Law Commons^™

Opening Brief For Plaintiff-Appellant Rocky Freeman, Madeline H. Meth, Sanketh Bhaskar, Henry Drembus, Brianna Jordan

Faculty Scholarship

For nearly two decades, while Rocky Freeman was in federal prison, the United States treated him like a contract killer who murdered two victims even though the U.S. Probation Office knew that this information was false, and the Bureau of Prisons (BOP) knew or should have known the same merely by looking at Freeman’s pre-sentence report (PSR). As a result, Freeman spent years subject to harsh conditions of confinement that he would not have experienced had probation or BOP officers acted with reasonable care. Since learning about this negligence, Freeman has sought repeatedly to remedy the various harms he suffered, …

Teaching "Is This Case Rightly Decided?", Steven Arrigg Koh

Faculty Scholarship

“Is this case rightly decided?” From the first week of law school, every law student must grapple with this classroom question. This Essay argues that this vital question is problematically under-specified, creating imprecision in thinking about law. This Essay thus advocates that law professors should present students with a three-part framework: whether a case is rightly decided legally, morally, or sociologically.

Additionally, this Essay argues that disaggregating the question exposes deeper deficiencies in legal education. Many law professors do not provide students with serious grounding to engage in rigorous thinking about the relationship between law, morality, and justice, not to …

Brief For Amici Curiae Legal Scholars Supporting Respondent, Nicole Huberfeld, Timothy S. Jost, Linda C. Mcclain, Wendy E. Parmet, Erwin Chemerinsky, Elizabeth Mccuskey, Danielle Pelfrey Duryea, Gabriel Scheffler, George J. Annas

Faculty Scholarship

QUESTION PRESENTED: Whether the Emergency Medical Treatment and Labor Act, 42 U.S.C. § 1395dd, preempts Idaho law in the narrow but important circumstance where terminating a pregnancy is required to stabilize an emergency medical condition that would otherwise threaten serious harm to the pregnant woman’s health but the State prohibits an emergency-room physician from providing that care.

Regulating Social Media Through Family Law, Katharine B. Silbaugh, Adi Caplan-Bricker

Faculty Scholarship

Social media afflicts minors with depression, anxiety, sleeplessness, addiction, suicidality, and eating disorders. States are legislating at a breakneck pace to protect children. Courts strike down every attempt to intervene on First Amendment grounds. This Article clears a path through this stalemate by leveraging two underappreciated frameworks: the latent regulatory power of parental authority arising out of family law, and a hidden family law within First Amendment jurisprudence. These two projects yield novel insights. First, the recent cases offer a dangerous understanding of the First Amendment, one that should not survive the family law reasoning we provide. First Amendment jurisprudence …

Against Monetary Primacy, Yair Listokin, Rory Van Loo

Faculty Scholarship

Every passing month of high interest rates increases the chances of massive job cuts and a devastating recession that still might come if the Fed maintains interest rates at their current levels for long enough. Recessions impose not only widespread short-term pain but also lifelong harms for many, as vulnerable populations and those who start their careers during a downturn never fully recover. Yet hiking interest rates is the centerpiece of U.S. inflation-fighting policy. When inflation is high, the Fed raises interest rates until inflation is tamed, regardless of the sacrifice that ensues. We call this inflation-fighting paradigm monetary primacy. …

Getting Merger Guidelines Right, Keith N. Hylton

Faculty Scholarship

This paper is on the new Merger Guidelines. It makes several arguments. First, that the Guidelines should be understood as existing in a political equilibrium. Second, that the new structural presumption of the Merger Guidelines (HHI = 1,800) is too strict, and that an economically reasonable revision in the structural presumption would have increased rather than decreased the threshold. Whereas the new Guidelines lowers the threshold to HHI 1,800 from HHI 2,500, an economically reasonable revision would have increased the threshold to HHI 3,200. I justify this argument using a bare-bones model of Cournot competition. Third, it seems unlikely, …

The Case For Scientific Jury Experiments, Bernard Chao, Christopher Robertson, David Yokum

Faculty Scholarship

For decades, litigators have relied on focus groups. While this approach can help identify issues for further exploration, attorneys often use focus groups to shape trial strategy or even predict outcomes. But focus groups are ill-suited for these applications because they suffer from three basic weaknesses: 1) they cannot explore unconscious decision-making; 2) they use too few mock jurors to provide reliable answers, and 3) they can become echo chambers that only surface a subset of the issues that an actual jury will consider.

Fortunately, recent technical advances in crowdsourcing and insights into human decision-making have opened the door to …

Do Public Accommodations Laws Compel “What Shall Be Orthodox”?: The Role Of Barnette In 303 Creative Llc V. Eleni, Linda C. Mcclain

Faculty Scholarship

This article addresses the U.S. Supreme Court’s embrace, in 303 Creative LLC v. Elenis, of a First Amendment objection to state public accommodations laws that the Court avoided in Masterpiece Cakeshop v. Colorado Civil Rights Commission: such laws compel governmental orthodoxy. These objections invoke West Virginia Board of Education v. Barnette’s celebrated language: “If there is any fixed star in our constitutional constellation, it is that no official, high or petty, can prescribe what shall be orthodox in politics, nationalism, religion or other matters of opinion or force citizens to confess by word or act their faith therein.” They also …

Human Rights In Hospitals: An End To Routine Shackling, Neil Singh Bedi, Nisha Mathur, Judy D. Wang, Avital Rech, Nancy Gaden, George J. Annas, Sondra S. Crosby

Faculty Scholarship

Medical students (NSB, NM, JDW) spearheaded revision of the policy and clinical practice for shackling incarcerated patients at Boston Medical Center (BMC), the largest safety net hospital in New England. In American hospitals, routine shackling of incarcerated patients with metal restraints is widespread—except for perinatal patients—regardless of consciousness, mobility, illness severity, or age. The modified policy includes individualized assessments and allows incarcerated patients to be unshackled if they meet defined criteria. The students also formed the Stop Shackling Patients Coalition (SSP Coalition) of clinicians, public health practitioners, human rights advocates, and community members determined to humanize the inpatient treatment of …

Counseling Oppression, Angelo Petrigh

Faculty Scholarship

Critical scholars and public defenders alike have grappled with the contradictions at the heart of counseling clients in a carceral system. Systems of oppression operate within the public defender - client relationship because the defender’s role in translating the law also enforces its inequities. Counseling can obscure the workings of the system, providing an illusion of choice despite privileging certain forms of knowledge and tactics.

But the counseling site is also where defenders become exposed to client’s lived experiences, encounter collectivist tactics, and critically examine the tension of their role in the system. Likewise, through counseling defenders can pull back …

A Matter Of Facts: The Evolution Of Copyright’S Fact-Exclusion And Its Implications For Disinformation And Democracy, Jessica Silbey

Faculty Scholarship

The Article begins with a puzzle: the curious absence of an express fact-exclusion from copyright protection in both the Copyright Act and its legislative history despite it being a well-founded legal principle. It traces arguments in the foundational Supreme Court case (Feist Publications v. Rural Telephone Service) and in the Copyright Act’s legislative history to discern a basis for the fact-exclusion. That research trail produces a legal genealogy of the fact-exclusion based in early copyright common law anchored by canonical cases, Baker v. Selden, Burrow-Giles v. Sarony, and Wheaton v. Peters. Surprisingly, none of them …

Structural Sex Discrimination: Why Gynecology Patients Suffer Avoidable Injuries And What The Law Can Do About It, Christopher Robertson, Annabel Kupke, Louise P. King

Faculty Scholarship

The nearly four million Americans who undergo gynecological surgeries each year suffer avoidable lifelong, painful, and disabling injuries. This Article diagnoses the root cause in our legal framework for healthcare finance and identifies legal solutions.

America’s public-private system for reimbursing healthcare pays for procedures rather than outcomes, and it pays substantially more for work on male rather than female anatomies. This disparity is due to the federal government’s reliance on a secretive industry committee to set those rates, and the committee’s reliance on junk science surveys, allowing self-interested and gender-biased responses, contrary to objective measures.

As payors disvalue the bodies …

Privacy Nicks: How The Law Normalizes Surveillance, Woodrow Hartzog, Evan Selinger, Johanna Gunawan

Faculty Scholarship

Privacy law is failing to protect individuals from being watched and exposed, despite stronger surveillance and data protection rules. The problem is that our rules look to social norms to set thresholds for privacy violations, but people can get used to being observed. In this article, we argue that by ignoring de minimis privacy encroachments, the law is complicit in normalizing surveillance. Privacy law helps acclimate people to being watched by ignoring smaller, more frequent, and more mundane privacy diminutions. We call these reductions “privacy nicks,” like the proverbial “thousand cuts” that lead to death.

Privacy nicks come from the …

Jack Daniel’S And The Unfulfilled Promise Of Trademark Use, Stacey Dogan, Jessica Silbey

Faculty Scholarship

In Jack Daniel’s v. VIP Products, the Supreme Court announced a bright-line rule: whatever speech protections govern the use of trademarks in artistic works, no such rule applies “when an alleged infringer uses a trademark in the way the Lanham Act most cares about: as a designation of source for the infringer’s own goods.” Those who engage in “trademark use,” in other words, must face the usual likelihood-of-confusion standard, regardless of whether their use also has expressive dimensions. The Jack Daniel’s defendant conceded that it was engaged in trademark use, so the opinion did not do the hard work …

How Bad Is Bad Enough?: Gatekeeping A Tenant's Right To 100% Habitable Housing, Sean Ahern

Faculty Scholarship

Tenants seeking to defend against eviction and to correct substandard conditions in their homes are hamstrung. Even in jurisdictions with “progressive housing policies,” there are steep doctrinal hurdles placed in front of tenants who try to establish a breach of the warranty of habitability and to defend against eviction. Such obstacles are baked directly into the judicial system and the standards that the judiciary applies in practice. While there are many systemic barriers to tenants vindicating themselves of the right to a fully habitable home, the most perniciously overlooked offender is a “substantiality” standard which trial court judges use to …

Beyond "Hard" Skills: Teaching Outward - And Inward-Facing Character-Based Skills To 1ls In Light Of Aba Standard 303(B)(3)'S Professional Identity Requirement, Marni Goldstein Caputo, Kathleen Luz

Faculty Scholarship

In this article, we share some ways in which we have adjusted our teaching to comply with Standard 303(b)(3) by addressing professional identity formation through the vehicles of outward-facing and inward-facing character-based skills. We believe that if law students do not intentionally start *811 exploring their professional identities as soon as they step foot into law school, they run the risk of believing that legal education and practice are somehow separate from their inner, personal identities as lawyers when, of course, they are, and ought to be, enmeshed. By injecting skills into the 1L curriculum that force both the development …

A Comment On Markovits's Welfare Economics And Antitrust, Keith N. Hylton

Faculty Scholarship

I criticize two features of the new book by Richard Markovits. One is the notion that ethics or moral judgments should be part of our analysis of antitrust. The other is the notion that market definition is incoherent.

Metaresearch, Psychology, And Law: A Case Study On Implicit Bias, Jason Chin, Alexander Holcombe, Kathryn Zeiler, Patrick Forscher, Ann Guo

Faculty Scholarship

When can scientific findings from experimental psychology be confidently applied to legal issues? And when applications have clear limits, do legal commentators readily acknowledge them? To address these questions, we survey recent findings from an emerging field of research on research (i.e., metaresearch). We find that many aspects of experimental psychology’s research and reporting practices threaten the validity and generalizability of legally relevant research findings, including those relied on by courts and policy-setting bodies. As a case study, we appraise the empirical claims relied on by commentators claiming that implicit bias deeply affects legal proceedings and practices, and that training …

High Stakes, Bad Odds: Health Laws And The Revived Federalism Revolution, Nicole Huberfeld

Faculty Scholarship

The Supreme Court’s 2021 term produced a remarkable number of blockbuster decisions, nearly hiding an underlying federalism agenda that surfaced in health care, reproductive rights, administrative law, and public health related domains. Health law has been a vehicle for constitutional change before, but the stakes for older laws, most of which rely on states to accomplish national goals, have been raised. The Court has doubled down on interpretive methods that limit governmental power, using formalist tools like clear statement rules that demand specificity and offer little deference to lawmakers or regulators. These rules have constitutional dimensions, including separation of powers …

Brief Of Amici Curiae Privacy And First Amendment Law Professors In Support Of Defendant-Appellant And Reversal, G. S. Hans, Hannah Bloch-Wehba, Danielle K. Citron, Julie E. Cohen, Mary Anne Franks, Woodrow Hartzog, Margot E. Kaminski, Gregory P. Magarian, Frank Pasquale, Neil Richards, Daniel J. Solove

Faculty Scholarship

STATEMENT OF INTEREST: Amici curiae are law professors and scholars of data privacy, constitutional law, and the First Amendment. Amici write to provide the court with scholarly expertise on the complexities of data privacy law and its intersection with the First Amendment. Amici have collectively written scores of academic articles and multiple books on data privacy, technology, the First Amendment, and constitutional challenges to state and federal privacy regulation.

Amici submit this brief pursuant to Fed. Rule App. P. 29(a) and do not repeat arguments made by the parties. No party’s counsel authored this brief, or any part of …

Reply Brief For Petitioner, Ferguson V. America, Brian Wolfman, Madeline H. Meth

Faculty Scholarship

The Government concedes that the circuits are divided over whether 28 U.S.C. § 2255 limits a district court’s discretion in reviewing 18 U.S.C. § 3582(c)(1)(A) motions. And because it cannot dispute that this issue is cleanly presented, unaffected by the Sentencing Commission’s policy statement, and exceptionally important, it instead rewrites the question presented. The Government’s effort to replace a question about the relationship (if any) between Section 3582(c)(1)(A) and Section 2255 with one about whether the district court abused its discretion should be rejected, and with it the Government’s attempt to gloss over the intractable circuit split, its misguided argument …

Reply Brief For Petitioner, Muldrow V. City Of St. Louis, Madeline H. Meth, Brian Wolfman

Faculty Scholarship

Section 703(a)(1) is straightforward: It prohibits all discrimination against an employee “with respect to his compensation, terms, conditions, or privileges of employment, because of such individual’s race, color, religion, sex, or national origin[.]” 42 U.S.C. § 2000e2(a)(1). The Department does not dispute that job transfers concern “terms and conditions” of employment. See Resp. Br. 1, 35. So, if the statute’s words are honored, and Jatonya Muldrow can show that the Department’s transfer decisions were imposed “because of” her sex, the Department is liable.

Yet the Department maintains that some discriminatory job transfers escape Title VII’s reach. It relies nearly exclusively …

Roberts's Revisions: A Narratological Reading Of The Affirmative Action Cases, Angela Onwuachi-Willig

Faculty Scholarship

In a seminal article published nearly twenty years ago in the Yale Journal of Law and the Humanities, Professor Peter Brooks posed a critical yet underexplored question: "Does the [flaw [n]eed a [n]arratology?"⁵ In essence, he asked whether law as a field should have a framework for deconstructing and understanding how and why a legal opinion, including the events that the opinion is centered on, has been crafted and presented in a particular way.⁶ After highlighting that "how a story is told can make a difference in legal outcomes," Brooks encouraged legal actors to "talk narrative talk" …

Command And Control: Operationalizing The Unitary Executive, Gary S. Lawson

Faculty Scholarship

The concept of the unitary executive is written into the Constitution by virtue of Article II’s vesting of the “executive Power” in the President and not in executive officers created by Congress. Defenders and opponents alike of the “unitary executive” often equate the idea of presidential control of executive action with the power to remove executive personnel. But an unlimitable presidential removal power cannot be derived from the vesting of executive power in the President for the simple reason that it would not actually result in full presidential control of executive action, as the actions of now-fired subordinates would still …

Copyright Fiduciaries: Problems And Solutions, Jessica Silbey

Faculty Scholarship

Andrew Gilden & Eva E. Subotnik, Copyright’s Capacity Gap, 57 U.C. Davis L. Rev. __ (forthcoming, 2023), available at SSRN (Aug. 9, 2023).

In this forthcoming article, Andrew Gilden and Eva Subotnik begin an important conversation about an underexplored area of copyright law. Their focus is copyright law’s inconsistent treatment of mental capacity. Under copyright law, copyright authors can produce valuable copyrighted work but those same authors may lack the legal capacity to make decisions about if, when, or how to exploit that work. For example, children and people with mental illness or disability can be copyright authors, but …

Opinion: How Software Stifles Competition And Innovation, James Bessen

Faculty Scholarship

Innovation is not what it used to be, and software is part of the reason. In many industries—industries well beyond Big Tech—dominant firms have built large software-based platforms delivering important consumer benefits, but these platforms also slow the rise of innovative rivals, including productive startups.5 Because access to these platforms is limited, competition has been constrained, creating a troubling market dynamic that slows economic growth.

Firearm Contagion: A New Look At History, Rachel Martin, Michael Ulrich

Faculty Scholarship

Gun violence is widely considered a serious public health problem in the United States, but less understood is what this means, if anything, for evolving Second Amendment doctrine. In New York Pistol & Rifle Association, Inc. v. Bruen, the Supreme Court held that laws infringing Second Amendment rights can only be sustained if the government can point to sufficient historical analogues. Yet, what qualifies as sufficiently similar, a suitable number of jurisdictions, or the most important historical eras all remain unclear. Under Bruen, lower courts across the country have struck down gun laws at an alarming pace, while …

Dobbs V. Jackson Women’S Health: Undermining Public Health, Facilitating Reproductive Coercion, Aziza Ahmed, Dabney P. Evans, Jason Jackson, Benjamin Mason Meier, Cecília Tomori

Faculty Scholarship

Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health continues a trajectory of U.S. Supreme Court jurisprudence that undermines the normative foundation of public health — the idea that the state is obligated to provide a robust set of supports for healthcare services and the underlying social determinants of health. Dobbs furthers a longstanding ideology of individual responsibility in public health, neglecting collective responsibility for better health outcomes. Such an ideology on individual responsibility not only enables a shrinking of public health infrastructure for reproductive health, it facilitates the rise of reproductive coercion and a criminal legal response to pregnancy and abortion. This commentary …

Continuous Reproductive Surveillance, Michael Ulrich, Leah R. Fowler

Faculty Scholarship

The Dobbs opinion emphasizes that the state’s interest in the fetus extends to “all stages of development.” This essay briefly explores whether state legislators, agencies, and courts could use the “all stages of development” language to expand reproductive surveillance by using novel developments in consumer health technologies to augment those efforts.

(Re)Criminalizing Abortion: Returning To The Political With Stories, George J. Annas

Faculty Scholarship

Abortion stories have always played a powerful role in advancing women’s rights. In the abortion sphere particularly, the personal is political. Following the Court’s reversal of Roe v. Wade, abortion politics, and abortion storytelling, take on an even deeper political role in challenging the bloodless judicial language of Dobbs with the lived experience of women.