Law Commons^™

A New Approach To Plaintiff Incentive Fees In Class Action Lawsuits, Jason Jarvis

Northwestern University Law Review

Because modern litigation is time-intensive and expensive, a consumer has no monetary incentive to sue over a low-value claim—even when the defendant has clearly violated that consumer’s legal rights. But the defendant may have harmed many consumers in the same way, causing significant cumulative damage. By permitting the aggregation of numerous small claims, class action lawsuits provide a monetary incentive for lawyers and plaintiffs to pursue otherwise low-value suits. Often, an important part of this incentive is the “incentive fee,” an additional payment awarded to the named plaintiffs as compensation for the time they spend and risks they assume in …

Avoiding Judicial Discipline, Veronica Root Martinez

Northwestern University Law Review

Over the past several years, several high-profile complaints have been levied against Article III judges alleging improper conduct. Many of these complaints, however, were dismissed without investigation after the judge in question removed themselves from the jurisdiction of the circuit’s judicial council—oftentimes through retirement and once through elevation to the Supreme Court. When judges—the literal arbiters of justice within American society—are able to elude oversight of their own potential misconduct, it puts the legitimacy of the judiciary and the rule of law in jeopardy.

This Essay argues that it is imperative that mechanisms are adopted that will ensure investigations into …

Too Many To Fail: Against Community Bank Deregulation, Jeremy C. Kress, Matthew C. Turk

Northwestern University Law Review

Since the 2008 financial crisis, policymakers and scholars have fixated on the problem of “too-big-to-fail” banks. This fixation, however, overlooks the historically dominant pattern in banking crises: the contemporaneous failure of many small institutions. We call this blind spot the “too-many-to-fail” problem and document how its neglect has skewed the past decade of financial regulation. In particular, we argue that, for so- called community banks, there has been a pronounced and unjustifiable shift toward deregulation, culminating in sweeping regulatory rollbacks in the Economic Growth, Regulatory Relief, and Consumer Protection Act of 2018.

As this Article demonstrates, this deregulatory trend rests …

The Case Against Prosecuting Refugees, Evan J. Criddle

Northwestern University Law Review

Within the past several years, the U.S. Department of Justice has pledged to prosecute asylum-seekers who enter the United States outside an official port of entry without inspection. This practice has contributed to mass incarceration and family separation at the U.S.–Mexico border, and it has prevented bona fide refugees from accessing relief in immigration court. Yet, federal judges have taken refugee prosecution in stride, assuming that refugees, like other foreign migrants, are subject to the full force of American criminal justice if they skirt domestic border controls. This assumption is gravely mistaken.

This Article shows that Congress has not authorized …

Energy Emergencies, Amy L. Stein

Northwestern University Law Review

Emergency powers are essential to the proper functioning of the government. Emergencies demand swift and decisive action; yet, our system of government also values deliberation and procedures. To enable such agility in a system fraught with bureaucracy, Congress frequently delegates unilateral statutory emergency powers directly to its most nimble actor: the President. The powers Congress delegates to the President are vast and varied, and often sacrifice procedural requirements in favor of expediency. Most scholars and policymakers have come to terms with this tradeoff, assuming that the need to respond quickly is outweighed by any loss of accountability.

This Article challenges …

Litigating Welfare Rights: Medicaid, Snap, And The Legacy Of The New Property, Andrew Hammond

Northwestern University Law Review

In 2017, the Republican-controlled Congress was poised to make deep cuts to the nation’s two largest anti-poverty programs: Medicaid and the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), commonly known as “food stamps.” Yet, despite a unified, GOP-led federal government for the first time in over a decade, those efforts failed. Meanwhile, the Trump Administration and its allies in state government continue to pursue different strategies to roll back entitlements to medical and food assistance. As public interest lawyers challenge these agency actions in federal court, roughly five million Americans’ health insurance and food assistance hang in the balance. This Article asks …

On Sexual Harassment In The Judiciary, Leah M. Litman, Deeva Shah

Northwestern University Law Review

This Essay examines the legal profession’s role in sexual harassment, particularly in the federal courts. It argues that individuals in the profession have both an individual and collective responsibility for the professional norms that have allowed harassment to happen with little recourse for the people subject to the harassment. It suggests that the legal profession should engage in a sustained, public reflection about how our words, actions, attitudes, and institutional arrangements allow harassment to happen, and about the many different ways that we can prevent and address harassment.

On Fosta And The Failures Of Punitive Speech Restrictions, Emily Morgan

Northwestern University Law Review

The Allow States and Victims to Fight Online Sex Trafficking Act (FOSTA) has provoked criticism from free-speech advocates, people involved in the commercial sex trade, everyday internet users, and scholars who deem the Act dangerous and ineffective. This Note helps to explain how such a controversial law came to be. Indeed, FOSTA is part of a legacy of failed attempts at reforming laws to comport with feminist goals—in this case, ending online sex trafficking and providing relief for sex-trafficking survivors, a group that consists largely of women and other marginalized people. But FOSTA, like its predecessors, fails to provide real …

Second Amendment Sanctuaries, Shawn E. Fields

Northwestern University Law Review

The term “sanctuary” has long expressed a sympathy for immigrants’ rights and resistance to federal immigration enforcement. Recently, the word has become associated with another divisive political topic, as local governments have begun declaring themselves “Second Amendment Sanctuaries” in defiance of statewide gun-control measures they deem unconstitutional. This gun-rights resistance movement not only flips the political script on the nature of sanctuaries, but also presents important and challenging questions about local–state power sharing, the proper scope of “subfederal commandeering,” and the role of coordinate branches in constitutional decision-making. This Article provides the first scholarly treatment of Second Amendment Sanctuaries. In …

Prerogative And Legislator Vetoes, Elliot Louthen

Northwestern University Law Review

Prerogative is the devolution of power to a single legislator over decisions in her district. In cities with a prerogative regime, when the city council votes on an issue or an administrative agency makes a decision concerning a specific district, decision-makers defer to that district’s legislator. This deference gives the legislator exclusive executive authority over her district. In Chicago and Philadelphia, legislators have infamously wielded prerogative and tied the practice to corruption. But in addition to corruption, prerogative gives rise to another, more pernicious issue. When applied to decisions related to affordable housing, prerogative perpetuates racial segregation through legislator vetoes. …

Mass Solitary And Mass Incarceration: Explaining The Dramatic Rise In Prolonged Solitary In America's Prisons, Jules Lobel

Northwestern University Law Review

In the last two decades of the twentieth century, prisons throughout the United States witnessed a dramatic rise in the use of solitary confinement, and the practice continues to be widespread. From the latter part of the nineteenth century until the 1970s and ’80s, prolonged solitary confinement in the United States had fallen into disuse, as numerous observers and the United States Supreme Court recognized that the practice caused profound mental harm to prisoners. The reasons for this dramatic rise in the nationwide use of solitary confinement and the development of new supermax prisons have not been explored in depth. …

Incrementalist Vs. Maximalist Reform: Solitary Confinement Case Studies, Margo Schlanger

Northwestern University Law Review

Among criminal justice reformers, it has long been hotly contested whether moderate reform helps or harms more efforts to achieve more thoroughgoing change. With respect to solitary confinement, do partial and ameliorative measures undermine the goal of solitary confinement abolition? Or do reformist campaigns advance—albeit incrementally—that ultimate goal? Call this a debate between “incrementalists” and “maximalists.” I offer this Essay as an appeal for empirical rather than aesthetic inquiry into the question. After summarizing nationwide reform litigation efforts that began in the 1970s, I try to shed some factual light by examining solitary reform efforts in two states, Massachusetts and …

Foreword, David M. Shapiro, Emily Mccormick, Annie Prossnitz

Northwestern University Law Review

No abstract provided.

The Science Of Solitary: Expanding The Harmfulness Narrative, Craig Haney

Northwestern University Law Review

The harmful effects of solitary confinement have been established in a variety of direct observations and empirical studies that date back to the nineteenth century, conducted in many different countries by researchers with diverse disciplinary backgrounds. This Essay argues that these effects should be situated and understood in the context of a much larger scientific literature that documents the adverse and sometimes life- threatening psychological and physical consequences of social isolation, social exclusion, loneliness, and the deprivation of caring human touch as they occur in free society. These dangerous conditions are the hallmarks of solitary confinement. Yet they are imposed …

A Wrong Without A Right? Overcoming The Prison Litigation Reform Act's Physical Injury Requirement In Solitary Confinement Cases, Maggie Filler, Daniel Greenfield

Northwestern University Law Review

This Essay argues against applying the so-called “physical injury” requirement of the Prison Litigation Reform Act (PLRA) to deny monetary compensation to solitary confinement survivors. The Essay identifies three ways in which misapplication of the PLRA’s physical injury requirement limits the ability of solitary confinement survivors to receive monetary compensation for psychological harm suffered. First, some courts applying the PLRA wrongly dismiss damages claims for alleging “de minimis” physical injury. Second, some courts have been reluctant to find that physical injury caused by psychological trauma satisfies the PLRA’s physical injury requirement. Third, courts do not distinguish between “garden …

Is Solitary Confinement A Punishment?, John F. Stinneford

Northwestern University Law Review

The United States Constitution imposes a variety of constraints on the imposition of punishment, including the requirements that the punishment be authorized by a preexisting penal statute and ordered by a lawful judicial sentence. Today, prison administrators impose solitary confinement on thousands of prisoners despite the fact that neither of these requirements has been met. Is this imposition a “punishment without law,” or is it a mere exercise of administrative discretion? In an 1890 case called In re Medley, the Supreme Court held that solitary confinement is a separate punishment subject to constitutional restraints, but it has ignored this …

How Do We Reach A National Tipping Point In The Campaign To Stop Solitary?, Amy Fettig

Northwestern University Law Review

The use and abuse of solitary confinement in American prisons, jails, and juvenile detention centers is at epidemic levels. On any given day 80,000 to 100,000 people in prisons are subjected to a practice considered inhumane and degrading treatment—even torture under international human rights standards. Despite widespread international condemnation, decades of research demonstrating the harm it inflicts on human beings, and a growing chorus from the medical community raising alarms about its impact on the brain, solitary confinement remains a routine prison-management strategy in correctional institutions nationwide. In the past decade, however, a growing movement has emerged to challenge the …

Consensus Statement From The Santa Cruz Summit On Solitary Confinement And Health

Northwestern University Law Review

No abstract provided.

Punishment In Prison: Constituting The "Normal" And The "Atypical" In Solitary And Other Forms Of Confinement, Judith Resnik, Hirsa Amin, Sophie Angelis, Megan Hauptman, Laura Kokotailo, Aseem Mehta, Madeline Silva, Tor Tarantola, Meredith Wheeler

Northwestern University Law Review

What aspects of human liberty does incarceration impinge? A remarkable group of Black and white prisoners, most of whom had little formal education and no resources, raised that question in the 1960s and 1970s. Incarcerated individuals asked judges for relief from corporal punishment; radical food deprivations; strip cells; solitary confinement in dark cells; prohibitions on bringing these claims to courts, on religious observance, and on receiving reading materials; and from transfers to long- term isolation and to higher security levels.

Judges concluded that some facets of prison that were once ordinary features of incarceration, such as racial segregation, rampant violence, …

Monopoly Or Monopolization––A Reply To Professor Rostow, Edward R. Johnston, John Paul Stevens

Northwestern University Law Review

No abstract provided.

A Personal History Of The Law Review, John Paul Stevens

Northwestern University Law Review

No abstract provided.

Delaware's New Competition, William J. Moon

Northwestern University Law Review

According to the standard account in American corporate law, states compete to supply corporate law to American corporations, with Delaware dominating the market. This “competition” metaphor in turn informs some of the most important policy debates in American corporate law.

This Article complicates the standard account, introducing foreign nations as emerging lawmakers that compete with American states in the increasingly globalized market for corporate law. In recent decades, entrepreneurial foreign nations in offshore islands have used permissive corporate governance rules and specialized business courts to attract publicly traded American corporations. Aided in part by a select group of private sector …

Mezei's Day In Court: Debtors' Prisons, Substance Abuse, And The Permissiveness Of Civil Detention In American Immigration Law, Conor Mcdonough

Northwestern University Law Review

American immigration law mandates the civil detention of certain classes of migrants while their legal cases proceed through the courts. Due to the peculiar nature of immigration law, many migrants find themselves detained for years on end without receiving the level of due process that normally attends imprisonment. This Note draws on historical and comparative analysis to argue that the mandatory detention provisions of American immigration law are not civil, but functionally criminal, and that detained migrants are therefore owed a modicum of due process that they do not currently receive.

This Note traces the history of immigration law in …

From The Spirit Of The Federalist Papers To The End Of Legitimacy: Reflections On Gundy V. United States, J. Benton Heath

Northwestern University Law Review

The revival of the nondelegation doctrine, foreshadowed last term in Gundy v. United States, signals the end of a distinctive style of legal and political thought. The doctrine’s apparent demise after the 1930s facilitated the development of a methodological approach that embodied what Lon Fuller once called “the spirit of the Federalist Papers”: an open-ended engagement with the problem of designing democracy and controlling public power. At its best, this discourse was critical and propulsive, with each purported solution generating more questions than it answered. The turn against congressional delegations will likely bring to a close this period of …

Transparency Deserts, Christina Koningisor

Northwestern University Law Review

Few contest the importance of a robust transparency regime in a democratic system of government. In the United States, the “crown jewel” of this regime is the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA). Yet despite widespread agreement about the importance of transparency in government, few are satisfied with FOIA. Since its enactment, the statute has engendered criticism from transparency advocates and critics alike for insufficiently serving the needs of both the public and the government. Legal scholars have widely documented these flaws in the federal public records law.

In contrast, scholars have paid comparatively little attention to transparency laws at the …

Justice Stevens And The Project Of Perfecting The Constitution, Katherine Shaw

Northwestern University Law Review

No abstract provided.

Sixty-Five Oral Arguments Were Not Enough: A Tribute To Justice Stevens From Across The Bench, Carter G. Phillips

Northwestern University Law Review

No abstract provided.

Judging And Baseball, Merritt E. Mcalister

Northwestern University Law Review

No abstract provided.

"The Function Of The Independent Lawyer As A Guardian Of Our Freedom": The Great Stevens Dissent In Walters, Andrew Koppelman

Northwestern University Law Review

No abstract provided.

In Memoriam, Hannah Mullen

Northwestern University Law Review

No abstract provided.