Introduction In his compelling new book, Invisible Atrocities, Professor Randle DeFalco explores the function of the aesthetics of violence in international law. In particular, he questions international law’s preference for sanctioning spectacular demonstrations of violence rather than more banal, bureaucratic actions that cause massive scales of suffering and misery. The book resonated with us because […]
CLR Forum
People routinely refer to copyright and trademark as “soft IP” to distinguish these practices from another area of intellectual property: patent. But the term reflects implicit biases against copyright and trademark doctrine and practitioners. “Soft IP” implies that patent law alone is hard, even though patents are no more physically, metaphorically, or intellectually hard than copyrights and trademarks. Despite stereotypes to the contrary,...
This Piece responds to recent critiques of litigation articulating a religious liberty right to access abortion. It argues that under current and expansive religious liberty doctrine, patients seeking a religious right to abortion have standing to sue even prior to pregnancy, their sincerity should not be unfairly disputed, and existing secular exemptions in abortion laws undermine the state’s alleged compelling government interest in prohibiting...
Social Security is funded by a regressive tax in which wages below the wage cap ($160,200 in 2023) are taxed at a flat rate but wages above the cap are taxed at zero. To address this normative shortcoming and make Social Security progressive, this Piece proposes eliminating the wage cap and using the resulting additional revenue to fund a zero-rate Social Security tax bracket analogous to the standard deduction of the federal income tax.
IRS...
A crucial path to legal status for immigrant victims of crimes is the U visa, which Congress established with strong bipartisan support to protect victims of particular crimes who are helpful to law enforcement. Because the U visa was intended to encourage reporting of crimes, the application requires a certification form to be completed by a federal, state, or local authority that is investigating or prosecuting the alleged offense. Arbitrary...
This Piece embraces a fictional narrative to illustrate deep flaws in our legal system. It borrows its basic structure and a few choice lines from George Orwell’s classic novel Nineteen Eighty-Four. Like Orwell’s novel, it is set in the not-too-distant future to comment on problems already emerging in the present. The footnotes largely provide examples of some of those problems and how courts have treated them in a constitutional law...
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...
This Piece describes a sophisticated but underreported system of mass-defendant intellectual property litigation called the “Schedule A Defendants Scheme” (the “SAD Scheme”), which occurs most frequently in the Northern District of Illinois and principally targets online merchants based in China. The SAD Scheme capitalizes on weak spots in the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure, judicial deference to IP rightsowners, and online marketplaces’...
The most elite and scarce of all U.S. legal credentials is serving as a Justice on the U.S. Supreme Court. A close second is clerking for a Justice. A Court clerkship is a prize as well as a ticket to future success. Rich accounts of the experience fill bookshelves and journal pages. Yet the public lacks a clear story about who wins this clerkship lottery. Original analysis of forty years of clerkships tells that story. New datasets detail clerks’...
Judicial clerkships are typically described in the rosiest of terms—as fostering lifelong mentor-mentee relationships between judges and clerks and conferring only professional benefits. The downsides of clerking are rarely discussed. The clerkship application process is opaque. Little information exists to help law students identify positive work environments and avoid judges who mistreat their clerks. The secretive, fear-infused method of information-sharing...