Law and Politics Commons^™

The Rise And [?] Of Anti-Administrativism, Gary Lawson

BYU Law Review

Scholars have proclaimed the administrative state to be “Under Siege” or subject to a “Never-Ending Assault.” Was the election of President Donald Trump on November 5, 2024, the sixth, if not yet the seventh, day around the walls?

This seems an appropriate time to consider the present and future of opposition to the administrative state—something that has come to be dubbed “anti-administrativism.” The first task, as is usually the case when one seeks intellectual clarity, is to figure out what one is talking about. What is this “anti-administrativism”? Without knowing the answer to that seemingly simple question, one cannot accurately …

Twilight Of Deference? Kisor, Chevron, And The Fate Of Deference To The Commentary Of The United States Sentencing Guidelines, Hannah May

University of Cincinnati Law Review

No abstract provided.

The Due Process And Policy Implications Of The Laken Riley Act, Abigail Adu

University of Cincinnati Law Review

No abstract provided.

How Armenia And Azerbaijan Are Lobbying For Influence In D.C., Gibran C. Boyce, Dawn Kikel

Capstones

In the wake of President Trump taking office, foreign government agencies and U.S.-based non-profits serving Armenian and Azerbaijani interests have been hiring lobbyists in Washington, D.C. as part of their concerted efforts to curry favor, gain influence, and seek policy changes that would benefit the rival post-Soviet nations.

Greenhat’S Greenlight To The Cftc: The Case For A Jurisdictional Shift Of Financial Transmission Rights From The Federal Energy Regulatory Commission To The Commodity Futures Trading Commission, Timothy K. Shaw Ii

DePaul Business & Commercial Law Journal

Regional Transmission Organizations and Independent System Operators are a relatively new platform to buy and sell wholesale electricity and transmission service of that electricity. These groundbreaking organizations have been around since 1996 after the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (“FERC”) issued Order 888. FERC regulates the physical electricity wholesale sale and transmission service market managed by a Regional Transmission Organization (“RTO”) or Independent System Operator (“ISO”),through its Federal Power Act mandate. Many RTOs and ISOs offer a product called a Financial Transmission Right (“FTR”). Traditionally, FTRs assist the holder by providing price certainty, or a hedge, in the capacity market. This …

Choosing The Best Entity For Investments Trading After Understanding The Tax Limitations And Restrictions, Ray A. Knight, Joseph Lakatos

DePaul Business & Commercial Law Journal

The trading of various securities is subject to market rules. However, when securities trading is completed within a business entity, the entity is subject to tax limitations and restrictions. The tax benefits cannot be the dominant purpose for the entity structure; economic substance including profit motive and business purpose for each transaction must be able to be shown.

The trading of investment securities must be housed in the right entity to gain the best economic results as well as to minimize the tax burden. The entity selection process must first consider the characteristics and nature of the securities (e.g., currencies, …

Volume 23 - Front Matter

DePaul Business & Commercial Law Journal

No abstract provided.

Expanding The Foreign National Prohibition To Combat Russian Interference In U.S. Elections, Hailey Arnett

William & Mary Bill of Rights Journal

In 2016, the Russian government purchased political advertisements from U.S. social media companies like Facebook to sway the U.S. presidential election. These purchases violated the foreign national prohibition (“the Prohibition”), which Congress codified as part of the Federal Election Campaign Act Amendments of 1974 (FECA). This Note explains why Congress should expand the Prohibition to capture the recipients of independent expenditures that violate the Prohibition and fine people who run online platforms that receive independent expenditures or contributions made by foreign nationals in violation of the Prohibition.

Part I describes current U.S. case law on domestic and foreign campaign finance …

An Analysis Of Policies Impacting Ex-Offenders And The Barriers Created In Their Transition Into Society: A Qualitative Metasynthesis, Thomas A. Ayala

Theses & Dissertations

In 2018, more than six million people in the United States were under correctional supervision, including incarceration, probation, or parole, equivalent to 1 in 40 adults (Maruschak & Minton, 2020). While this reflects a decline from previous years, prison populations reversed course in 2022, increasing by 2% nationwide, with 36 states and federal facilities reporting higher inmate counts (Nellis, 2024). Since 1973, policy shifts have fueled the rise of mass incarceration (Nellis, 2021; O’Brien, 2020). According to the Pew Center, the United States remains a global outlier, holding 5% of the world’s population, but incarcerates 25% of the 9 million …

Separation-Of-Powers Lochnerism, Andrea Scoseria Katz

Fordham Law Review

One hundred and twenty years ago, in 1905, the U.S. Supreme Court rendered one of the single most notorious opinions in history, striking down a New York labor law for violating the right to contract—a right found nowhere in the text of the Constitution. Though the era of Lochner v. New York is well past us, the judicial impulses that gave rise to the case remain. With a new champion in the Roberts Court, Lochnerism is alive and well, deployed in a new context to redefine the relationships between the president, Congress, federal agencies, and the courts.

Bringing together two …

Equality In Sentencing Mitigation, John B. Meixner Jr.

Fordham Law Review

As guilty-plea rates have skyrocketed, sentencing has become an increasingly important part of criminal procedure. With judges often wielding significant discretion at sentencing, a key question is how judges interpret mitigation: evidence about the defendant’s background or the case that supports a reduced sentence. Past empirical research—both experimental and in real-world cases—indicates that mitigation plays an important role in determining sentences. But does mitigation help everyone, or does it reinforce inequalities that frequently infect other areas of criminal procedure? Do low-income Black defendants with appointed counsel benefit from sentencing mitigation as much as wealthier White defendants with private attorneys? Do …

Red, White-, And Blue-Collar Crime: Federal Sentencing Practices Among White-Collar And Blue-Collar Offenders, Henna Judge

Fordham Law Review

Under the current federal sentencing regime, district courts exercise immense amounts of discretion when sentencing. Though strict adherence to the U.S. Sentencing Commission Guidelines (the “Guidelines”) was once mandatory, courts must now use these Guidelines as an advisory starting point and make a series of fact-specific determinations when sentencing a defendant. Though judicial discretion in this realm aids in preventing undue reliance on Guidelines-range recommendations that can lack nuance, it also invites bias.

In recent years, scholars and courts alike have called attention to a potential disparity in the way blue-collar and white-collar offenders are sentenced. This Note examines relevant …

Mississippi Redistricting And The Voting Rights Act: An Historical Supplement, Leslie H. Southwick

MC Law Review

No abstract provided.

The Silent Sound Of Drowning: Human Rights Justifications And Complex Intersectionality, Maria Grahn-Farley

Brooklyn Journal of International Law

This Article presents a new concept, “Human Rights Justifications,” which captures instances in which states invoke human rights to defend and legitimize their own actions. Human Rights Justifications stand in contrast to cases in which human rights are activated by an individual holding the state accountable for its actions. The difference between when a state and when an individual is the activating subject is that with the former, human rights risk serving the state in legitimizing its actions, instead of serving the individual as a protection from the state. This occurs because, when the state activates human rights, it also …

National Values Matter For Ai: Comparative Analysis Of Ai Regulations In The Us, The Eu, And China, Kaori (Furuya) Kawaguchi

Brooklyn Journal of International Law

As artificial intelligence (AI) continues to evolve rapidly, governments worldwide face increasing pressure to regulate it. This Article focuses on regulatory approaches to AI in the United States, the European Union, and China, examining the underlying rationales: why have they taken these approaches? Each jurisdiction’s unique political institutions, historical preferences, and strategic priorities shape its approach to governance. In particular, the values the jurisdiction expects in technology shape its regulation. The US adopts a decentralized, innovation-friendly model rooted in reliance on market and self-regulation in industries with its strong trust in laissez-faire philosophy; the EU asserts global leadership in regulations …

A Middle-Class New Deal: A Call To Action, Angela K. Littwin

Brooklyn Journal of Corporate, Financial & Commercial Law

The books featured in the Debt in the Real World Symposium paint compelling portraits of American financial insecurity and distress. The fact that half of U.S. households cannot make ends meet is a devastating development, but it also presents an opportunity for making change because economic insecurity is now an “us” problem rather than a “them” problem. The next step is to organize, and as part of that process, to develop a vision of an economy that works for everyone. The title of one featured book, Michele Dickerson’s forthcoming The Middle Class New Deal, is a strong starting point because …

Missing Strugglers: Debt’S Reach, Bankruptcy’S Limits, And A Proxy For Who’S Left Out, Dalié Jiménez

Brooklyn Journal of Corporate, Financial & Commercial Law

This essay uses Debt’s Grip as a point of departure to examine how debt operates as a system of social control in the United States. While the book offers a vivid portrait of those who file for bankruptcy, it also gestures toward a broader reality: millions of financially distressed individuals who never access relief. Drawing on legal scholarship and political theory, this Essay argues that debt disciplines individuals, fragments solidarity, and undermines democratic agency. It proposes a new metric—the ratio of debt collection lawsuits to bankruptcy filings—as a proxy for unmet need, revealing a population of “missing strugglers” visible to …

Power, Tools, And Process: Some Reflections On Bankruptcy Minimalism, Edward J. Janger

Brooklyn Journal of Corporate, Financial & Commercial Law

In Unjust Debts: How Our Bankruptcy System Makes America More Unequal, Melissa Jacoby offers a brilliant and sweeping indictment of the way in which bankruptcy law is currently practiced in the United States. As she puts it, “This book is a story of falling out of love. With a law.” Like me, Professor Jacoby came of professional age, at the close of the first age of the Bankruptcy Code. Enacted in 1978, we both learned the statute in the mid-1990s, at a time when the transformative power of the 1978 Code was reaching its peak. On the business side, corporations …

Interdisciplinary Research Is Hard And Other Lessons From Debt’S Grip, Pamela Foohey, Robert M. Lawless, Deborah Thorne

Brooklyn Journal of Corporate, Financial & Commercial Law

This symposium spotlights recent book-length treatments of household finance. Its organizers asked us to write an essay that would add to our recently published book, Debt’s Grip. At first, we were at a loss. The book documents what it means to live in financial precarity after decades of risk shifting onto households in the United States. We had spent a couple of years writing the book, which in turn is built on over a decade of teamwork in data collection. If we had something more to say, we would have said it in the book. For those looking for new …

Democratic Integrity Under Threat: Confronting Disinformation With Legislative And Structural Reforms, Sophia Brociner

Journal of Law and Policy

In the modern digital era, disinformation has evolved from a political strategy into a fundamental threat to democratic governance. This Note contends that the absence of comprehensive federal legislation addressing political disinformation on social media has compromised both the integrity of elections and the public’s trust in government institutions. By analyzing the disinformation campaigns that shaped the 2016, 2020, and 2024 presidential elections, this Note demonstrates how false and AI-generated content, amplified by both foreign and domestic actors, has manipulated voters, deepened political polarization, and destabilized public confidence in democratic processes. The discussion examines how rapid technological development, insufficient regulatory …

The Political Dynamics Of Constitutional Law, Neal Devins

William & Mary Bill of Rights Journal

No abstract provided.

Judge Platt Potter: Politics And Principle In Interbranch Conflict, Aaron-Andrew P. Bruhl

Faculty Publications

During the previous Congress, some commentators called on the Senate Judiciary Committee, then controlled by Democrats and chaired by Senator Dick Durbin of Illinois, to demand the testimony of Supreme Court Justices Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito over allegations of ethical breaches, securing their presence by subpoena if necessary. The Committee did not subpoena the Justices, with Durbin citing the likely lack of sufficient votes and worrying that the Senate would not be able to enforce the subpoenas anyway. During the same Congress, Durbin asked Chief Justice Roberts to testify about judicial ethics, an invitation that Roberts declined.

These incidents …

Symbolic Justice: The Continued Limits Of International Criminal Justice Without A Permanent Prison System, Meg Penrose

Faculty Scholarship

Many people misremember Nuremberg, Tokyo, and the subsequent World War II tribunals. These seminal international tribunals gave the world convictions but largely failed to fully enforce the sentences imposed. Most people do not recall the mass clemency following the World War II tribunals. This Article seeks to fill a scholarly void by explaining why international criminal justice has never matured beyond Nuremberg and Tokyo. The modern ad hoc tribunals, as well as the permanent International Criminal Court (“ICC”), have failed to deliver lasting justice. Much like Nuremberg and Tokyo, the modern tribunals fixate on arrests and convictions and then seemingly …

Copyright, Incentives, And Popular Music Composition, Glynn S. Lunney Jr.

Faculty Scholarship

The rise of file sharing and the subsequent collapse in sales of recorded music offer a rare glimpse into a counterfactual world where copyright, for a time, was weakened. Comparing creative output before and after this exogenous shock allows us to test empirically whether incentives to copyright owners were correlated with creative output. In this article, I extend previous work on this issue from recording artists to songwriters and search for a correlation between incentives and popular music composition. In particular, I test three hypotheses. First, I test whether more incentives were associated with more or better popular musical compositions. …

Per Se Non-Takings, Nestor M. Davisdson, Timothy M. Mulvaney

Faculty Scholarship

In the discourse on the Takings Clause, disputes over methodology have long formed a kind of proxy war, with per se rules ordinarily underwriting strong constitutional protection for property rights and ad hoc standards more often vindicating public interests. At a moment when the Supreme Court is increasingly embracing the rules end of this rules-standards spectrum, this Article offers a novel perspective to challenge the conventional link between categorical reasoning and classical liberal conceptions of constitutional property.

To do so, the Article excavates a vast body of law denying takings liability through rule-like reasoning, an approach the Article calls per …

Preventive Transparency In Third-Party Litigation Funding, Seth Katsuya Endo

Northwestern University Law Review

For years, efforts to comprehensively regulate third-party litigation funding have been unsuccessful. But bills requiring mandatory disclosure are being introduced in Congress, and the Advisory Committee for Civil Rules has finally agreed to take up the issue. By grounding the discussion of third-party litigation funding in both the broader civil procedure and professional responsibility scholarship, this Article identifies an easy, uncontroversial reform to preventively address the categorical concerns raised by the practice. The primary contribution is a doctrinal intervention, identifying how legal ethics are an integral part of federal civil procedure and then drawing out the implications for third-party litigation …

Malapportionment: A Murder Mystery, Daniel Wodak

Northwestern University Law Review

Malapportionment—electoral districts with divergent ratios of people to representation—was ruled to be unconstitutional in a widely venerated series of cases before the Warren Court. Those cases held that a principle of political equality, one person, one vote, is required by the Constitution. But what is the content of that principle? Many Justices and commentators declare that it is vague, empty, circular, or meaningless. This creates a murder mystery. Malapportionment was killed, but by what exactly? This Article seeks an answer by focusing on the Supreme Court’s commitments about the scope and strictness of one person, one vote: it …

Control As A Constitutional Threshold: Moody V. Netchoice And The Case For Human Authorship, Giselle Goad

Northwestern University Law Review

The Supreme Court’s 2024 decision in Moody v. NetChoice, LLC left a critical question unanswered: when do algorithmic outputs on social media platforms, such as recommended posts and videos, constitute the platform’s protected speech under the First Amendment? This Note contends that courts and litigants should borrow from the First Amendment’s speech-promoting partner, copyright law, and its authorship framework when answering that question. Copyright doctrine has already begun to grapple with how much human control is required over expressive outputs generated with the aid of technology, including AI, in order for an author to receive copyright protection over those outputs. …

Investigating The Relationship Between Noun Classes And Plant Folk Taxonomy In Chasu Language Of Kilimanjaro Region In Tanzania, Peter Rabson Mziray

Journal of Humanities and Social Sciences

The current study investigates the relationship between noun classes and plant folk taxonomy in Chasu (G 22). The study focuses on two objectives: the first objective is to describe the plant folk taxonomy in Chasu and the second objective is to determine the relationship between noun classes and plant folk taxonomy in Chasu. Data were collected from rural villages in Same and Mwanga districts by using free listing, field interviews (jungle-walk-and-identify), and written texts containing Chasu plant names. The findings reveal that Chasu folk taxonomy reflects different ethnobotanical categories; including a unique beginner which is mmea/mimea ‘plant(s)’, and three life …

A Comparison Of Inadequate Doctrines: The Canadian “Honour Of The Crown” And The U.S. Federal Trust Responsibility, Jennifer Pahre, Cara Shanahan, Emma Troy, Brooke Conklin

Texas A&M Journal of Property Law

This article critically examines and compares the Canadian doctrine of the "honour of the Crown" and the United States' federal trust responsibility as legal frameworks intended to protect the rights and interests of Indigenous peoples. Through historical and doctrinal analysis, the authors argue that both doctrines, while rooted in fiduciary ideals, have been reinterpreted by courts and policymakers in ways that prioritize governmental interests over those of Indigenous communities. The U.S. trust responsibility, once grounded in treaty obligations and sovereign-to-sovereign relations, has devolved into a vague, largely unenforceable moral and legal obligation, allowing for unilateral federal and state action that …