: Public housing suffers from disinvestment, and, today, many residents live in substandard conditions. By combining the literature on public-housing history and tenant-rights law with the lived experiences of public-housing residents, this Essay uses Chicago as a case study to explore litigation and other advocacy strategies for systematically improving public-housing
: This Essay explores public-benefits agencies' increasing reliance on technology and remote services and its impact on welfare-rights litigation. The Essay argues that the lack of direct regulation of these practices threatens benefits access. However, creative impact litigation is still a powerful tool for enforcing benefits recipients'
: We live in perilous times, where acrimony and contempt poison our republic. But as others have long recognized—from Washington to Lincoln to current observers—there is an antidote: civic charity. It has helped heal our nation in some of our most difficult times; it can do so
: Honest services fraud is a vital anticorruption statute used by federal prosecutors to police state and local corruption. However, the statute's undefined terms and perceived intrusions on federalism have invited scrutiny from the Supreme Court. To redress these concerns, courts should interpret the statute to require a predicate state-law
: In its decision in Students for Fair Admissions, Inc. v. President and Fellows of Harvard , the Supreme Court appeared to take a new approach to what constitutes a Fourteenth Amendment violation. This Essay argues that the new standard should be applied to reduce race discrimination in jury
: This Essay argues for reconceiving habeas corpus as a meaningful avenue for judicial power to push back against arbitrary executive power, and proposes a surprising source for this revival: Justice Scalia's attack on the Sentencing Guidelines. Texas's capital murder statute is proposed as ripe for such reinvigorated habeas
: The First Amendment is a well-known barrier to sensible technology regulation. While scholars blame the Court's libertarian turn, we offer another explanation: the Court's solicitude for religious speakers. Religious-speech cases have given firms a powerful suite of deregulatory tools. This Feature draws the through line from gods to
: Professors Ellen Bublick and Jane Bambauer argue that the common law has expanded, and should continue to expand, the civil legal rights of wrongfully injured people, including police. There is value in using civil enforcement to hold both civilians and officers accountable for the unjustified harms that they
: This Article offers the first legal history of the Comstock Act from its enactment to its post- Dobbs reinvention. From conflicts over Comstock's enforcement emerged popular claims on democracy, liberty, and equality in which we can recognize roots of modern free-speech law and the law of sexual and reproductive
: In civil litigation, police most commonly appear as defendants. But police also act as plaintiffs, suing the individuals they police. This Article argues that these plaintiff police claims cause significant democratic harms and should be limited. Compensation and deterrence can be achieved through other, less politically corrosive
: This Note argues that Indian tribes can best address disenrollment by viewing the problem through the lens of international norms regarding citizenship revocation. In choosing to embrace these norms, tribes can restrict disenrollment in a manner that does not simply invoke tribal sovereignty but instead promotes
: The Catholic Church has concluded close to two hundred treaties in the last sixty years with nations across the globe. Many of these agreements integrate Church doctrine into state legal systems at the expense of LGBTQ rights. This Note unearths this vast treaty regime—and suggests ways to challenge
: This Essay argues that technological and procedural legal interoperability—that is, widespread consistency in legal technology design and related processes—can help stakeholders effectively leverage artificial intelligence to maximize access to legal services and fairness of outcomes through self-help options, with traditional legal services, and in the
: This Essay examines the legal basis for the requirement that agencies must respond to significant comments they receive during a rulemaking proceeding, the pros and cons of that requirement, and how the requirement fits together with other principles of administrative law, including procedural fairness and standing to
: This Essay uses a mixed-methods study to sketch operation of criminal legal systems in several rural counties in central and eastern Washington. The study reveals how an attorney shortage, along with reliance on local funding of justice system functions, is leaving defendants vulnerable to delays and ineffective assistance of
: Access to justice in American civil courts won't come through free or pro bono lawyers. To drive down costs, we need to loosen bar regulation and streamline procedures. And we should embrace technology and AI responsibly to give more people the legal help they need but can't
: The United States has criminalized cannabis since 1970. In response to pleas for reform and widespread state cannabis legalization, the federal government recently initiated rulemaking to reschedule cannabis. This Essay argues that the federal government should abandon its legally problematic rescheduling proposal and, instead, decriminalize and deregulate
: Ifetayo Harvey explores the foremost drug reform issues by giving a broad overview of the Essays in this Collection. Harvey uses Oregon ' s Measure 110 as an example of drug reform ' s challenges when implemented on a state level. The piece concludes with guidance on how advocates can improve future drug
: Congress split drug scheduling authority between the Department of Health and Human Services and the Drug Enforcement Administration. However, this statutory separation of powers has collapsed, producing unscientific outcomes that undermine the CSA text, purpose, and history. Congress, courts, agencies, and the President can shift drug scheduling back on
: Through an institutional theory lens, this Essay examines how the family policing system's historical emphasis on punishment and surveillance resists even well-intentioned legislative changes. Despite the inclusion of family-centered services in recent legislation, implementation barriers and institutional inertia within family policing agencies perpetuate default practices of policing and
: David Pozen's new book chronicles the constitutional arguments that American litigants once deployed to protect a “right” to use drugs. This Review supplements and critiques Pozen's important contribution, situating his findings within a broad backdrop of race, crime, and the judiciary's eagerness to just say “yes” to the drug
: Aggressive applications of extraterritoriality under the protective principle in international law pose serious threats to states and individuals. This Note tracks the rise of protective-principle jurisdiction around the world. It then provides a reformulation of the principle to better cabin it within foundational doctrines of international
: “Democracy's Distrust” explores how the Supreme Court has eroded voting rights and weakened democracy. It argues that the Court prioritizes candidates and legislatures over voters, fostering public distrust. The Essay examines historical and contemporary cases, highlighting the need for legislative reforms and civic action to protect
: After several decades, the Supreme Court has revised its interpretation of employment-discrimination law requiring religious accommodations, creating waves of new litigation. Latent in the doctrine, principles of nondisparagement, reciprocity, and proportionality can guide courts in resolving these claims while also anchoring nonjudicial strategies to protect employees' basic
: Using new archival research, this Article argues that notice-and-comment rulemaking emerged from a series of American transplantations of English rulemaking procedures. Yet, as this Article emphasizes, during the 1930s and 1940s Americans only partially adopted the English framework. The rejection of laying procedures implicates the legitimacy of our rulemaking
: This Feature revisits the widely held assumption that pharma needs patents to sustain innovation. By analyzing the information goods underlying drugs, this Feature demonstrates that innovation in this sector can proceed without patents. Replacing patents with a tailored form of regulatory exclusivity would reap large gains in social
: Textualists have yet to explain how to interpret codified positive-law text, which is revised by bureaucrats then enacted by Congress, where it differs from original text. This Note's proposed solution is the “two texts canon.” When applied to Section 1983, the two texts canon demands that qualified immunity be
: After the Supreme Court's decision in Regents , courts have intensified their scrutiny of agency reversals that upset the expectations of regulatory beneficiaries. This Note defends that development and situates it within an underexplored history of courts calibrating the stringency of their review of agency action to distributional
: Rulemaking agencies have always faced the risk of getting sued. But they have not traditionally faced the risk of getting sued for failing to discuss their risk of getting sued. They do now, thanks to Ohio v. EPA . This Essay traces that decision's odd origins and troubling
: From 1919 to 1969, the Offices of the Legislative Counsel in the Senate and House drafted precedential opinions to advise lawmakers on constitutional and subconstitutional questions. This Article lifts the curtain on this institution, revealing a hidden system that worked to reify congressional power and stymie a rising
: This Article introduces “antiracist expert evidence,” an underutilized tool to prove racism in court. Based on a nationwide survey of defense attorneys, it explores the evidence's utility, identifies barriers to use, and offers strategies to overcome them, aiming to begin to level the evidentiary playing field for criminal
: Prevailing constitutional interpretation sees Congress's role as legislative, but members of Congress frequently exert nonlegislative influence on agencies by intervening directly on individual claimants' behalf. This Feature provides an empirical portrait of congressional intervention in veterans' appeals through internal administrative data and discusses its implications for constitutional and administrative
: Civil asset forfeiture was once a law-enforcement tool. Today, however, police and prosecutors use forfeiture to fundraise, not to fight crime. This Note challenges the constitutionality of these profit-motivated government confiscations. It argues that these “contemporary civil forfeitures” are not forfeitures at all—they are compensable
: Militaries are increasingly targeting “dual-use objects”—objects that serve both civilian and military purposes. Drawing on an original dataset of the U.S. military's airstrike reports and ground reporting in Iraq and Syria, this Article illustrates how targeting such "dual-use objects" has undermined critical legal protections for
: For incarcerate d plaintiffs, meaningful d iscovery is essential to proving an d exposing wrong d oing in prison. Yet prison d iscovery is broken. This Article explores the extensive written an d unwritten barriers to evi d ence gathering in prison, an d , through a 200-case stu d y, reveals courts' central role in both perpetuating—an d potentially resolving—this
: This Feature argues that constitutionally unenumerated yet nonetheless fundamental rights require judicial protection, but only from unequal infringements. Because these infringements often result from nondiscriminatory motives, particularly the desire for benefits without cost, current law doesn't provide protection. This Feature explores a novel proposal for judicial protection for these
: Freight railroading today is profitable but fails workers, consumers, and communities in serious ways. This Note argues that both the railroad industry's financial success and its operational shortcomings are legacies of deregulation in the 1970s and 1980s and considers alternatives, some old and some
: This Note uncovers the history of how the Brigham Young University Police Department blurred the boundaries between criminal law and church doctrine. These practices included sting operations that used students as undercover agents to target morals offenses. Such tactics illustrate the risks of religiously affiliated policing as it spreads
: This Essay examines the overlooked long-term costs generated by restricted charitable gifts to the government. It reveals that gift compliance disputes are surprisingly frequent and costly to litigate. The authors propose that governments adopt gift acceptance policies that subject donor-imposed restrictions to rigorous review, public comment, and formal
: Everyone believes that immigration law has been exceptional since its late nineteenth-century birth—insulated from judicial review by the Court's creation of the “plenary power doctrine.” But early immigration law was actually ordinary public law. Recovering this reality has profound implications for scholars of immigration and public law
: This Article introduces a new, historically grounded “externalist” perspective for understanding the possibilities and limits of statutory interpretation as a tool for democratic participation and collective power
: The legal system's ability to control people's time is a form of dominion that exacerbates the structural disadvantages that marginalized families already face. Constriction, stretching, and indeterminacy are important aspects of temporal marginalization in the family regulation system. Considering the experience of time is one step towards understanding its
: This Note argues that wage theft in the fissured economy is a competition problem, not just a labor problem. It first recovers a historical understanding of substandard wages as an unfair method of competition. It then proposes FTC action against supply-chain wage theft using Section 5 of the FTC
: Platforms' content moderation of medical misinformation has become one of this era's biggest political controversies. This Essay traces how platforms' choices during the COVID-19 pandemic became so politicized, and how the category “medical misinformation” cannot be used to skirt important questions about the legitimacy of platform power over public
: States should respond to the U.S. Supreme Court's 303 Creative decision by enacting implied warranties of nondiscrimination. Making nondiscrimination a publicly disclaimable default would facilitate informed consumer choice and mitigate the dignitary harms of point-of-sale
: In its recent decision in Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, Inc. v. Goldsmith , the Supreme Court noted that whether defendant's work competes with plaintiff's is a key element of the fair-use analysis. This Essay argues that antitrust law offers valuable guidance for assessing competition in copyright
: Many of the intractable political disputes that plague tribal nations can be traced to the reliance on legal principles that are poor fits in Indigenous contexts. I suggest the acknowledgment of an Indigenous canon of construction of tribal laws by tribal judiciaries that will benefit legal development in tribal
: Constitutional torts allow victims of governmental misconduct to seek redress. But the doctrinal regime is in disarray because it vacillates between two conceptions of constitutional rights: rights that “nullify” changes to subconstitutional law and rights that impose “duties” on officers. The Feature defends a regime that embraces constitutional
: Mirroring the recent paradigm shift in corporate equity, corporate debt is now increasingly private and concentrated in the hands of investment funds. This Article chronicles the rise of private credit—loans originated by investment funds, rather than banks—and discusses its implications, including the potential loss of information and
: Courts routinely deny student-employees facing sex discrimination the expansive Title VII protections they deserve, and student-employees often fail to bring Title IX claims that more fulsomely capture this discrimination. Looking forward, courts should synthesize Title VII's protections with Title IX's coverage by considering education-based evidence when evaluating Title VII
: The Supreme Court's new standing cases have further narrowed the class of claims justiciable in federal court. Some state courts have followed suit, leaving valid federal claims without any viable forum. We argue that the Supremacy Clause requires state courts to vindicate federal rights by hearing some of these
: This Essay disputes the myth that employment, unlike independent contracting, is inherently inflexible. It traces the roots of this widely shared belief to corporate propaganda and rejects “third-category” legislation based on this fiction. Finally, the Essay cautions labor enforcers to avoid the third-category sham in negotiated misclassification
: An AI arms race and a laissez-faire approach to globalization enable a borderless labor market without labor protections and the capture of workers' capital. Proposed redress includes: (1) workers' data as stake capital, (2) a data-licensing regime, and (3) a guaranteed income fund organized by the International Labor
: Recognizing harms arising from the growing use of automated systems for labor control, the European Union (EU) has passed an array of digital-rights protections for workers. This Essay argues that the EU framework fails to account for the formal subordination of workers and proscribe the harms of algorithmic labor
: “The Law of the Territories” is an emerging academic heading for legal scholarship on the status of U.S. territories. This Essay argues that the current momentum of this narrow “emerging field” presents an obstacle rather than a pathway to meaningful scholarly engagement, sidelining broader perspectives and more consequential
: The American Bar Association (ABA) has done much to remedy its history of racial discrimination. However, to this day, the ABA systematically discriminates against lawyers in four overwhelmingly nonwhite U.S. territories. This Essay examines the history of this discrimination and proposes a potential way forward to remedy
: Women in the U.S. territories experience particularized harms often rooted in U.S. colonization and the territories' political relationship with the United States. This Essay describes how traditional legal frameworks can sharply constrict available remedies and sketches the contours of a rational-basis-with-bite framework for assessing intersectional harms and
: This Essay examines Congress's design of territorial revenue systems during 1898-1900. Eager to protect the federal fisc, lawmakers instituted tariffs between Puerto Rico and the mainland. Their choices segregated the territories from the federal fiscal apparatus, prompted the Insular Cases , and created the territories' distinct tax status as foreign
: The prospect of productively leveraging litigation loss should not insulate decisions about whether and how to litigate from scrutiny. Examining contemporary LGBTQ litigation, this Essay shows how winning through losing, which is contingent on factors advocates assess before litigating, only makes sense within a less juriscentric and more multidimensional
: This Essay examines the rise of originalism and textualism within the Supreme Court's intellectual-property jurisprudence. Due to its intense dynamism, intellectual-property law exposes the failures of these methods, which detach law from social reality and human goals, and highlights the need for an alternative jurisprudence of
: This Essay argues that when Justice Department officials order subordinate lawyers to consider inappropriate partisan goals in making charging decisions, prosecutors must prioritize their fiduciary obligation to seek justice on behalf of the public. It further elaborates how courts and Congress can support them in this
: In this series of Tributes to Justice David H. Souter, three of his law clerks—Judge Jesse M. Furman, President Heather K. Gerken, and Professor Jeannie Suk Gersen—reflect upon and honor their former boss's humility, wit, and
: Younger v. Harris is canonical in the field of federal courts, but its origins remain largely unknown. Examining diverse sources, this Article reconstructs that story. In doing so, this Article democratizes our constitutional memory, recovering the erased history of Black political resistance and state oppression underlying Younger v. Harris