Law Commons^™

Comparative Judicial Enforcement, Rosa Hayes, Angela Hefti

Washington Law Review

Almost immediately upon his second inauguration, President Trump took several actions that subvert longstanding norms, contravene long-settled Supreme Court precedent, and disrespect the authority of the coordinate branches to check executive branch excess. The Administration’s actions pose both immediate and long-term challenges to the American constitutional order, with many scholars and citizens believing that the United States is in the midst of a constitutional crisis. At minimum, the Trump Administration’s actions have illuminated sticking points in both functionalist and formalist conceptions of the separation of powers. For this model of shared but distributed power to function, each branch must give …

A Right Without A Remedy: The Court’S Failure To Quantify The Agua Caliente’S Federal Reserved Water Rights, Lauren Block

Washington Law Review

The Agua Caliente Band of Cahuilla Indians has inhabited the Coachella Valley region since time immemorial. Through a series of 1870s executive orders, the United States government reserved land for the Tribe to establish a permanent home within the bounds of their ancestral homeland. Underlying this permanent home is the Coachella Valley aquifer, a groundwater source that has been in a continuous state of overdraft for decades. Against the backdrop of climate change, water scarcity, and other concerns, the Tribe sued Coachella Valley’s water management agencies in 2013, alleging the Tribe owned a portion of the water in the aquifer …

Fostering An Equitable Scrum: A Conceptual Framework For Using Antiracist Enrollment Management Practices To Counter Job Market Discrimination, Aaron N. Taylor

AccessLex Institute Research

For most law students, attending law school is an investment. At stake are immense amounts of time and money spent pursuing the degree. The most desired payoff is a lucrative and fulfilling career. This chapter argues that law schools must adopt enrollment management practices that attempt to account for the job market their entering students will face at graduation. In proffering this argument, the chapter presents a conceptual framework for aligning class size targets to the future job market and proposes an equity-based approach to tuition discounting that accounts for job market racism. Graduates of color, particularly Black graduates, experience …

Constitutional Structure And Election Law, Manoj Mate

William & Mary Bill of Rights Journal

Since Bush v. Gore, scholarship on election law has centered on a theoretical debate between rights-based and structural theory approaches, and the appropriate role and scope of judicial intervention in election law cases. However, these debates have not fully assessed the degree to which the Court’s approach to constitutional structure has fundamentally reshaped election law. Over the past two decades, the Court has increasingly emphasized the importance of constitutional structure-based approaches in election law cases.

This Article analyzes these dynamics and advances a typology of constitutional structure-based approaches in election law. Drawing on scholarship on modalities of interpretation and …

Less Fisher More Doe: Non-Testimonial Mental Content And A New Rule For Unlocking Digital Devices, Jordan Wallace-Wolf

William & Mary Bill of Rights Journal

Roughly fifteen years ago, courts started to regularly confront a fact pattern that I refer to as the unlocking scenario. In this kind of case, the government seeks evidence on a criminal defendant’s digital device, but it cannot access it due to a sufficiently strong system of password protection or encryption. May the government compel the defendant to unlock the device, or would this compulsion make the defendant “a witness against himself”?

Courts gave different answers to this question right from the start, but their answers have started to diverge even more markedly in recent years, notwithstanding two formative papers …

Free Speech Trapped In Amber: The Rise Of The 'History And Tradition' Test, From Unregulated Guns To Highly Regulated Speech, Matthew D. Bunker, Emily Erickson

William & Mary Bill of Rights Journal

An insidious virus appears poised to invade First Amendment free speech doctrine. “History and tradition,” a deeply flawed variant of originalism, threatens to transform speech law from a rational enterprise, employing tiers of scrutiny to evaluate potential infringements on speech, to a random scavenger hunt through the distant past that could upend numerous vital First Amendment principles.

Traditionalism’s ascendence to the forefront of history-centric constitutional interpretation was heralded in three dramatic cases decided at the end of the U.S. Supreme Court’s October 2021 term. New York State Rifle & Pistol Ass’n v. Bruen elicited particular concern among First Amendment scholars, …

Inequality As Market Failure, Erick J. Sam

William & Mary Bill of Rights Journal

This Article explores economic, philosophical, and legal relationships between economic inequality and market failure, and it draws on these linkages to develop an innovative normative justification and alternative constitutional basis for a levy on wealth.

The Article’s central analytic result is that several general mechanisms responsible for common market failures can also systematically produce economic inequalities whenever preferences against extreme inequality are fairly widespread. Because these mechanisms satisfy both the ‘process-based’ and ‘outcome-based’ criteria of market failure, redistributive transfers designed to reduce these inequalities would be normatively justified under the widely accepted market failure theory of government action. On this …

Does Article I Of The Constitution Prohibit The States From Creating Their Own Cryptocurrencies?, Kevin Fontenot

William & Mary Bill of Rights Journal

The market for cryptocurrency (crypto) has exploded in size since the first cryptocurrency, Bitcoin, was created in 2009. As of September 4, 2024, the value of all existing cryptocurrency was $2.02 trillion. On November 14, 2024, this value reached a high of $3.2 trillion, apparently in response to the election of pro-crypto President Donald Trump. Despite the fact that cryptocurrencies have been at the forefront of many high profile scandals, consumers still flock to them. For example, celebrities including Hailey Welch (colloquially known as “Hawk Tuah girl”), Logan Paul, and Jason Derulo have been criticized for allegedly goading consumers into …

Confronting Imitation: Questioning Fair Use After Warhol, Genevieve Stegner-Freitag

William & Mary Bill of Rights Journal

The Constitution’s Intellectual Property Clause (IP Clause) contains a mandated goal of “progress” for copyright. Efforts to address what progress means move between some understanding it to be a specific Enlightenment-oriented term, progress as a forward-moving, Judeo-Christian ideal, to others viewing the term as strictly economic, understanding the goal of copyright is to get as many different products in the market as possible. Defining what progress means in copyright law is a necessary step, as courts are increasingly considering market forces in granting or denying authorial property rights. This Note addresses what progress means, how imitative art factors in, and …

Beyond Equality To Belonging: The Missing Value In Equal Protection Law Involving Education, Danieli Evans

Washington Law Review

Belonging is a fundamental need without which people cannot function optimally. Accordingly, school belonging—students’ perceptions of mattering or feeling cared about, accepted, respected and valued by faculty, staff, and peers—impacts students’ well-being, academic motivation and outcomes.

Equal Protection jurisprudence governing education largely overlooks the value of school belonging. Instead, it centers on a formal conception of equality, or an “anti-classification” principle, which essentially prohibits purposeful discrimination based on a fixed set of suspect traits. This formalistic “anti-classification” approach permits many policies and practices that undermine students’ sense of school belonging and inhibits schools from taking certain measures to foster belonging. …

Engendering Human Rights Through Clinical Legal Education, Caroline S. Bettinger-Lopez

UMKC Law Review

No abstract provided.

Engendering Authority: Social Movements, Legitimacy, And Gender, Judith Resnik

UMKC Law Review

No abstract provided.

Sex, Gender, And The Blogosphere: Looking Back At The Feminist Law Professors Blog, 2006-2024, Bridget J. Crawford

UMKC Law Review

The Feminist Law Professors blog began in 2006 as a modest effort to make feminist legal scholars more visible to one another and to the broader world. What emerged from this effort was a dynamic, collectively imagined space that bore witness to generational shifts in feminist legal thought, the rise and fall of blogging culture, and the enduring challenges of feminist community-building. This Essay reflects on the origins, evolution, and legacies of the Feminist Law Professors blog, situating it within its legal, cultural, and technological moments. It also offers my reflections—as one of two blog editors—on the risks and rewards …

The Future Of Working Families In A Riven Political And Moral Economy, Deborah Dinner

UMKC Law Review

No abstract provided.

Glass Cliff Off An Ivory Tower, Katharine Traylor Schaffzin, Katie Kempner

UMKC Law Review

No abstract provided.

Some Thoughts On Outsiders Within The Legal Academy, Jamelia N. Morgan

UMKC Law Review

No abstract provided.

What Do We Have To Lose? The Lasting Legacies And Lost Promise Of Feminist Legal History, Serena Mayeri

UMKC Law Review

No abstract provided.

Is The Fourth Amendment Sexist?, Alexandra Mckee

UMKC Law Review

No abstract provided.

The Origin And Future Of Shield Laws, David S. Cohen, Rachel Rebouché

UMKC Law Review

This Essay describes the origin and future of so-called shield laws—novel state legislation designed to protect legal abortion care from out-of-state attack. These laws have facilitated an increase in the number of abortions even in the wake of the Supreme Court overturning Roe v. Wade in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization. The Essay, after detailing shield laws’ origins (Part II) and content (Part III), highlights how shield laws have operated and succeeded over the last three years (Part IV) as well as the challenges mounted against shield laws and shield providers (Part V). Although state lawsuits and the possibility …

Contemporary Law And Economics, Adam Chilton, Joshua C. Macey, Mila Versteeg

University of Chicago Law Review

Law and economics (L&E) emerged as a field in the middle of the twentieth century, it focused on using economic theory to study the common law. During this period, L&E offered insights so novel that it not only profoundly influenced legal doctrine, but the movement’s key figures also became some of the most cited and acclaimed scholars in the American academy. The field of law and economics has since continued to grow and become more technically sophisticated, but it is also a less cohesive movement. Moreover, L&E has been misunderstood and misrepresented by the emerging law and political economy (LPE) …

When Should The Legal System Help Redistribute Income?, Jacob Goldin, Zachary Liscow

University of Chicago Law Review

Should legal rules be designed exclusively based on efficiency considerations, or should they also attempt to promote an equitable distribution of social resources? The answer traditionally associated with scholarship in law and economics is that they should focus only on efficiency. Even for a society that cares about achieving an equitable distribution of resources by income, the argument goes, it is generally better to adopt legal rules based exclusively on efficiency considerations while relying on the income tax and transfer system to promote distributional goals.

However, even proponents of the claim that social welfare is best promoted through the adoption …

Law And The Self-Coordinating Market Idea, Sanjukta Paul

University of Chicago Law Review

“This emotional pronouncement of value judgments condemning emotion and value judgments seems to [me] a symptom of a defective sense of humor. The attempt to build a social science on these foundations suggests that the human race, and especially a large proportion of its ‘best minds,’ having at long last (a very long last) found out that the objects of nature are not like human beings—are not actuated by love and hate and caprice and contrariness, and subject to persuasion, cajolery, and threats—have logically inferred that human beings must be like natural objects, and so viewed by the seeker of …

Contents, North Carolina Law Review

North Carolina Law Review

No abstract provided.

Against Privacy Essentialism, Daniel J. Solove

North Carolina Law Review

No abstract provided.

Trademasks, Matthew Sipe

North Carolina Law Review

No abstract provided.

Parents At The Schoolhouse Gate, Emily Gold Waldman

North Carolina Law Review

No abstract provided.

Pocket Arbitration!, D. Mclean Campbell

North Carolina Law Review

No abstract provided.

Opting Out Of Privacy: United States V. Chatrie And The Erosion Of Fourth Amendment Protections, Chloe H. Iurillo

North Carolina Law Review

No abstract provided.

Bankrupt Crypto Organizations, Kara Bruce, Christopher K. Odinet, Andrea Tosato

Faculty Scholarship

This Article provides the first comprehensive analysis of the intersection between decentralized autonomous organizations (DAOs) and American bankruptcy law. DAOs are blockchain-based entities that enable individuals to pursue common goals using decentralized decision-making and automated governance. Since their recent emergence, DAOs have proliferated dramatically—with over 20,000 organizations managing over $20 billion in assets and engaging in activities ranging from investment management to real estate and even attempting to purchase historic copies of the U.S. Constitution. Yet like any other organization, DAOs can fail, creating an urgent need to understand what happens when unstoppable code meets immovable bankruptcy law.

Our investigation …

Contagious Discrimination: Why Race-Blind Justice In Courtrooms Is Not Enough, Yijia Lu, Murat C. Mungan

Faculty Scholarship

Existing theories of discrimination focus on discrimination at the individual, societal, or organizational level. We highlight the importance of the dynamic relationship between different institutional actors who jointly give rise to discriminatory outcomes. This reveals that discrimination can be contagious: discrimination that would otherwise not occur at one institutional level can arise due to discrimination at another institutional level. Therefore, discrimination by some actors can trickle down and create disparate impacts in processes that would otherwise be free of discrimination. This phenomenon, which we term “contagious discrimination,” can manifest itself in various settings such as employment and commercial trade negotiations. …