Law Commons^™

Covid-19 And The Law: Elections, Richard Briffault

Faculty Scholarship

With one Supreme Court decision, lower federal and state court decisions, pending litigation, and proposals around the country for major changes in how elections are conducted, COVID-19 has already had and likely will continue to have a significant impact on election law.

The discussion that follows proceeds in two parts. The first addresses the initial consequences of COVID-19 as an electoral emergency. Voters were due to go to the polls in states around the country just as the pandemic was gathering force and governors and mayors were calling on people to stay at home and avoid large gatherings – which, …

Memoriam: Justice John Paul Stevens, John G. Roberts Jr., David Barron, Alison J. Nathan, Christopher L. Eisgruber, Olatunde C.A. Johnson, Eduardo M. Peñalver

Faculty Scholarship

When Justice John Paul Stevens passed away on July 16, 2019, I was flooded with personal memories of my year clerking for him. The standard words of comfort when someone dies are that they will live on through the individuals that knew and loved them. Justice Stevens sat on the Supreme Court for more than three decades; his loss would be felt beyond those who knew him personally. I wondered how history would remember him.

Symposium: The Puzzling And Troubling Grant In Kisor, Gillian E. Metzger

Faculty Scholarship

From one perspective, the Supreme Court’s decision to grant review in Kisor v. Wilkie is not surprising. Dating back at least to Justice Antonin Scalia’s 2011 concurrence in Talk America v. Michigan Bell Telephone Co., through Decker v. Northwest Environmental Defense Center in 2013 and Perez v. Mortgage Bankers Association in 2015, there’s been growing interest on the Supreme Court’s conservative wing in overturning Auer deference, or the doctrine that an agency’s interpretation of its own regulation is “controlling unless plainly erroneous or inconsistent with the regulation.” The campaign to overturn Auer v. Robbins then stalled, with the court denying …

Boynton V. Virginia And The Anxieties Of The Modern African-American Customer, Amber Baylor

Faculty Scholarship

In 1958, Bruce Boynton was arrested for ordering food in a Whites-Only diner and charged with criminal trespass. Sixty years later, African Americans continue to face arrest and threat of arrest in commercial establishments based on discriminatory trespass claims. When store owners or employees decide to exclude would-be patrons from their establishment for discriminatory reasons, both overt and implicit, they rely on the police to enforce this form of discrimination. This article considers the legacy of Boynton v. Virginia, particularly the resonance of Boynton’s unaddressed claim, that the state enforcement of discriminatory trespass allegations is an Equal Protection …