Article

The 2016 presidential election was one of the most divisive in re­cent memory, but it produced a surprising bipartisan consensus. Donald Trump, Hillary Clinton, and Bernie Sanders all agreed that U.S. trade agreements should be, but are not, “fair.” Although it...

PARTISAN BALANCE WITH BITE

Brian D. Feinstein* & Daniel J. Hemel**

Dozens of multimember agencies across the federal government are subject to partisan balance requirements, which mandate that no more than a simple majority of agency members may hail from a single party. Administrative law scholars and political scientists have questioned whether these provisions meaningfully affect the ideological composition of federal agencies. In theory, Presidents can comply with these requirements by appointing ideologically...

Partial Takings

Abraham Bell* & Gideon Parchomovsky**

Partial takings allow the government to expropriate the parts of an asset it needs, leaving the owner the remainder. Both vital and common, partial takings present unique challenges to the standard rules of eminent domain. Partial takings may result in the creation of suboptimal, and even unusable, parcels. Additionally, partial takings create assessment problems that do not arise when parcels are taken as a whole. Finally, partial takings engender...

One of the most dramatic exercises of a court’s equitable authority is the nationwide injunction. Although this phenomenon has become more prominent in recent years, it is a routine fixture of the jurisprudence of federal courts. Despite the frequency with which these cases arise, there has been no systematic scholarly or judicial analysis of when courts issue nationwide injunctions and little discussion of when they should issue such relief.

Since the Supreme Court’s invalidation of anti-gay marriage laws, scholars and advocates have been debating the LGBT movement’s near-term strategies and priorities. This Article joins that conversation by developing the framework for a national campaign to repeal or invalidate anti-gay curriculum laws—statutes that prohibit or restrict the discussion of homosexuality in public schools. Anti-gay curriculum laws expose LGBT students to...

Growing demands for privacy and increases in the quantity and variety of consumer data have engendered various business offerings to allow companies, and in some instances consumers, to capitalize on these developments. One such example is the emerging “personal data economy” (PDE) in which companies, such as Datacoup, purchase data directly from individuals. At the opposite end of the spectrum, the “pay-for-privacy” (PFP) model requires...

For centuries, the duty of loyalty has been the hallowed centerpiece of fiduciary obligation, widely considered one of the few “mandatory” rules of corporate law. That view, however, is no longer true. Beginning in 2000, Delaware dramatically departed from tradition by granting incorporated entities a statutory right to waive a crucial part of the duty of loyalty: the corporate opportunities doctrine. Other states have since followed Delaware’s...

ABDICATION AND FEDERALISM

Justin Weinstein-Tull*

States abdicate many of their federal responsibilities to local governments. They do not monitor local compliance with those laws, they disclaim responsibility for the actions of their local governments, and they deny state officials the legal capacity to bring local governments into compliance. When sued for noncompliance with these federal laws, states attempt to evade responsibility by arguing that local governments—and not the state—are...

This Article advances a novel positive theory of tort law. The Article’s core insight is that the benefit from the harm-causing activity determines the form and substance of tort liability. This finding is surprising and innovative, since tort scholars universally believe that the doctrines determining individuals’ liability for accidents—negligence, causation, and damage—are driven by harms, not...

A century ago and in the midst of American involvement in World War I, future Chief Justice Charles Evans Hughes delivered one of the most influential lectures on the Constitution in wartime. In it he uttered his famous axiom that “the power to wage war is the power to wage war successfully.” That statement continues to echo in modern jurisprudence, though the background and details of the lecture have not previously been explored in detail....