Law Commons^™

"Plausible Cause": Explanatory Standards In The Age Of Powerful Machines, Kiel Brennan-Marquez

Faculty Articles and Papers

The Fourth Amendment's probable cause requirement is not about numbers or statistics. It is about requiring the police to account for their decisions. For a theory of wrongdoing to satisfy probable cause-and warrant a search or seizure-it must be plausible. The police must be able to explain why the observed facts invite an inference of wrongdoing, and judges must have an opportunity to scrutinize that explanation.

Until recently, the explanatory aspect of Fourth Amendment suspicion-"plausible cause"-has been uncontroversial, and central to the Supreme Court's jurisprudence, for a simple reason: explanations have served, in practice, as a guarantor of statistical likelihood. …

Regulating Milk: Women And Cows In France, Mathilde Cohen

Faculty Articles and Papers

Animal milk, most commonly cow’s milk, is one of the most heavily regulated commodities in both France and the United States. With the increasing popularity of breastfeeding and the possibility of pumping, freezing, and storing breast milk, a cottage industry has emerged for people wishing to buy, sell, or donate milk produced by humans. Yet the legal landscape for human milk remains inchoate, prompting public health officials and medical professionals to call for tighter regulation. Animal and human milk are typically viewed as two distinct substances with little in common beyond a name. In contrast, this Article highlights the analogies …

Construction, Originalist Interpretation And The Complete Constitution, Richard Kay

Faculty Articles and Papers

In recent years, the literature of constitutional originalism has adopted a new concept, "constitutional construction." This Essay critically examines that concept. Contrary to some claims, the difference between "interpretation" and "construction" is not well established in common law adjudication. Contemporary descriptions of constitutional construction end up leaving some ill-defined discretion in the hands of constitutional decision-makers. Finally, the Essay disputes the claim that constitutional construction is unavoidable because the constitutional text is inherently incomplete. It fails to provide a decision-rule for manyindeed for most-constitutional disputes. This conclusion follows, howeveronly when the Constitution is interpreted according to the "new" or "public …

Hope For Indian Tribes In The Us Supreme Court: Menominee, Nebraska V. Parker, Bryant, Dollar General … And Beyond, Bethany Berger

Faculty Articles and Papers

There has long been concern that the U.S. Supreme Court is hostile to Indian tribes. Between 1990 and 2015, tribal interests lost in 76.5% of Supreme Court cases distinctly affecting them; the loss rate rose to 82% in the first decade of the Roberts Court. With four Indian law cases on the docket last year, Native communities were poised for disaster. Newspapers speculated on why tribes could not win in the Supreme Court. By the end of June 2016, however, tribal interests had lost just one case, won two, and the Court split four-four in a fourth, affirming a lower …

Of Milk And The Constitution, Mathilde Cohen

Faculty Articles and Papers

Central cases in our constitutional law canon share an unexpected similarity: they all arose out of litigation involving cattle and milk. The Slaughter-House Cases, Nebbia v. New York, Carolene Products, and Wickard v. Filburn are familiar to generations of law students as iconic cases that address key concepts such as equal protection, the states' police powers, and Congress' commerce powers. Importantly, they also ground the Supreme Court's "dairy jurisprudence "-the series of cases about milk and cattle decided between the 1880s and the early 2000s. This Article argues that this dairy jurisprudence expresses an underlying ideology of nutrition, which glorifies …

Corporations As Conduits: A Cautionary Note About Regulating Hypotheticals, Douglas M. Spencer

Faculty Articles and Papers

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Teaching Law As A Vocation: Local 1330, Promissory Estoppel, And The Critical Tradition In Labour Scholarship, Michael Fischl

Faculty Articles and Papers

A central feature of early work associated with critical legal studies was an effort to ‘break the seal’ between teaching and writing, the supposedly dichotomous dimensions of academic life. This essay locates the link in a ‘demystification’ project – a relentless focus on the recurring rhetorical structures of legal reasoning and argument – and nowhere is it more evident than in critical labour scholarship. The essay offers an extended illustration by deploying a series of critical classroom techniques in a study of Local 1330 v. U.S. Steel, a tragically unsuccessful effort by a union to prevent the closing of a …