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A Republic Of Spending, Jonathan S. Gould

Michigan Law Review

Large-scale spending measures make up many of Congress’s most important recent contributions to national policymaking. Congress has appropriated trillions of dollars to respond to emergencies, fight climate change, expand social safety net programs, spur technological innovation, and strengthen national infrastructure. While the contemporary Congress’s failure to enact landmark regulatory statutes causes many to characterize it as dysfunctional, Congress in fact remains quite active—its policymaking energy is simply concentrated in the spending domain.

Congress’s use of spending rather than regulatory legislation as its primary way of shaping national policy marks a significant shift in American governance. This Article examines the causes …

Postmortem Privacy, Anita L. Allen, Jennifer E. Rothman

Michigan Law Review

Since their inception in the late nineteenth century, privacy rights have been widely understood to terminate with a person’s death. The “no-privacy-rights-for- the-dead” doctrine has been repeated for nearly 130 years. As demonstrated in this Article, the reality on the ground deviated from this common pronouncement even early on. The divergence is so great today that sustained consideration of postmortem privacy is essential. This is especially so given urgent calls to protect the digital assets of the dead and evolving technology that allows for the reanimation of deceased performers and loved ones. This Article provides a theoretical foundation for determining …

#Employerstoo: Expanding Vicarious Liability For Sexual Harassment In Title Vii And Tort Law, Kassandra "Kassie" Fotiadis

Michigan Law Review

When an individual experiences sexual harassment through a workplace, she has limited options for recourse. One seemingly promising possibility is bringing a claim against her perpetrator’s employer. But this option—achievable through vicarious liability—has failed to realize its potential. In 1998, the U.S. Supreme Court established a standard to enforce vicarious liability for sexual harassment claims under Title VII. That standard, though, was limited in scope to begin with and has further narrowed over time. Common law principles also allow courts to hold employers vicariously liable for sexual harassment in tort. But few jurisdictions have adopted those principles, and there is …

Front Matter, Michigan Law Review

Michigan Law Review

Front Matter for Volume 122, Issue 8 of Michigan Law Review

Standing And Probabilistic Injury, Curtis A. Bradley, Ernest A. Young

Michigan Law Review

Standing to sue often turns on questions of probability. For example, public law plaintiffs must show that they are likely to be affected by allegedly unlawful government surveillance or environmental policies, and consumers may wish to sue private defendants over false credit reporting or data breaches that may or may not cause them financial or reputational harm in the future. This Article offers a framework for resolving a wide range of these “probabilistic standing” issues. Our core claim is that courts and commentators ask too much of standing doctrine in probabilistic cases. First, scholars sometimes seek a unified theory of …

Agency Use Of Indirect Benefits To Justify Regulation, Abe Eichner

Michigan Law Review

Executive agencies have long used indirect benefits—meaning benefits beyond the express purpose of a regulation—to justify their rulemakings. However, the statutes that provide agencies with regulatory authority rarely explicitly direct agencies to consider indirect benefits. Lower courts disagree over whether consideration of indirect benefits is permissible, and the Supreme Court has reserved the question for a future case. Courts and existing scholarship have largely asked whether particular statutory provisions authorize consideration of indirect benefits. This Note contends that, even without such statutory authorization, indirect benefits are presumptively permissible because they further three traditional administrative law values: rational decisionmaking, transparency, and …

Bounded Extraterritoriality, Ruth Mason, Michael S. Knoll

Michigan Law Review

Twenty-first-century politics has inspired a new mode of interstate rivalries and reprisals consisting not of the tariffs that plagued the Founding but rather of regulations with significant impacts outside the enacting state’s borders. Employing the dormant Commerce Clause doctrine of extraterritoriality, the Supreme Court has limited overbroad state regulations, but the extraterritoriality doctrine is unclear both in its normative grounding and practical application. This Article proposes a conceptual framework that situates the prohibition of extraterritoriality as an aspect of horizontal federalism. Our conceptualization of extraterritoriality enables us to distinguish it from two dormant Commerce Clause doctrines with which it is …

Front Matter, Michigan Law Review

Michigan Law Review

Front Matter for Volume 122, Issue 7 of Michigan Law Review

Original Public Meaning And Pregnancy’S Ambiguities, Evan D. Bernick, Jill Wieber Lens

Michigan Law Review

Relying on 1868 abortion statutes, the 2022 Supreme Court held in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization that no federal constitutional right to abortion exists. Mere months later, a petition for certiorari asked the Court to determine that “person” in the Fourteenth Amendment includes prenatal existence, which would require criminalization of abortion in all states. The petitioners cited Dobbs and claimed the authority of legal history in 1868 and before. These arguments will be heard again, and they are increasingly framed in terms of the “original public meaning” of the Fourteenth Amendment.

This Article refutes these arguments on their own …

On The Genealogy Of Intimate Digital Harm, Aziz Z. Huq

Michigan Law Review

A review of The Fight for Privacy: Protecting Dignity, Identity, and Love in the Digital Age. By Danielle Keats Citron.

The Art Of The Review, Don Herzog

Michigan Law Review

What’s a book review for?

You might think it’s to supply a summary of the book. Time is short. We’re drowning in stuff to read; it’s hard to keep up even if you dutifully apply the seat of your pants to the seat of your chair and read very fast. Courts are constantly publishing new opinions. And—even though you’re used to this familiar feature of American law, you should still notice how startling it is—they’re also publishing unpublished opinions, with indefensible rules about whether or how they count as precedents lawyers can cite. Legislatures are publishing floor debates, not to …

Orders Without Law, Thomas P. Schmidt

Michigan Law Review

A review of The Shadow Docket: How the Supreme Court Uses Stealth Rulings to Amass Power and Undermine the Republic. By Stephen Vladeck.

The Shadow Of The Law Of The Police, Adam A. Davidson

Michigan Law Review

A review of Shielded: How the Police Became Untouchable. By Joanna Schwartz.

Beyond Profit Motives, William J. Moon

Michigan Law Review

A review of The Profit Motive: Defending Shareholder Value Maximization By Stephen M. Bainbridge.

What Is A Prison?, Grace Y. Li

Michigan Law Review

A review of The Idea of Prison Abolition. By Tommie Shelby.

Consumerist Waste: Looking Beyond Repair, Roy Shapira

Michigan Law Review

A review of The Right to Repair: Reclaiming the Things We Own. By Aaron Perzanowski.

Care Reimagined: Transforming Law By Embracing Interdependence, Robyn M. Powell

Michigan Law Review

A review of All Our Families: Disability Lineage and the Future of Kinship. By Jennifer Natalya Fink.

A Democracy Story: Reframing A Free Speech Landmark, Thomas Healy

Michigan Law Review

A review of Actual Malice: Civil Rights and Freedom of the Press in New York Times v. Sullivan. By Samantha Barbas.

Justice By Means Of The Administrative State, Glen Staszewski

Michigan Law Review

A review of Justice by Means of Democracy. By Danielle Allen.

Disability, Race, And Health Beyond The Carceral State, Benjamin A. Barsky, Craig Konnoth, Michael Ashley Stein

Michigan Law Review

A review of Embodied Injustice: Race, Disability, and Health. By Mary Crossley.

In Pursuit Of Collective Liberation In Feminist Constitutionalism, Yvette Butler

Michigan Law Review

A review of After Misogyny: How The Law Fails Women and What to Do About It. By Julie C. Suk.

Favoritism, Coercion, And The Establishment Clause, Christopher C. Lund

Michigan Law Review

A review of Agreeing to Disagree: How the Establishment Clause Protects Religious Diversity and Freedom of Conscience. By Nathan S. Chapman and Michael W. McConnell.

The Profit Principle: Tracing The Moral Decline Of Corporate Law Firms, Sung Hui Kim

Michigan Law Review

A review of Servants of the Damned: Giant Law Firms, Donald Trump, and the Corruption of Justice. By David Enrich.

Still Searching For Zora Neale Hurston, Khiara M. Bridges

Michigan Law Review

A review of Their Eyes Were Watching God. By Zora Neale Hurston.

Shutting Out Noise And Understanding Artificial Intelligence, Lauren J. Yu

Michigan Law Review

A review of Noise: A Flaw in Human Judgment. By Daniel Kahneman, Olivier Sibony and Cass R. Sunstein, and You Look Like a Thing and I Love You: How Artificial Intelligence Works and Why It’s Making the World a Weirder Place. By Janelle Shane.

Designing Sanctuary, Rick Su

Michigan Law Review

In recent decades, a growing number of cities in the United States have adopted “sanctuary policies” that limit local participation in federal immigration enforcement. Existing scholarship has focused on their legality and effect, especially with respect to our nation’s immigration laws. Largely overlooked, however, is the local process through which sanctuary policies are designed and the reasons why cities choose to adopt them through city ordinances, mayoral orders, or employee handbooks. This Article argues that municipal sanctuary policies are far from uniform, and their variation reflects the different local interests and institutional actors behind their adoption and implementation. More specifically, …

Peripheral Detention, Transfer, And Access To The Courts, Jessica Rofé

Michigan Law Review

In the last forty years, immigration detention in the U.S. has grown exponentially, largely concentrated in the southern states and outside of the country’s metropoles. In turn, federal immigration officials routinely transfer immigrants from their communities to remote jails and prisons hundreds, if not thousands, of miles away, often in jurisdictions where the law is more favorable to the government. These transfers are conducted without notice or process and frequently occur on weekends or in the predawn hours, when offices are closed and interested parties are lucky to access voicemail.

Federal immigration officials’ use of peripheral detention and transfer significantly …

Voting While Trans: How Voter Id Laws Unconstitutionally Compel The Speech Of Trans Voters, Emmy Maluf

Michigan Law Review

Thirty-five states currently request or require identification documents for in-person voting, and these requirements uniquely impact transgender voters. Of the more than 697,800 voting-eligible trans people living in states that conduct primarily in-person elections, almost half (43 percent) lack documents that correctly reflect their name or gender. When an ID does not align with a trans voter’s gender presentation, the voter may be disenfranchised—either because a poll worker denies them the right to cast a ballot or because the voter ID requirement chills their participation in the first place. Further, when a trans voter presents an ID that does not …

In Citizenship We Trust? The Citizenship Question Need Not Impede Puerto Rican Decolonization, Jimmy Mcdonough

Michigan Law Review

Puerto Rico is an uncomfortable reminder of the democratic deficits within the world’s oldest constitutional democracy. Puerto Ricans are U.S. citizens who live in a U.S. territory that is subject to the plenary authority of Congress, to which they cannot elect voting members. In 2022, under unified Democratic control for the first time in a decade, Congress considered the Puerto Rico Status Act, legislation that would finally decolonize Puerto Rico. The Status Act offered Puerto Rican voters three alternatives to the colonial status quo—statehood, independence, or sovereignty in free association—and committed Congress to implementing whichever alternative won majority support from …

Front Matter, Michigan Law Review

Michigan Law Review

Front Matter for Volume 122, Issue 5 of Michigan Law Review