Law Commons^™

When Claims Collide: Students For Fair Admissions V. Harvard And The Meaning Of Discrimination, Cara Mcclellan

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This term, the Supreme Court will decide Students for Fair Admissions v. President and Fellows of Harvard College (SFFA v. Harvard), a challenge to Harvard College’s race-conscious admissions program. While litigation challenging the use of race in higher education admissions spans over five decades, previous attacks on race-conscious admissions systems were brought by white plaintiffs alleging “reverse discrimination” based on the theory that a university discriminated against them by assigning a plus factor to underrepresented minority applicants. SFFA v. Harvard is distinct from these cases because the plaintiff organization, SFFA, brought a claim alleging that Harvard engages in intentional discrimination …

Dobbs In A Technologized World: Implications For Us Data Privacy, Jheel Gosain, Jason D. Keune, Michael S. Sinha

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In June of 2022, the U.S. Supreme Court issued its opinion in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, overturning 50 years of precedent by eliminating the federal constitutional right to abortion care established by the Court’s 1973 decision in Roe v. Wade. The Dobbs decision leaves the decision about abortion services in the hands of the states, which created an immediately variegated checkerboard of access to women’s healthcare across the country. This in turn laid bare a profusion of privacy issues that emanate from our technologized world. We review these privacy issues, including healthcare data, financial data, website tracking and …

Colonizing Queerness, Jeremiah A. Ho

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This Article investigates how and why the cultural script of inequality persists for queer identities despite major legal advancements such as marriage, anti-discrimination, and employment protections. By regarding LGBTQ legal advancements as part of the American settler colonial project, I conclude that such victories are not liberatory or empowering but are attempts at colonizing queer identities. American settler colonialism’s structural promotion of a normative sexuality illustrates how our settler colonialist legacy is not just a race project (as settler colonialism is most widely studied) but also a race-gender-sexuality project. Even in apparent strokes of progress, American settler colonialism’s eliminationist motives …

Corporate Personhood And Limited Sovereignty, Elizabeth Pollman

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This Article, written for a symposium celebrating the work of Professor Margaret Blair, examines how corporate rights jurisprudence helped to shape the corporate form in the United States during the nineteenth century. It argues that as the corporate form became popular because of the way it facilitated capital lock-in, perpetual succession, and provided other favorable characteristics related to legal personality that separated the corporation from its participants, the Supreme Court provided crucial reinforcement of these entity features by recognizing corporations as rights-bearing legal persons separate from the government. Although the legal personality of corporations is a distinct concept from their …

Docket Control, Mandatory Jurisdiction, And The Supreme Court's Failure In Rucho V. Common Cause, Carolyn Shapiro

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This paper, part of a Symposium on Andrew Coan's book, Rationing the Constitution: How Judicial Capacity Shapes Supreme Court Decision-Making, traces congressional changes to Supreme Court jurisdiction over more than a century, noting that those changes were regularly made in response to concerns about the Court's caseload. To the extent that Coan, and the Court, turn to doctrinal methods of controlling caseloads, such as deferential standards of review, they are overlooking the important congressional role in setting the Court's jurisdiction. The paper concludes by criticizing the recent decision of Rucho v. Common Cause in which the Court held that extreme …

Litigating Epa Rules: A Fifty-Year Retrospective Of Environmental Rulemaking In The Courts, Cary Coglianese, Daniel E. Walters

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Over the last fifty years, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) has found itself repeatedly defending its regulations before federal judges. The agency’s engagement with the federal judiciary has resulted in prominent Supreme Court decisions, such as Chevron v. NRDC and Massachusetts v. EPA, which have left a lasting imprint on federal administrative law. Such prominent litigation has also fostered, for many observers, a longstanding impression of an agency besieged by litigation. In particular, many lawyers and scholars have long believed that unhappy businesses or environmental groups challenge nearly every EPA rule in court. Although some empirical studies have …

Dimensions Of Delegation, Cary Coglianese

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How can the nondelegation doctrine still exist when the Supreme Court over decades has approved so many pieces of legislation that contain unintelligible principles? The answer to this puzzle emerges from recognition that the intelligibility of any principle dictating the basis for lawmaking is but one characteristic defining that authority. The Court has acknowledged five other characteristics that, taken together with the principle articulating the basis for executive decision-making, constitute the full dimensionality of any grant of lawmaking authority and hold the key to a more coherent rendering of the Court’s application of the nondelegation doctrine. When understood in dimensional …

Rights And Retrenchment In The Trump Era, Stephen B. Burbank, Sean Farhang

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Our aim in this essay is to leverage archival research, data and theoretical perspectives presented in our book, Rights and Retrenchment: The Counterrevolution against Federal Litigation, as a means to illuminate the prospects for retrenchment in the current political landscape. We follow the scheme of the book by separately considering the prospects for federal litigation retrenchment in three lawmaking sites: Congress, federal court rulemaking under the Rules Enabling Act, and the Supreme Court. Although pertinent data on current retrenchment initiatives are limited, our historical data and comparative institutional perspectives should afford a basis for informed prediction. Of course, little in …

Teva And The Process Of Claim Construction, Lee Petherbridge Ph.D., R. Polk Wagner

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In Teva Pharmaceuticals USA, Inc. v. Sandoz, Inc., the Supreme Court addressed an oft-discussed jurisprudential disconnect between itself and the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit: whether patent claim construction was “legal” or “factual” in nature, and how much deference is due to district court decisionmaking in this area. In this Article, we closely examine the Teva opinion and situate it within modern claim construction jurisprudence. Our thesis is that the Teva holding is likely to have only very modest effects on the incidence of deference to district court claim construction but that for unexpected reasons the …

Foster V. Chatman: A Missed Opportunity For Batson And The Peremptory Challenge, Nancy Marder

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In 2016, the United States Supreme Court decided that the prosecutors in Foster v. Chatman exercised race-based peremptory challenges in violation of Batson v. Kentucky. The Court reached the right result, but missed an important opportunity. The Court should have acknowledged that after thirty years of the Batson experiment, it is clear that Batson is unable to stop discriminatory peremptory challenges. Batson is easy to evade, so discriminatory peremptory challenges persist and the harms from them are significant. The Court could try to strengthen Batson in an effort to make it more effective, but in the end the only way …

Once We're Done Honeymooning: Obergefell V. Hodges, Incrementalism, And Advances For Sexual Orientation Anti-Discrimination, Jeremiah A. Ho

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Undoubtedly, the Supreme Court’s marriage equality decision in Obergefell v. Hodges is the watershed civil rights decision of our time. Since U.S. v. Windsor, each recent victory for same-sex couples in the federal courts evidenced that the legal recognition of same-sex marriages in the U.S. was becoming increasingly secure. Meanwhile, momentum was growing for the visibility of sexual minorities nationally. Yet, is marriage equality the last stop in the pro-LGBTQ movement, or should we expect sexual minorities to advance in other legal arenas? Should we expect that the recent strides in marriage equality from Windsor to Obergefell can somehow leverage …

Preemption In The Rehnquist And Roberts Courts: An Empirical Analysis, Michael Greve, Jonathan Klick, Michael A. Petrino, J. P. Sevilla

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This article presents an empirical analysis of the Rehnquist Court’s and the Roberts Court’s decisions on the federal (statutory) preemption of state law. In addition to raw outcomes for or against preemption, we examine cases by subject-matter, level of judicial consensus, tort versus regulatory preemption, party constellation, and origin in state or federal court. We present additional data and analysis on the role of state amici and of the U.S. Solicitor General in preemption cases, and we examine individual justices’ voting records. Among our findings, one stands out: over time and especially under the Roberts Court, lawyerly preemption questions have …

En-Gendering Economic Inequality, Michele E. Gilman

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We live in an era of growing economic inequality. Luminaries ranging from the President to the Pope to economist Thomas Piketty in his bestselling book Capital in the Twenty- First Century have raised alarms about the disparity between the haves and the have-nots. Overlooked, however, in these important discussions is the reality that economic inequality is not a uniform experience; rather, its effects fall more harshly on women and minorities. With regard to gender, American women have higher rates of poverty and get paid less than comparable men, and their workplace participation rates are falling. Yet economic inequality is neither …

How The Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court Should Interpret Wynne, Michael S. Knoll, Ruth Mason

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In this special report, Knoll and Mason discuss how the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court should apply Wynne when it hears on remand First Marblehead v. Commissioner of Revenue. The authors conclude that when it originally heard the case, the Massachusetts court mistakenly considered, as part of its internal consistency analysis, whether Gate Holdings Inc. experienced double state taxation. As developed by the U.S. Supreme Court and most recently applied in Wynne, the internal consistency test is not concerned with actual double taxation that may arise from the interaction of different states’ laws. Rather, the test is designed to determine …

The Original Meaning Of "God": Using The Language Of The Framing Generation To Create A Coherent Establishment Clause Jurisprudence, Michael I. Meyerson

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The Supreme Court’s attempt to create a standard for evaluating whether the Establishment Clause is violated by religious governmental speech, such as the public display of the Ten Commandments or the Pledge of Allegiance, is a total failure. The Court’s Establishment Clause jurisprudence has been termed “convoluted,” “a muddled mess,” and “a polite lie.” Unwilling to either allow all governmental religious speech or ban it entirely, the Court is in need of a coherent standard for distinguishing the permissible from the unconstitutional. Thus far, no Justice has offered such a standard.

A careful reading of the history of the framing …

Using The Dna Testing Of Arrestees To Reevaluate Fourth Amendment Doctrine, Steven P. Grossman

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With the advent of DNA testing, numerous issues have arisen with regard to obtaining and using evidence developed from such testing. As courts have come to regard DNA testing as a reliable method for linking some people to crimes and for exonerating others, these issues are especially significant. The federal government and most states have enacted statutes that permit or direct the testing of those convicted of at least certain crimes. Courts have almost universally approved such testing, rejecting arguments that obtaining and using such evidence violates the Fourth Amendment.

More recently governments have enacted laws permitting or directing the …

Bait And Switch: Why United States V. Morrison Is Wrong About Section Five, Kermit Roosevelt Iii

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As the title suggests, the article examines Morrison’s creation of the rule that the Section Five power cannot be used to regulate private individuals. This is one of the most meaningful and, thus far, durable constraints that the Court has placed on federal power. It is the more surprising, then, that it turns out to be based on essentially nothing at all. The Morrison Court asserted that its rule was derived by—indeed, “controlled by”—precedent, but a closer reading of the Reconstruction-era decisions it cites shows that this is simply not the case. An independent evaluation of the rule against regulation …

Keynote Speech: A Letter From The Original Cause Lawyer, F. Michael Higginbotham

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This symposium speech is a short piece which talks about why there is a need for law students to become cause lawyers, the symposium being: cause lawyers and cause lawyering in the sixty years after Brown v. Board of Education. The writer creates an allegorical scene where he's snowed in in his home during a snowstorm, lightning strikes his computer, and the computer comes to life in the form a message being typed, and "channeled" to him by Thurgood Marshall. The former Justice of the Supreme Court proceeds to state the many reasons why there is still a need for …

Federalism And Phantom Economic Rights In Nfib V. Sibelius, Matthew Lindsay

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Few predicted that the constitutional fate of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act would turn on Congress’ power to lay and collect taxes. Yet in NFIB v. Sebelius, the Supreme Court upheld the centerpiece of the Act — the minimum coverage provision (MCP), commonly known as the “individual mandate” — as a tax. The unexpected basis of the Court’s holding has deflected attention from what may prove to be the decision’s more constitutionally consequential feature: that a majority of the Court agreed that Congress lacked authority under the Commerce Clause to penalize people who decline to purchase health insurance. …

A Court For The One Percent: How The Supreme Court Contributes To Economic Inequality, Michele E. Gilman

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This Article explores the United States Supreme Court’s role in furthering economic inequality. The Occupy Wall Street movement in 2011 not only highlighted growing income and wealth inequality in the United States, but also pointed the blame at governmental policies that favor business interests and the wealthy due to their outsized influence on politicians. Numerous economists and political scientists agree with this thesis. However, in focusing ire on the political branches and big business, these critiques have largely overlooked the role of the judiciary in fostering economic inequality. The Court’s doctrine touches each of the major causes of economic inequality, …

Financing Elections And 'Appearance Of Corruption': Citizen Attitudes And Behavior In 2012, Molly J. Walker Wilson

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As political spending reaches new highs in the 2012 election cycle, and as the controversy surrounding wealthy donors and interest groups grows, polls demonstrate a surge of cynicism among Americans who profess a belief that the American political system is corrupt. The Supreme Court’s 2010 decision in Citizens United made possible the most recent expansion of political spending. In this case, the question was whether allowing corporations and unions to spend unlimited amounts of money on political advertising would result in corruption or the appearance of corruption. The majority on the Court determined that it would not. Many observers have …

Weather Permitting: Incrementalism, Animus, And The Art Of Forecasting Marriage Equality After U.S. V. Windsor, Jeremiah A. Ho

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Within LGBT rights, the law is abandoning essentialist approaches toward sexual orientation by incrementally de-regulating restrictions on identity expression of sexual minorities. Simultaneously, same-sex marriages are become increasingly recognized on both state and federal levels. This Article examines the Supreme Court’s recent decision, U.S. v. Windsor, as the latest example of these parallel journeys. By overturning DOMA, Windsor normatively revises the previous incrementalist theory for forecasting marriage equality’s progress studied by William Eskridge, Kees Waaldijk, and Yuval Merin. Windsor also represents a moment where the law is abandoning antigay essentialism by using animus-focused jurisprudence for lifting the discrimination against the …

Patents At The Supreme Court: It Could Have Been Worse, Gregory Dolin

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In the last few years in particular, the Court has expanded the zone of exclusion from patent eligibility, limited the availability of injunctive relief for patentees whose patents have been adjudged to be valid and infringed, and broadened the scope of the patent exhaustion doctrine. To be sure, not all of the Supreme Court’s decisions were “anti-patent.” Nonetheless, the overall trajectory of the Court’s patent jurisprudence has been toward a narrower set of patent rights. Thus, there was significant trepidation in the patent bar and the academy when the Supreme Court decided to hear three patent cases in the OT …

The Roberts Court And The Law Of Human Resources, Matthew T. Bodie

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The rise of human resources departments parallels the increase in the myriad statutory and regulatory requirements that govern the workplace. The Supreme Court's decisions in labor and employment law cases are largely monitored and implemented by HR professionals who must carry out these directives on a daily basis. This article looks at the Roberts Court's labor and employment law cases through the lens of human resources. In adopting an approach that is solicitous towards HR departments and concerns, the Roberts Court reflects a willingness to empower these private institutional players. Even if labor and employment law scholars do not agree …

The Anomaly Of Executions: The Cruel And Unusual Punishments Clause In The 21st Century, John Bessler

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This Article describes the anomaly of executions in the context of the U.S. Supreme Court’s Eighth Amendment jurisprudence. While the Supreme Court routinely reads the Cruel and Unusual Punishments Clause to protect prisoners from harm, the Court simultaneously interprets the Eighth Amendment to allow inmates to be executed. Corporal punishments short of death have long been abandoned in America’s penal system, yet executions — at least in a few locales, heavily concentrated in the South — persist. This Article, which seeks a principled and much more consistent interpretation of the Eighth Amendment, argues that executions should be declared unconstitutional as …

Claiming Neutrality And Confessing Subjectivity In Supreme Court Confirmation Hearings, Carolyn Shapiro

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Supreme Court confirmation hearings provide a rare opportunity for the American people to hear what (would-be) justices think about the nature of judging and the role of the Supreme Court. In recent years, nominees have been quick to talk about judging in terms of neutrality and objectivity, most famously with Chief Justice Roberts’ invocation of the “neutral umpire,” and they have emphasized their reliance on legal texts and sources as if those sources can provide answers in difficult cases. Many of the cases heard by the Supreme Court, however, do not have objectively correct answers that can be deduced from …

Fisher's Fishing Expedition, Vinay Harpalani

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This Essay delves into the Supreme Court oral arguments in Fisher v. Texas, which occurred on October 10, 2012. It examines the exchanges between the advocates and Justices, focusing on the meaning of 'critical mass' and the quest for total race neutrality in UT admissions. It argues that both of these are futile endeavors and unnecessary to decide Fisher. The entire Fisher case is a fishing expedition - albeit one that might reel in race-conscious admissions.

The Supreme Court's Theory Of The Fund, William Birdthistle

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Just as the firm has long served as the foundational molecule of the U.S. capitalist economy, theories of the firm have for more than a century dominated legal and economic discourse. Ever since Ronald Coase published The Nature of the Firm in 1937 and asked why firms should exist in an efficient market, classicists and neoclassicists have competed to develop theories — predominantly managerialist and contractual — that best explain the structure and behavior of business organizations.

The investment fund, by contrast, has languished at the margins of corporate theory, relegated as simply a minor, if somewhat curious, example of …

Tinkering Around The Edges: The Supreme Court's Death Penalty Jurisprudence, John Bessler

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This Essay examines America's death penalty forty years after Furman and provides a critique of the Supreme Court's existing Eighth Amendment case law. Part I briefly summarizes how the Court, to date, has approached death sentences, while Part II highlights the incongruous manner in which the Cruel and Unusual Punishments Clause has been read. For instance, Justice Antonin Scalia-one of the Court's most vocal proponents of "originalism" conceded that corporal punishments such as handbranding and public flogging are no longer constitutionally permissible; yet, he (and the Court itself) continues to allow death sentences to be imposed. The American Bar Association …

The Long And Winding Road From Monroe To Connick, Sheldon Nahmod

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In this article, I address the historical and doctrinal development of § 1983 local government liability, beginning with Monroe v. Pape in 1961 and culminating in the Supreme Court’s controversial 2011 failure to train decision in Connick v. Thompson. Connick has made it exceptionally difficult for § 1983 plaintiffs to prevail against local governments in failure to train cases. In the course of my analysis, I also consider the oral argument and opinions in Connick as well as various aspects of § 1983 doctrine. I ultimately situate Connick in the Court’s federalism jurisprudence which doubles back to Justice Frankfurter’s view …