Law Commons^™

Bon Voyage, My Friend, Amy Coney Barrett

Journal Articles

I met John in the fall of 2000, when he traveled to Washington to recruit new faculty at the annual hiring conference. Although I was not then on the teaching market, John heard that I intended to enter it in a year or two. He invited me to have coffee to discuss my plans, and so began a friendship that spanned nearly twenty years.

John wore many hats in the course of our relationship: mentor, colleague, co-author, and treasured friend.

Rather than putting his resources into himself, John put them into his family, friends, church, and work. And in each …

Who Is Wise Among You?, Bruce Huber

Journal Articles

Bruce Huber, Professor of Law at Notre Dame Law School, provides the eleventh and last essay in Notre Dame Law Review Reflections' special issue in memory and honor of John Copeland Nagle, also a Professor of Law at Notre Dame Law School, whom he considered a friend and colleague.

Well Done, Good And Faithful Servant, Nicole Stelle Garnett, Richard Garnett

Journal Articles

This essay is an appreciation, remembrace, and tribute, written for our friend and colleague, John Copeland Nagle.

Alleged Violations Of The 1955 Treaty Of Amity, Economic Relations, And Consular Rights (Iran V. U.S.) (Judgment On Preliminary Objections) (I.C.J.), Diane A. Desierto

Journal Articles

On February 3, 2021, the International Court of Justice delivered its judgment on preliminary objections in Alleged Violations of the 1955 Treaty of Amity, Economic Relations, and Consular Rights (Islamic Republic of Iran v. United States of America). The judgment rejected all of the United States’ preliminary objections, declared the admissibility of Iran's Application, and held that the Court has jurisdiction “on the basis of Article XXI, paragraph 2 of the Treaty of Amity, Economic Relations, and Consular Rights of 1955.”

Contracts Without Courts Or Clans: How Business Networks Govern Exchange, Sadie Blanchard

Journal Articles

Legal scholars have long recognized the close-knit community as an alternative institution for supporting trade when contract law and trusted courts are unavailable. But recent research suggests that another option may be available: heterogeneous business networks. What’s interesting is that these networks lack features traditionally seen as essential to community-supported trade. In particular, they lack preexisting noncommercial social ties that allow reliable and trusted information to spread at low cost, make exiting the network difficult, and enable coordinated sanctioning of cheaters. As a result, some leading scholars doubt that these networks are doing the work of sustaining cooperation. This Article …

Taking Justification Seriously: Proportionality, Strict Scrutiny, And The Substance Of Religious Liberty, Stephanie H. Barclay, Justin Collings

Journal Articles

Last term, five Justices on the Supreme Court flirted with the possibility of revisiting the Court’s First Amendment test for when governments must provide an exemption to a religious objector. But Justice Barrett raised an obvious, yet all-important question: If the received test were to be revised, what new test should take its place? The competing interests behind this question have be-come even more acute in light of the COVID-19 pandemic. In a moment rife with lofty rhetoric about religious liberty but riven by fierce debates about what it means in practice, this Article revisits a fundamental question common to …

Introduction To The Bremer-Kovacs Collection: Historic Documents Related To The Administrative Procedure Act Of 1946 (Heinonline 2021), Emily S. Bremer, Kathryn E. Kovacs

Journal Articles

Few statutes have a legislative history as rich, varied, and sprawling as the Administrative Procedure Act of 1946 (APA). In recent years, courts and scholars have shown increased interest in understanding this history. This is no mean feat. The APA’s history spans nearly two decades, and it includes numerous failed bills, a presidential veto, and a full panoply of congressional documents. In addition, much of the most crucial documentation underlying the APA was produced outside of Congress—by the executive branch—and even outside of government—by the American Bar Association. Identifying and locating all the relevant documents is difficult. Understanding each piece …

The Undemocratic Roots Of Agency Rulemaking, Emily S. Bremer

Journal Articles

Americans often credit—or blame—Congress for the laws and policies that govern their lives. But Congress enacts broad statutes that give federal administrative agencies the primary responsibility for making and enforcing the regulations that control American society. These administrative agencies lack the political accountability of those in public office. To address this democratic deficit, an agency seeking to adopt a new regulation must publish a notice of proposed rulemaking and provide an opportunity for the public to comment on the proposal. Heralded as “one of the greatest inventions of modern government,” the Administrative Procedure Act’s (APA) notice-and-comment rulemaking procedure is understood …

When Should Governments Invest More In Nudging? Revisiting Benartzi Et Al. (2017), Avishalom Tor, Jonathan Klick

Journal Articles

Highly influential recent work by Benartzi et al. (2017) argues—using comparisons of effectiveness and costs—that behavioral interventions (or nudges) offer more cost-effective means than traditional regulatory instruments for changing individual behavior to achieve desirable policy goals. Based on this finding, these authors further conclude that governments and other organizations should increase their investments in nudging to supplement traditional interventions. Yet a closer look at Benartzi et al.’s (2017) own data and analysis reveals that they variously exclude and include key cost elements to the benefit of behavioral instruments over traditional ones and overstate the utility of cost-effectiveness analysis for policy …

The Law And Economics Of Behavioral Regulation, Avishalom Tor

Journal Articles

This article examines the law and economics of behavioral regulation (“nudging”), which governments and organizations increasingly use to substitute for and complement traditional instruments. To advance its welfare-based assessment, Section 1 examines alternative nudging definitions and Section 2 considers competing nudges taxonomies. Section 3 describes the benefits of nudges and their regulatory appeal, while Section 4 considers their myriad costs—most notably the private costs they generate for their targets and other market participants. Section 5 then illustrates the assessment of public and private welfare nudges using cost-benefit analysis, cost-effectiveness analysis, and rationality-effects analysis.

Faith In Elections, Derek T. Muller

Journal Articles

Americans may be suffering a crisis of faith. But not necessarily a crisis of religious faith. Instead, it is a crisis of faith in elections.

This language of faith in elections—do we have faith, are we losing faith, can we restore faith—pervades our political discourse and suggests religious imagery. Examples only scratch the surface of the language of faith in elections, democracy, and the American ideal. The language is seemingly everywhere. Words, of course, take on different meanings in different contexts. But the choice to use the word faith does appear to deliberately invoke religious imagery. Words like trust, confidence, …

Humility, Climate Change, And The Pursuit Of Scientific Truth, John Copeland Nagle

Journal Articles

This Essay begins with the understanding that environmental law could not exist without science. The tolerable amount of pollution, the proximity of a species to extinction, and the threats presented by climate change are just some of the questions that environmental law depends on science to answer. Often environmental law insists that science alone is relevant to a particular regulatory action, such as an air pollution standard or an endangered species listing. It is not surprising, therefore, that many disputes about environmental law are really disputes about science.

Science, however, does not always yield the information that environmental law needs …

Reevaluating Legal Theory, Jeffrey Pojanowski

Journal Articles

Must a good general theory of law incorporate what is good for persons in general? This question has been at the center of methodological debates in general jurisprudence for decades. Answering “no,” Julie Dickson’s book Evaluation and Legal Theory offered both a clear and concise conspectus of positivist methodology, as well as a response to the longstanding objection that such an approach has to evaluate the data it studies rather than simply describe facts about legal systems. She agreed that legal positivism must evaluate. At the same time, she argued, it is possible to offer an evaluative theory of the …

Moral Truth And Constitutional Conservatism, Gerard V. Bradley

Journal Articles

Conservative constitutionalism is committed to "originalism," that is, to interpreting the Constitution according to its original public understanding. This defining commitment of constitutional interpretation is sound. For decades, however, constitutional conservatives have diluted it with a methodology of restraint, a normative approach to the judicial task marked by an overriding aversion to critical moral reasoning. In any event, the methodology eclipsed originalism and the partnership with moral truth that originalism actually entails. Conservative constitutionalism is presently a melange of mostly unsound arguments against the worst depredations of Casey's Mystery Passage.

The reason for the methodological moral reticence is easy to …

Fashion's Brand Heritage, Cultural Heritage, And The Piracy Paradox, Felicia Caponigri

Journal Articles

This Article explores the role that heritage has on our understanding of the appropriateness of intellectual property protection for fashion designs in light of Christopher Sprigman and Kal Raustiala’s seminal work in The Piracy Paradox. At times, heritage seems to both reinforce Sprigman and Raustiala’s argument that fashion thrives in a low-IP regime and, at other times, heritage challenges that argument. Taking Italian fashion design as a case study, this Article considers the intersection of brand heritage, cultural heritage, and intellectual property law and makes three central observations. First, that fashion designs reflecting brand heritage thrive in a low-IP regime. …

The Morality Of Fiduciary Law, Paul B. Miller

Journal Articles

Recent work of fiduciary theory has provided conceptual synthesis requisite to understanding core fiduciary principles and the structure of fiduciary liability. However, normative questions have received only sporadic attention. What values animate fiduciary law? How does, or ought, fiduciary law prove responsive to them?

Where in other areas of private law theory – notably, tort theory – pioneering scholars went directly at normative questions like these, fiduciary theory has been exceptional for the reticence shown toward them. The reticence is sensible. Fiduciary principles are the product of equity’s most extended and convoluted program of supplementing surrounding law. They span several …

Dissenting From The Bench, Christine Venter

Journal Articles

This paper examines the oral dissents of Justices Antonin Scalia and Ruth Bader Ginsburg from the year 2000 to the times of their respective deaths. It explores the concept and purpose of oral dissent and details the kinds of cases in which each justice was more likely to orally dissent. The paper analyzes the kinds of rhetoric that each justice used to refer to their subject matter, and argues that Scalia's rhetoric evinces a view of the law as "autonomous", operating independently of the facts of the case. In contrast, Ginsburg's view espouses a view of the law as responsive …

Human Dignity Has No Borders: Respecting The Rights Of "People On The Move" And The Rights And Religious Freedom Of Those Who Aid Them, Christine Venter

Journal Articles

This Article argues that states must desist from and be held accountable for the ongoing practices of denying refugees due process and denying humanitarian groups the rights to freely associate and freely exercise their religion in assisting refugees.

On Being First, On Being Only, On Being Seen, On Charting A Way Forward, Veronica Root Martinez

Journal Articles

This Essay reflects upon my professional experiences as a Black woman both at Notre Dame and beyond. It argues that it is important for students to have demographically diverse professors within their educational environments. It calls for the Notre Dame Law School community to continue to create a diverse, equitable, and inclusive culture.

What Is Caesar's, What Is God's: Fundamental Public Policy For Churches, Lloyd Histoshi Mayer, Zachary B. Pohlman

Journal Articles

Bob Jones University v. United States is both a highly debated Supreme Court decision and a rarely applied one. Its recognition of a contrary to fundamental public policy doctrine that could cause an otherwise tax-exempt organization to lose its favorable federal tax status remains highly controversial, although the Court has shown no inclination to revisit the case and Congress has shown no desire to change the underlying statutes to alter the case’s result. That lack of action may be in part because the IRS applies the decision in relatively rare and narrow circumstances.

The mention of the decision during oral …

Advisory Opinions And The Problem Of Legal Authority, Christian R. Burset

Journal Articles

The prohibition against advisory opinions is fundamental to our understanding of federal judicial power, but we’ve misunderstood its origins. Discussions of the doctrine begin not with a constitutional text or even a court case, but a letter in which the Jay Court rejected President Washington’s request for legal advice. Courts and scholars have offered a variety of explanations for the Jay Court’s behavior. But they all depict the earliest Justices as responding to uniquely American concerns about advisory opinions.

This Article offers a different explanation. Drawing on previously untapped archival sources, it shows that judges throughout the anglophone world—not only …

Retheorizing Precedent, Randy J. Kozel

Journal Articles

Does the doctrine of stare decisis support judicial attempts to retheorize dubious precedents by putting them on firmer footing? If it does, can retheorization provide a means for Chevron to endure as a staple of administrative law notwithstanding serious challenges to its established rationale?

Rethinking Protections For Indigenous Sacred Sites, Stephanie H. Barclay, Michalyn Steele

Journal Articles

Meaningful access to sacred sites is among the most important principles to the religious exercise of Indigenous peoples, yet tribes have been repeatedly thwarted by the federal government in their efforts to vindicate this practice of their religion. The colonial, state, and federal governments of this Nation have been desecrating and destroying Native American sacred sites since before the Republic was formed. Unfortunately, the callous destruction of Indigenous sacred sites is not just a troubling relic of the past. Rather, the threat to sacred sites and cultural resources continues today in the form of spoliation from development, as well as …

Negative-Value Property, Bruce R. Huber

Journal Articles

Ownership is commonly regarded as a powerful tool for environmental protection and an essential solution to the tragedy of the commons. But conventional property analysis downplays the possibility of negative-value property, a category which includes contaminated, depleted, or derelict sites. Owners have little incentive to retain or restore negative-value property and much incentive to alienate it. Although the law formally prohibits the abandonment of real property, avenues remain by which owners may functionally abandon negative-value property, as demonstrated recently by busts in certain coal and oil & gas markets. When negative-value property is abandoned, whether formally or functionally, the rehabilitation …

The Mischief Rule, Samuel L. Bray

Journal Articles

The mischief rule tells an interpreter to read a statute in light of the “mischief” or “evil”—the problem that prompted the statute. The mischief rule has been associated with Blackstone’s appeal to a statute’s “reason and spirit” and with Hart-and-Sacks-style purposivism. Justice Scalia rejected the mischief rule. But the rule is widely misunderstood, both by those inclined to love it and those inclined to hate it. This Article reconsiders the mischief rule. It shows that the rule has two enduringly useful functions: guiding an interpreter to a stopping point for statutory language that can be given a broader or narrower …

Litigation Analytics: A Framework For Understanding, Using & Teaching, Peter A. Hook

Journal Articles

This article, appearing in the American Association of Law Libraries bimonthly member magazine, provides a brief introduction (under 2000 words) to litigation analytics. It contains a definition, common uses of litigation analytics, a brief history, as well as why litigation analytics should be taught in law school. The author provides his framework for teaching and understanding litigation analytics which includes types of analytics, pivot points (perspectives from which the analytics may be understood), and contextualizes the various analytics offerings by insight-needs categories: (1) categorizing and clustering; (2) ordering, ranking, and sorting; (3) distribution; (4) comparison; (5) trends; (6) geospatial location; …

Keeping Up With New Legal Titles, Susan Azyndar, Susan David Demaine

Journal Articles

A book review column featuring recent titles related to law and/or librarianship.

The High Cost Of Eviction: Struggling To Contain A Growing Social Problem, Judith Fox

Journal Articles

Matthew Desmond’s Pulitzer Prize winning book, focused public attention on the issue of eviction. As a result, scholars have begun to investigate and challenge some of the assumptions made in the book. Primarily, is eviction the cause of poverty or one of its consequences? This article explores several options in an attempt to explain the high number of evictions in America. These include, among others, the lack of affordable housing, failed governmental policies, the rise of institutional landlords and the role of courts. The article highlights some interventions that have begun to show progress in easing the burden of eviction. …

Reckoning With Adjudication's Exceptionalism Norm, Emily S. Bremer

Journal Articles

Unlike rulemaking and judicial review, administrative adjudication is governed by a norm of exceptionalism. Agencies rarely adjudicate according to the Administrative Procedure Act’s formal adjudication provisions, and the statute has little role in defining informal adjudication or specifying its minimum procedural requirements. Due process has almost nothing to say about the matter.

The result is that there are few uniform, cross-cutting procedural requirements in adjudication, and most hearings are conducted using procedures tailored for individual agencies or programs. This Article explores the benefits and costs of adjudication’s exceptionalism norm, an analysis that implicates the familiar tension between uniformity and specialization …

Conscience And Justice In Equity: Comments On Equity: Conscience Goes To Market, Paul B. Miller

Journal Articles

This short essay introduces and engages several philosophical questions raised by Irit Samet’s Equity: Conscience Goes to Market. Amongst other things, it addresses questions going to: the proper scope of equity; the relationship between equity’s remedial and supplemental functions; whether, and if so, to what extent equity promotes compliance with moral obligations; what, if any, moral aims animate equitable intervention; and whether, and if so, how, equity is distinctively concerned with matters of conscience and “particular” justice. All the while, I express appreciation for Samet’s project while raising some doubts about her views on how law and equity divide labor …