Columbia Law Review

In 2021, the Supreme Court decided City of Chicago v. Fulton, a landmark bankruptcy case that addressed the issue of whether passive retention of estate property violates § 362(a)(3) of the U.S. Bankruptcy Code, commonly known as the “automatic stay” provision. The automatic stay, as its name suggests, is a breathing spell that prevents creditors from taking certain collection actions against the debtor after a bankruptcy petition[...]

Jurisprudence aims to identify and explain important features of law. To accomplish this task, what method should one employ? Elucidating Law, a tour de force in “the philosophy of legal philosophy,” develops an instructive account of how philosophers “elucidate law,” which in turn elucidates jurisprudence’s own aims and methods. This Review introduces the book, with emphasis on its discussion of methodology.

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In myriad areas of public life—from voting to professional licensure—the state collects, shares, and uses sex and gender data in complex algorithmic systems that mete out benefits, verify identity, and secure spaces. But in doing so, the state often erases transgender, nonbinary, and gender-nonconforming individuals, subjecting them to the harms of exclusion. These harms are not simply features of technology design, as others have ably written.[...]

We analyze whether non-shareholder constituencies are better protected with internal corporate law reform or with external regulation. We reply to Professor Aneil Kovvali’s article, Stark Choices for Corporate Reform, that criticizes some of our previous output, in which we warned that a stakeholderist corporate law reform would stymie efforts to achieve effective stakeholder protections with external regulation. In his article, Kovvali[...]

Book bans and censorship battles have garnered considerable attention in recent years, but one of the most critical battlegrounds is kept out of the public eye. Prison officials can ban any book that threatens the security or operations of their facility. This means that the knowledge access rights of incarcerated people are subject to the judgments of the people detaining them. This Note focuses on books about Black people in America and books[...]

Despite a burgeoning conversation about the centrality of information management to governments, scholars are only just beginning to address the role of legal information in sustaining authoritarian rule. This Essay presents a case study showing how legal information can be manipulated: through the deletion of previously published cases from China’s online public database of court decisions. Using our own dataset of all 42 million cases made[...]