The single subject rule, a widespread and oft-litigated state constitutional provision limiting ballot initiatives to one "subject," has confounded judges, lawyers, and scholars for decades.  The problem grows from the inability to define "subject" with precision.  In A Theory of Direct Democracy and the Single Subject Rule, we attempt to solve this problem.  We propose a democratic process theory of the rule, which interprets "subjects" in terms of voters' preferences.  Professors Richard Hasen and John Matsusaka, experts in election law and direct democracy, are skeptical of our approach.  We appreciate their thoughtful comments, which have contributed helpfully to the debate.  However, we think their skepticism misses the mark.  They seem to confuse opposition to the single subject rule itself with opposition to our test. 

In recent years, scholars have drawn attention to the myriad ways in which the lines between criminal enforcement and immigration control have blurred in law and public discourse.  Some commentators even resist the very term "detention" as misplaced, masking circumstances approximating criminal "incarceration" or "imprisonment."  In response, the Obama Administration has pledged reforms to reconstruct this regime as a "truly civil detention system."  This Essay considers the possibilities and limits of these proposals, situating detention within the broader convergence of immigration control and criminal enforcement.  Notwithstanding the proposed reforms, the expansion of enforcement means that DHS will continue to detain noncitizens, in the words of a senior official, "on a grand scale"—which will significantly constrain its ability to dismantle the more quasi-punitive features of the detention regime.  While excessive detention conditions may well be tempered for many individuals, large-scale immcarceration seems here to stay for the foreseeable future.  

In recent years, scholars have drawn attention to the myriad ways in which the lines between criminal enforcement and immigration control have blurred in law and public discourse.  Some commentators even resist the very term "detention" as misplaced, masking circumstances approximating criminal "incarceration" or "imprisonment."  In response, the Obama Administration has pledged reforms to reconstruct this regime as a "truly civil detention system."  This Essay considers the possibilities and limits of these proposals, situating detention within the broader convergence of immigration control and criminal enforcement.  Notwithstanding the proposed reforms, the expansion of enforcement means that DHS will continue to detain noncitizens, in the words of a senior official, "on a grand scale"—which will significantly constrain its ability to dismantle the more quasi-punitive features of the detention regime.  While excessive detention conditions may well be tempered for many individuals, large-scale immcarceration seems here to stay for the foreseeable future.  

Julie C. Suk addressed a timeless issue in her article Are Gender Stereotypes Bad for Women?—namely, whether American women would be better served if the United States, following the example of every other industrialized country, offered a paid maternity leave. More evidence exists than perhaps Suk is aware of that bundling maternity leave with medical leave has made enactment of paid leave more difficult in the United States. 

Suk's diagnosis seems correct:  Old-time sameness feminism may well have jeopardized the ability of advocates in the United States to realize universal paid maternity leave.  Her proposed cure is less convincing:  that we should abandon our focus on gender stereotypes, and on antidiscrimination law.  In this short piece, I will try to ensure that disagreements about how to handle the three short months of maternity leave do not undercut our ability to protect women's jobs during the nearly twenty years they spend in childrearing.

The "single subject" rule—mandating that voter initiatives embrace no more than one subject—has vexed courts and scholars alike for decades.  In the Columbia Law Review, Professors Robert D. Cooter and Michael D. Gilbert make a valiant attempt to bring rationality and consistency to judicial application of the rule.  They propose a "separable preferences" decision criterion that they argue will improve the democratic process by reducing logrolls and depoliticizing adjudication.

We are skeptical.  Though we agree that the decision criterion that Cooter and Gilbert propose could work in theory to limit the number of voter initiatives containing certain types of logrolls, we have two primary concerns.  First, their approach is premised on a normative hostility to logrolling that is not justified by existing political theory.  While it is true that some logrolls can lead to harmful outcomes, other logrolls can be socially beneficial, and the criterion that Cooter and Gilbert propose would eliminate both socially beneficial and harmful logrolls.  Second, we do not believe that the separable preferences criterion would lead to court consistency in application of the single subject rule.  Our own research finds that judicial decisions in single subject cases are heavily influenced by the judge's political preferences rather than neutral, objective rules in states that allow courts to aggressively police single subject violations.  We suspect that courts in states that thus far have shown restraint in application of the single subject rule would become much more aggressive if they adopted the separable preferences criterion, leading to greater politicization of adjudication.

In "A Practical Solution to the Reference Class Problem," Edward K. Cheng usefully surveys the ways in which the problem arises in legal contexts.  Cheng argues that a practical solution to the problem lies in modern "model selection" methods which decide on the appropriate complexity of a model.  This Essay argues that a simpler area of recent statistics, the theory of feature selection methods, is more relevant.  Part I of this Essay argues that the correct reference class with which to compare a case is the set of cases which share with it all relevant features.  Part II discusses model complexity and argues that Cheng's approach is workable, but that the statistical literature provides equally credible alternative approaches, based on smoothness instead of simplicity.