Legislation Commons^™

Trademarks, Functionality, And Competition, Glynn Lunney

Faculty Scholarship

Courts and commentators have long thought that the purpose of trademark and unfair competition law is to distinguish fair competition from unfair competition and prohibit the latter. Yet, trademark law has a more fundamental, more foundational purpose. Before trademark law can distinguish fair competition from unfair competition, there must first be competition. That makes ensuring competition trademark law’s highest priority. Identifying and prohibiting unfair competition becomes, by necessity, a subordinate concern. Until 1982, courts recognized this hierarchy and enforced a broad and flexible functionality limitation on trademark or trade dress protection to ensure competitive markets. In 1982, however, this changed. …

Communicative Administration: The Administrative State Beyond Legal Administration, Daniel E. Walters

Faculty Scholarship

On many dimensions, the administrative state is at the nadir of its power. The Supreme Court has tightened administrative law controls on agency power, and the Trump Administration has stormed the bureaucracy in an unprecedented blitz designed to kneecap agency capacity and independence. For better or worse, many agencies and their civil servants are being sidelined as meaningful actors in the administration of government. Yet this familiar account doesn’t tell the entire story. At the same time that agencies are being stripped of the power to implement law—what this Article calls “legal administration”— they are steadily accumulating extensive and largely …

Defining Civil Rico's "Injury To Business Or Property" Requirement: The Supreme Court Takes A Few Steps, Says It Punts, But Actually Fumbles, Randy D. Gordon

Faculty Scholarship

Throughout its history, the RICO statute has presented lawyers with something of an interpretive parlor game. It is indefinite along multiple dimensions and thereby given multiple interpretations, even down to the word level. In Medical Marijuana v. Horn, the Supreme Court set out to define one of RICO's civil-standing provisions: Namely, whether the statute's "injury to business or property" requirement can be satisfied when a plaintiff suffers both economic and personal injuries. In a 5-4 decision, members of the Court engaged in an interpretive battle over the meaning of the phrase and succeeded only in holding that civil RICO does …

Climate Lies And Unjust Profits, Vanessa Casado-Pérez, Yotam Kaplan, Yael Lifshitz, Niv Meyerson

Faculty Scholarship

The climate crisis has reached a perilous tipping point. Our entrenched reliance on fossil fuels remains unchecked, as fossil fuel corporations wield their power to block meaningful reform and entrench their profits. The political horizon offers little relief—an incoming administration is poised to dismantle vital environmental protections, stripping away the few safeguards that stand between us and climate catastrophe.

In this grim landscape, communities across the nation are turning to the courts with renewed urgency, seeking justice and reform through climate litigation. Yet past efforts have fallen short, stymied by two formidable barriers. First, by centering on greenhouse gas emissions …

Fifty Ways To Leave Your Lover: Using State Constitutions To Escape The Dead Hand Of Article V, Meg Penrose

Faculty Scholarship

Thomas Jefferson believed that “the earth always belongs to the living generation.” His constitutional approach would empower twenty-first century Americans to decide twenty-first century problems regularly determined by the United States Supreme Court. Article V, the formal method for constitutional change, seemingly relegates these decisions to the Supreme Court because amending the federal Constitution is nearly impossible.

Unfortunately, our fixation on federal constitutional law often eclipses the power of state constitutional law. State constitutions balance our relatively static federal Constitution with responsive state governments. There is no need to debate what the Framers thought about modern issues when Americans can …

The Lost Origins Of Antitrust, William Magnuson

Faculty Scholarship

Over the last decade, the once-sleepy field of antitrust has suddenly sprung to the forefront of public attention. The digitalization of the economy, the expansion of Big Tech, and the rise of platform monopolies have all raised deep questions about the nature of corporate power and law’s capacity to constrain it. Some scholars have argued that antitrust enforcement must be reinvigorated in substance and broadened in scope in order to combat rapidly rising economic inequality. Others have argued that antitrust law is ill-equipped to address these broad moral issues and instead must be re-focused on its traditional principles of consumer …

Information Law Pluralism, Hannah Bloch-Wehba

Faculty Scholarship

Information-intensive activities are reshaping political, social, and economic institutions. As they respond to these shifts, legislators and regulators are embracing information as a regulatory device for tech. Far from limiting themselves to public disclosure, consumer notice, and other traditional mechanisms of fostering transparency and information flows, however, legislators are using other, more nuanced tools to incentivize regulated entities to obtain, generate, and share information.

This Article maps the landscape of the emerging information-based regimes for regulating tech and assesses their conceptual and practical implications. It canvasses an extensive set of recently enacted laws regulating the information economy and shows that, …

Defending Form Contract Consent, Wayne R. Barnes

Faculty Scholarship

The issue of standard form contracts has bedeviled Contracts scholars for a century. The basic problem has long been known. Contract is supposed to be a quintessentially consensual activity, whereby both parties are operating with full knowledge and comprehension of the array of terms and conditions being negotiated and agreed to. But by employing standard forms replete with boilerplate fine print, companies have created a regime whereby it is most likely irrational for consumers to bother reading the terms before consenting to the transaction. The existing “duty to read” doctrine is that consumers fully consent to all terms when they …

General Rulemaking Grants And The Federal Trade Commission, Tamar Katz, Alex Lloyd George, Lev Menand, Tim Wu

Faculty Scholarship

The legal campaign against the administrative state has a new front: general rulemaking provisions. General rulemaking provisions authorize agencies, in an open-ended way, to write rules to carry out Congress’s directives. Administrative agencies have relied on such provisions for decades. But over the last several years, some litigators, scholars, and judges have advanced limiting theories that would, if applied widely, greatly reduce the ability of agencies to execute federal statutes. The leading edge of this campaign is an effort to negate the rulemaking authority of the Federal Trade Commission (FTC). The reasoning employed by the FTC’s opponents, already adopted by …

Traditional And Computational Canons, Eric H. Martinez

Faculty Scholarship

As part of the rise of modern textualism, dictionaries and linguistic canons have become a ubiquitous part of legal interpretation. One longstanding question is whether judges citing these tools sincerely attempt to follow the meaning of a text, or if their invocation is merely window-dressing for a preferred outcome. The practical significance of this question extends across all major doctrinal areas, and with the Supreme Court’s overturning of Chevron deference, its importance is only to grow, as courts are now instructed to use every tool at their disposal to resolve ambiguity when interpreting a law. This Article is the first …

Pragmatics And Textualism, Lawrence B. Solum

Faculty Scholarship

In theoretical linguistics the word “pragmatics” refers to the roles of context and communicative intentions in the production of meaning. Those roles include contextual disambiguation and the communication of implicit content via “pragmatic enrichment.” Textualism is sometimes characterized as the view that the meaning of statutory texts should not take context into account, but that characterization is misleading. Not only do self-identified textualists explicitly maintain that context should be considered when interpreting statutes—all good textualists must do so. Absent consideration of context, the meaning of statutory texts would be pervasively ambiguous, sparse, and incomplete. Good textualism requires pragmatics.

“Pragmatics and …

Tomorrow’S Climate Law, Today, Daniel E. Walters

Faculty Scholarship

The prospects for domestic legislation or international treaties that would require governments, businesses, and individuals to stop emitting the greenhouse gases that cause global climate change are particularly bleak these days. Even as the United States has recently passed its most ambitious climate legislation to date in the Inflation Reduction Act and related “green industrial policy” legislation, these successes were ultimately a compromise with politicians who refused to consider more direct controls on emissions. Assuming they survive the second Trump Administration, the green subsidies and nudges contained in these laws, coupled with a groundswell of private environmental governance, will do …

Debt Tokens, Andrea Tosato, Diane Lourdes Dick, Christopher K. Odinet

Faculty Scholarship

The worlds of crypto and bankruptcy have collided. Once-prominent, fast-growing, and even politically influential platforms for trading cryptocurrencies have imploded spectacularly. Gone are the glossy advertisements, celebrity endorsements, and proclamations that blockchain operates as a law unto itself. Instead, insolvent crypto businesses—including the crypto exchange giant FTX—find themselves in bankruptcy court, no different from any other failed enterprise. These bankruptcies reveal a startling reality: individual investors who placed their trust in these platforms have been stripped of their digital assets. In their stead, they hold hard-to-collect claims against these defunct platforms.

Amid the chill of the crypto winter, bankruptcy has …

Artificial Intelligence, Autonomous Creation, And The Future Path Of Copyright Law, Peter K. Yu

Faculty Scholarship

Most literature at the intersection of copyright and AI has focused primarily on what copyright law is or ought to be. Frequently overlooked is the question of what copyright law will be in the AI space. Understanding this question is crucial because the path of copyright law chosen by the United States will have a major impact on the country's economic and technological future.

This article begins by scrutinizing two lines of arguments that have been advanced to deny copyright protection to AI-generated works: constitutional and incentive-based. The article then discusses a third line of arguments—harmonization-based arguments—and identifies select instances …

Public Funds, Public Functions, Private Actors: The Cognitive Dissonance Of Us Health Law, William M. Sage

Faculty Scholarship

This chapter begins with the evolution of American medicine from a “sovereign” self-regulating profession focused on direct patient service to a large industry that serves the social sector but that, because of its professional heritage, receives extensive public subsidies without equivalent public accountability. Next, the chapter identifies regulatory dynamics in American health care governance that structurally discourage movement from the prevailing, if dissonant, private law framework to one explicitly grounded in public law. The chapter concludes by highlighting the challenges and opportunities inherent in a private law approach to what is intuitively a public law domain.

Legislating For The Future, Jonathan S. Gould, Rory Van Loo

Faculty Scholarship

Public policy must address threats that will manifest in the future. Legislation enacted today affects the severity of tomorrow’s harms arising from biotechnology, climate change, and artificial intelligence. This Essay focuses on Congress’s capacity to confront future threats. It uses a detailed case study of financial crises to show the limits and possibilities of legislation to prevent future catastrophes. By paying insufficient attention to Congress, the existing literature does not recognize the full nature and extent of the institutional challenges in regulating systemic risk. Fully recognizing those challenges reveals important design insights for future-risk legislation.

We first examine Congress as …

The Great Unsettling: Administrative Governance After Loper Bright, Cary Coglianese, Daniel E. Walters

Faculty Scholarship

“Chevron is overruled.” These three words surely captured more attention than any others in the U.S. Supreme Court’s thirty-five-page opinion in Loper Bright Enterprises v. Raimondo. For forty years, the Chevron doctrine had been virtually synonymous with administrative law. Now that the Court has taken a step that many scholars thought unfathomable even just a few years ago, speculation abounds about the possible downstream impacts of Loper Bright on both what agencies will be able to do in the future and how lower courts will respond when reviewing agency action. The vast majority of early expert commentaries suggest …

The United States Healthcare System: From Medicare To Post-Pandemic Health Policy, William M. Sage

Faculty Scholarship

My purpose in this essay is to comment on national health policy in the United States over the past sixty years.  My conclusions are less optimistic than what I had hoped when I began my teaching and research career in the 1990s to be able to say in 2025.  In particular, the successful expansion of publicly supported health coverage via the passage of the Affordable Care Act (“ACA” or “Obamacare”) in 2010 seems to have triggered -- though I hesitate to say that it caused – a backsliding from broader commitments to clinical performance, population health, and social solidarity that …

"Arbitration In Name Only": A Race Claims Mismatch, Michael Z. Green

Faculty Scholarship

With arbitration's meteoric rise as a tool in resolving statutory employment discrimination matters beginning in the 1990s, concerns about lack of employee bargaining power received little consideration when raised in court challenges to the enforcement of employer-mandated agreements to arbitrate those claims. Only in rare circumstances, when an employer appeared to go to extremes in using its overwhelming bargaining power to implement an arbitration process so clearly unfair would a court find the agreement created an unfair "arbitration in name only" that should not be enforced. 

Employers have become savvier in how they require employees to agree to resolve discrimination …

Redefining The Scope Of Anti-Discrimination Law: Illuminating Colorism As A Basis For Discrimination Claims By Black Entertainers, Tolulope Odunsi-Nelson

Faculty Scholarship

This Article critically examines the pervasive issue of colorism within the entertainment industry and its profound impact on dark-skinned Black entertainers. Anti-Black colorism is discrimination against Black people with darker skin tones and Afrocentric features (i.e. darker eye color, kinkier hair, broader nose, fuller lips). Tracing the historical roots of colorism from the colonial era to contemporary times, the Article emphasizes how societal preferences for Eurocentric features and anti-Black racism have created and perpetuated a hierarchy that disadvantages darker-skinned individuals. It analyzes the underrepresentation and pay disparities faced by dark-skinned Black actors and actresses. It details the industry’s preference for …

Section 1: Defining Arbitration And Addressing Structural Bias, Nancy A. Welsh

Faculty Scholarship

The Supreme Court’s jurisprudence pursuant to the Federal Arbitration Act (FAA) has successfully encouraged the use of arbitration to resolve disputes of all types, including those arising out of contracts of adhesion. Meanwhile, with one very limited exception, neither Congress nor the Supreme Court has done anything to assure those bound by adhesive contracts that the required arbitration process will be fair, impartial, and consistent with due process principles. The FAA does not even include a definition of arbitration to guide arbitration providers and individual arbitrators. This chapter proposes the addition of a definition of arbitration to the FAA to …

Water, Rosario Sanchez, Gabriel E. Eckstein

Faculty Scholarship

As the new US administration begins its term in January 2025, its ability to address complex, interconnected challenges will shape the future of US-Mexico relations. From economic cooperation and migration to shared security concerns, the new president’s leadership will be pivotal in navigating these critical issues and strengthening bilateral ties between Mexico and the United States. Effective collaboration will be vital to building a more prosperous and stable North America.

To support this effort, the Wilson Center’s Mexico Institute has prepared a comprehensive booklet as a practical roadmap for the incoming administration. This publication offers actionable recommendations across six priority …

A New Era Of Deference: From Chevron To Loper Bright, Daniel E. Walters

Faculty Scholarship

Deference to administrative agencies’ interpretations of ambiguous statutory provisions has been a hallmark of administrative law and regulatory policy for the past forty years. The Supreme Court recently upended that settled allocation of power between agencies and courts, granting interpretive primacy to courts even where statutes essentially require policy choices. However, questions remain about precisely how courts will exercise this policymaking authority that agencies used to exercise, as well as about the multiple “offramps” from this nondeferential standard that the Court left open. Rather than a new era of nondeference, it is just as likely we are embarking on a …

Shifting Toward Boilerplate Regulation, Wayne R. Barnes

Faculty Scholarship

Consumer assent to standard form contracts has been creating cognitive dissonance among contracts scholars for a century. Businesses impose standard forms on consumers, who never read the terms. But consumers would not understand them if they did. And they don’t have the bargaining power to change them anyway—the terms are famously “take it or leave it.” Contracting is ideally theorized as an act of voluntary, knowing consent to all the terms agreed to. The dissonance is that consumers, although ostensibly signaling their assent to the boilerplate by signing (or clicking, or tapping their phone screen), do not in fact know …

Major Questions, Common Sense?, Kevin Tobia, Daniel E. Walters, Brian Slocum

Faculty Scholarship

The Major Questions Doctrine (“MQD”) is the newest textualist interpretive canon, and it has driven consequential Supreme Court decisions concerning vaccine mandates, environmental regulation, and student loan relief. But the new MQD is a canon in search of legitimization. Critics allege that the MQD displaces the Court’s conventional textual analysis with judicial policymaking. Textualists have now responded that the MQD is a linguistic canon, consistent with textualism. Justice Barrett recently argued in Biden v. Nebraska that the MQD is grounded in ordinary people’s understanding of language and law, and scholarship contends that the MQD reflects ordinary people’s understanding of textual …

The Incoherence Of Evidence Law, G. Alexander Nunn

Faculty Scholarship

What is the purpose of evidence law? The answer might seem intuitive. Evidence law exists, of course, to foster verdict accuracy, legitimacy, and efficiency. But these kindred aims often come into conflict. Policy tradeoffs are inescapable in evidence law, meaning that an evidentiary regime must clarify how its normative objectives cohere. Do accuracy, legitimacy, and efficiency work together on equal footing, such that the goal of a code is to maximize each objective to the extent possible? Or does one of evidence law’s aims take precedence over the rest? And if one goal takes priority, what is the role of …

Critical Race Theory Bans And The Changing Canon: Cultural Appropriation In Narrative, Susan Ayres

Faculty Scholarship

Thirty-five states have enacted critical race theory bans at the level of elementary and secondary public education, and seven states have extended these to the university level. One way to resist these attempts to repress a healthy democracy by whitewashing history is through a pedagogy of antiracism, including literary works. The question of what that would look like involves questions of cultural appropriation, which occurs when one takes from another culture, such as a writer creating a narrative about a character outside of the writer’s cultural identity. This Article considers the story of Ota Benga, brought from the Congo to …

The Subfederal In Immigration Polarization, Huyen Pham, Pham Hoang Van

Faculty Scholarship

The framing of subfederal immigration regulation as a red- blue divide is conventional wisdom. As more states, cities, and counties have engaged in the regulation of immigrants within their jurisdictions, it is not particularly surprising to see deep-red states like Texas enacting laws that restrict the rights of immigrants in their jurisdictions (e.g., requiring police within the state to honor detainers issued by United States Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE)) or deep-blue states like California enacting laws that protect immigrants’ rights (e.g., issuing driver’s licenses without requiring proof of lawful immigration status).

Rather than only reflecting national polarization on immigration …

The Perennial Eclipse: Race, Immigration, And How Latinx Count In American Politics, Rachel F. Moran

Faculty Scholarship

In 2016, the U.S. Supreme Court decided Evenwel v. Abbott, a case challenging the use of total population in state legislative apportionment as a violation of the Equal Protection Clause. The plaintiffs sued Texas, alleging that the State impermissibly diluted their voting power because they lived in areas with a high proportion of voting-age citizens. When total population was used to draw district lines, the plaintiffs had to compete with more voters to get their desired electoral outcomes than was true for voters in districts with low proportions of voting-age citizens. The Court rejected the argument, finding that states enjoy …

The Submerged Administrative State, Gabriel Scheffler, Daniel E. Walters

Faculty Scholarship

The United States government is experiencing a reputation crisis: after decades of declining public trust, many Americans have lost confidence in the government’s capacity to perform its basic functions. While various explanations have been offered for this worrying trend, these existing accounts overlook a key factor: people are unfamiliar with the institutions that actually do most of the governing—administrative agencies—and they devalue what they cannot easily observe. The “submerged” nature of the administrative state is, we argue, a central reason for declining trust in government.

This Article shows that the administrative state is systematically submerged in two ways. First, administrative …