunities for accountability on both sides of the ledger: Investors are expected to engage in human rights legal due diligence, and states are taken to task when they invoke human rights in a perfunctory fashion. The fair and equitable treatment standard presents an opportunity to expand fairness and equity in international arbitration not only for the disputing parties, but also for the people who stand to lose from their actions.

The Double Jeopardy Clause of the Fifth Amendment provides that no person shall “be subject for the same offence to be twice put in jeopardy of life or limb.” Yet the dual sovereignty doctrine, a longstanding rule of judicial interpretation, reads the Double Jeopardy Clause as applying only to prosecutions by a single sovereign. Successive prosecutions by separate sovereigns, including the United States and foreign nations, do not implicate double jeopardy. The Double Jeopardy Clause protects the individual from government overreach, but the dual sovereignty doctrine flips the script: It protects the interests of the sovereign at the expense of the individual. After many decades of criticism, the Supreme Court reconsidered and then reaffirmed the doctrine in Gamble v. United States. The current blanket rule solves one problem—the fear that sovereign interests will be thwarted by other sovereigns—but creates another: an incentive for two sovereigns to join up to evade constitutional requirements. In the shadow of the dual sovereignty rule, lower courts have articulated an exception where one sovereign manipulates another or uses it as a “sham” or a “cover” for its own aims. Without further guidance from the Supreme Court, however, courts are reluctant to find the exception to apply.

This Note offers a new approach to inter-sovereign successive prosecutions that would reconcile these two doctrinal threads and provide greater protection to defendants at the mercy of multiple sovereigns: application of the strict scrutiny standard. Courts should embrace the complexity of inter-sovereign prosecutions, which can range from situations of obstruction, where successive prosecution may be necessary, to manipulation, where it should be prohibited. Genuine protection of the right against double jeopardy demands strict scrutiny.

In the Spring of 2020, a panel of the Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals in Gary B. v. Whitmer penned an opinion recognizing a fundamental right to basic minimum education. While this decision was subsequently vacated pending en banc review and then dismissed as moot following a settlement, it stands as a bellwether of the long-overdue march toward recognition of positive rights under the Constitution. A series of Burger Court opinions attempted to calcify the notion that the Constitution is a “charter of negative liberties,” most famously DeShaney v. Winnebago County Department of Social Services and its progeny. These opinions erected three key doctrinal barriers to recognition of positive rights: 1) that a cognizable due process claim must arise from direct, de jure state deprivation; 2) that separation of powers points towards legislatures, not courts, as the appropriate bodies for curing social and economic ills; and 3) that furnishing equality is not a proper aim of due process.

But substantive due process doctrine has transformed over the past few decades. Most notably in a series of cases protecting the rights of LGBTQ+ individuals—Lawrence v. Texas in 2003, United States v. Windsor in 2013, and Obergfell v. Hodges in 2015—the doctrines of due process and equal protection have fused so intimately as to have revealed a new doctrinal structure, which Laurence Tribe has termed “equal dignity.” The doctrine of equal dignity has profound implications for the recognition of positive rights. Its theoretical tenets undermine the doctrinal elements which have traditionally steered federal courts away from recognizing positive rights. This Note argues that the case of education—considered in light of the post-Obergefell substantive due process doctrine—dismantles each of the traditional pillars of negative-rights constitutionalism, paving the way for recognition of a positive right to a basic minimum education. More broadly, Gary B. demonstrates that courts are now doctrinally equipped to recognize positive rights within the framework of modern substantive due process, a development that has radical implications for Fourteenth Amendment jurisprudence and the project of constitutional equality.

Photography has exploded into the most accessible mode of creative production of
our time: Over one trillion photographs will be taken this year. Yet despite the
medium’s dramatic expansion, catalyzed by advances in technology, the copyright-
ability of photography remains controlled by a Supreme Court precedent that is
over one hundred years old, Burrow-Giles Lithographic Co. v. Sarony. The long-
standing interpretation of Burrow-Giles in the lower courts has rendered nearly
every litigated photograph copyrightable, even though the factual foundation of
Burrow-Giles is remarkably inconsistent with how most photography is produced
today. With protracted, low-value, and often frivolous copyright litigation over
photographs increasingly clogging up federal courts’ dockets, it is high time to
reconsider photography’s copyright.

This Note argues that a revitalization of copyright’s merger doctrine—long ignored
or dismissed in the realm of photography’s copyright—could be the vehicle for this
reassessment. Theorizing photographs as mergeable does not render the medium
per se uncopyrightable, but captures the spirit of the Supreme Court’s now 150-
year-old instruction to permit photography’s copyright, while correcting for
changes in photographic technology to better uphold the Court’s simultaneous
mandate that “ordinary” photographs should not receive copyright protection.

There is a practice among prosecutors whereby they pursue incompatible theories
of a case against two or more defendants for criminal behavior for which, factually,
only one defendant can be culpable. While it’s difficult to determine just how fre-
quently these arguments are made, at least twenty-nine people have been con-
demned to death in cases where the defense has alleged inconsistencies, and seven
of those twenty-nine people have been executed. Situations like these cut against our
moral and ethical understanding of fairness and of justice; these arguments operate
in a world detached from reality, where factually singular acts can have multiple
agents, prosecutors are not accountable to a consistent narrative, and factfinders are
asked to make ultimate determinations of death based on factual impossibilities.
But finding ways to challenge the practice has, frustratingly, fallen short in pro-
viding legal relief to the condemned.

This Note looks beyond the due process and Eighth Amendment arguments against
this practice that have not provided fertile ground for protecting criminal defen-
dants from this type of vindictive approach to sentencing. Instead, this Note makes
a normative argument that the history of the Fifth Amendment’s Double Jeopardy
Clause, along with civil law principles of collateral estoppel that have been incorpo-
rated into the criminal law through the Clause, and protections against vindictive
sentencing practices that undergird the Clause bars this practice. In other words,
this Note argues that double jeopardy preclusion principles bar prosecutors from
relitigating issues of ultimate culpability in successive cases. This solution draws on
the Supreme Court’s only consideration of this issue—Bradshaw v. Stumpf—which
makes an analytical distinction between the consequences of this practice on convic-
tion and consequences on sentencing.

The principal-agent problem in class actions, which occurs whenever the interests
of class counsel (the agent) conflict with those of the class (the principal), has
plagued the class action system for decades. When these conflicts of interest arise,
they often lead to plaintiff classes receiving lower monetary awards than they other-
wise deserve, above-market fees for attorneys, and underenforcement of claims
against wrongdoers. Throughout the years, both Congress and scholars alike have
tried to address this issue, but it persists. This Note invites Congress and scholars to
think differently about potential solutions to a problem that has been around for far
too long. It argues that looking to qui tam litigation, specifically, the False Claims
Act, provides a unique approach that could help significantly curtail the principal-
agent problem. By permitting the government to install itself as lead counsel in class
actions involving money damages—when it deems an action to be worthy—the
financial incentives between any given class and its respective class counsel are
realigned. While private attorneys seek the maximum amount of attorney’s fees,
even if it comes at the expense of the client, government lawyers do not have the
same motivation. Adding an amendment to Federal Rule of Civil Procedure 23
permitting qui tam litigation would allow the government to act as a gatekeeper for
class actions while leaving the option open for private attorneys to bring suit should
the government decide not to do so. By providing different channels of enforce-
ment, the amendment offers a promising opportunity to better deter private sector
misconduct, discourage frivolous suits, and improve the overall outcomes for plain-
tiff classes.

In Ford Motor Co. v. Montana Eighth Judicial District Court, the Supreme Court
heard a challenge to specific personal jurisdiction brought under the “arising out of
or relating to” prong (also referred to as the “arising out of” prong) of the min-
imum contacts test for only the second time. In attempting to evade jurisdiction for
injuries caused by defective cars in Montana and Minnesota, Ford argued that
because the specific cars at issue were not originally sold in those fora, its pur-
poseful contacts with the state did not proximately cause the injury at issue, and
therefore the injuries did not “arise out of” those contacts. Ford’s argument is based
on a misreading of Bristol-Myers Squibb Co. v. Superior Court, the only case in
which the Court analyzed that prong of the minimum contacts test. This Note seeks
to explore the development and purposes underlying the “arising out of” prong,
concluding that its purpose is to ensure a sufficient connection between the forum
and the underlying claim such that the state has a legitimate regulatory interest and
that litigation in the forum is convenient. After describing the development and
purpose of the “arising out of” prong and contrasting it with the purpose under-
lying the “purposeful availment” prong, this Note addresses the ways in which chal-
lenges to jurisdiction are brought when it is unclear if the claim arises in a
particular forum. This Note then takes on the Ford case and discusses how the
Supreme Court’s decision fits into the framework describing what work the “arising
out of” prong is doing in the jurisdictional analysis.

After decades in which agricultural land could only be owned by farmers, Taiwan’s
2000 amendments to the Agricultural Development Act opened up the farmland
market to non-farmers. This decision, along with Taiwan’s accession to the World
Trade Organization and the increasing globalization of trade, has had effects on an
agricultural landscape that has traditionally consisted largely of smallholder
farmers. This Note explores the 2000 amendments within both the historical context
of first- and second-stage land reform in Taiwan and the current context of third-
stage land reform and trade liberalization. The effects are far-reaching—the most
expensive farmland in the world, escalating non-agricultural use, fields left idle.
This Note raises questions about the role of agriculture in developed societies and
discusses the nuanced nature of farmland market deregulation.

District attorneys are responsible for the vast majority of criminal prosecutions in the United States, and most of them are elected by the public from prosecutorial
districts. Yet these districts are massively malapportioned, giving rural, dispropor-
tionately white voters significantly more voting power over their district attorneys
than urban voters, who are more likely to be voters of color. At the same time, our
district attorney system is characterized by the sorts of political process failures that
both triggered the Supreme Court’s Apportionment Revolution—requiring that leg-
islative and executive districts comply with one-person, one-vote—and justify judi-
cial intervention in other voting rights contexts. This Note argues that extending
one-person, one-vote to prosecutorial districts would meaningfully address
prosecutorial political process failure and have a number of salutary effects on our
democracy: It would rebalance the distribution of voters’ influence over district
attorneys, producing salutary downstream effects on our criminal justice system; it
may increase challenger rates, leading to healthier levels of prosecutorial demo-
cratic competition; and it would further core democratic norms, including respect
for the equal dignity of voters.

Private markets have exploded. This growth has created lucrative opportunities for businesses raising capital and those who qualify to invest. For decades, Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) rules have restricted most private investments to “accredited investors,” a designation that, for members of the general public, was based exclusively on affluence. While critics of this regime have emphasized its role in exacerbating inequality, scholarship has neglected the economic divide between white and Black Americans specifically. This Note fills that void.

In August 2020, the SEC issued the first update to the accredited investor standard since its genesis in the 1980s. Using available data, this Note argues that the accredited investor regime—historically and as amended—systematically excludes Black investors and Black-owned businesses from private markets, which both perpetuates racial inequality and depresses the value of those markets. This Note proposes a framework for an Administrative Procedure Act lawsuit charging that the Securities Act required the SEC to consider these distributional effects when modernizing the accredited investor standard. Finding that the SEC failed to satisfy this statutory requirement and omitted other relevant data, this Note concludes that the accredited investor update was arbitrary and capricious in violation of the Administrative Procedure Act. It then offers guidance on how the agency can remedy its error and avoid repeating it in the future.

Line-level immigration officers have virtually unreviewable discretion to deny noncitizens the ability to enter the United States. This power extends not only to those who enter without inspection or arrive with counterfeit documents, but also to those who travel to the United States with the U.S. government’s express permission—i.e., visa holders. These noncitizens can unwittingly be caught up in the expedited removal process, which affords only minimal procedural safeguards and heavily circumscribes judicial review of officers’ actions. This Note argues that, despite these limitations, federal habeas courts should take advantage of their ability under the statute to inquire into whether an expedited removal order in fact was issued. In particular, courts should insist upon compliance with critical procedures required by the agency’s own regulations, without which an expedited removal order may be said not to exist at all. Informed by fundamental principles of administrative law, such an insistence on procedural compliance could help correct some of the worst abuses of the system notwithstanding the lack of constitutional due process protections for arriving noncitizens.

Police officers lie. About nearly every aspect of their work and at every stage of the criminal legal process—in arrest paperwork, warrant affidavits, courtroom testimony, and disciplinary proceedings. The primary scholarly account of police perjury frames the problem as one that emerged largely after the Supreme Court decided Mapp v. Ohio, which made the Fourth Amendment exclusionary rule applicable in state criminal proceedings. But a gap exists in the literature, one this Note seeks to fill: Scholars have neglected to consider whether, and to what extent, police lied before Mapp. By reaching into the historical record, this Note uncovers a rich tradition of rank perjury dating back to the origins of modern policing.

Building on the insight that police have lied for as long as police have existed, this Note sketches an abolitionist framework for police perjury. A structural understanding better accounts for the fact that police lies legitimate police power and figure prominently in two other features of modern policing—racialization and violence. In offering a new framework to understand the perjury problem, this Note joins the growing chorus of scholars, organizers, and activists calling for defunding and dismantling the police.

Agencies often bring enforcement actions and propose and accept settlements that have significant repercussions for the public and those harmed by the alleged misconduct. However, few meaningful opportunities exist for the public, or for victims, to participate in the decisionmaking process, and no external constraints exist to ensure their interests are adequately considered. Focusing on the Federal Trade Commission and its settlement procedures, this Note asks whether more is needed to preserve administrative legitimacy. To do so, it situates rights of participation within the two dominant schools of thought about the administrative state: the arbitrariness model and the accountability model. It finds that these theories support more expansive, but distinct, participatory rights for the general public and for victims. Criminal law, and the victim participation movement within it, provides guidance for the path forward, and this Note concludes that Congress and agencies should act together to perfect participation rights in agency enforcement actions.

As the world reckons with the #MeToo movement and Black Lives Matter movement, within the corporate world people are starting to take stock of board diversity. Pressure is starting to build from shareholders and stakeholders for their companies to hire diverse directors. Although diversifying boardrooms has garnered support as of late, many other members of the corporate world believe a company should not diversify simply due to external pressures and it being “the right thing to do.” This Note seeks to provide a new perspective for why hiring diverse directors is essential—one that is likely digestible to the more traditional, long-established members of the corporate world and our law-making bodies: Increasing board diversity furthers a corporation’s purpose. Placing the arguments for board diversity within the context of both the shareholder primacy and stakeholder approach models of corporate governance, this Note demonstrates that irrespective of which side of the corporate purpose debate one believes, diverse boardrooms are beneficial for a corporation and in fact necessary for its survival. It also advocates for short-term and long-term policies that can increase board diversity and encourage the benefits of diverse directorship to be fully realized.

The federal tax code contains a number of provisions that reduce taxes on personal and business investment income. Many of these provisions fall into two categories: yield exemption provisions, which reduce taxes on investment returns, and tax deferral provisions, which reduce taxes on investment principal. While these two families of tax provisions are sometimes said to be equivalent, there are important differences between them. This Note focuses on one under-appreciated difference between yield exemption and tax deferral: the amount of risk to which the federal government is exposed. Under a tax deferral approach, the federal government’s expected revenue is higher but more uncertain, as revenue collections depend on the performance of taxpayers’ investments. This Note argues that policies that raise revenue by exposing the federal government to greater risk could be more efficient than other avenues of raising federal revenue. The federal government is able to take on market risk at a relatively low social cost, because of its high liquidity and ability to diversify risk across generations. While there are many possible ways for the government to raise revenue by taking on more risk, this Note argues that the tax code is a promising vehicle for doing so. All in all, this analysis adds a reason why tax deferral provisions are preferable to yield exemption provisions.

Modern capitalist theory has been the engine of Western innovation and prosperity for centuries. However, the persistence of the free market and corporate form in the United States has come at a high cost. Industrialization powered by fossil fuels has permanently degraded and destabilized the Earth’s climate, wealth continues to concentrate among a handful of individuals, and increasing nativist and anti-immigrant sentiments threaten our institutions. This has led scholars to draw parallels between the current day and the Gilded Age, a period of massive wealth inequality during which the negative externalities of unfettered capitalism became particularly clear. This Note is situated in the rapidly expanding literature about environmental social governance (ESG) and stakeholderism, looking to past instances of corporate reform as well as the present realities of the modern-day corporation to argue that private ordering is an ineffective and improper means of addressing negative externalities of capitalism. It identifies moments of proto-stakeholderism during three periods: the Gilded Age, Progressive Era, and stock market crash of 1929, highlighting the cyclicality of addressing stakeholder concerns throughout history. It critiques two major avenues through which corporations might consider stakeholders—private ordering or government action—and argues that private ordering’s legal limits and legitimacy problems are inescapable when considering transformational ESG reform.