Does the Constitution guarantee a habeas Privilege or not? Even though the Supreme Court appeared to answer this foundational habeas question in Boumediene v. Bush, it seemed to have unceremoniously rescinded that answer in DHS v. Thuraissigiam. This Piece, using Thuraissigiam as a starting point, links this...
CLR Forum
In Georgia v. Public.Resource.Org, Inc., the Supreme Court resurrected a nineteenth-century copyright doctrine—the government edicts doctrine—and applied it to statutory annotations prepared by a legislative agency. While the substance of the decision has serious implications for due process and the rule of law, the Court’s treatment of the doctrine recognized an invigorated role for courts in the development of copyright law through...
Business corporations long ago rejected the idea of unaccountable directors running firms with only their consciences to keep them in check. Yet unaccountable boards are the norm in the nonprofit sector. This need not be the case. The laws of all fifty states and the District of Columbia provide a template for accountability in nonprofit governance: membership statutes. These statutes define the roles and responsibilities of nonprofit members,...
In Borrowing Equality, Professor Atkinson deftly demonstrates Congress’s nonsensical bifurcation of the twin concepts of “credit” and “debt,” whereby it celebrates and encourages the former and regulates and punishes the latter. She then shows that, in refusing to acknowledge the harmful consequences of indebtedness while legislating credit-based solutions to inequality, these credit policies in fact entrench the very hierarchies...
Introduction Recent developments, such as incidents of legalized discrimination against Black expatriates, tourists, and students in China, raise questions about why Black scholars and legal practitioners are largely absent from global debate over how China’s laws and legal institutions function. Despite the Supreme Court’s opinion that U.S. law schools and the legal community benefit from […]
United States trademark law requires that a mark be used in commerce for it to qualify for registration at the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office (PTO). Applicants prove that they have met the use requirement by submitting to the PTO photographic specimens of their use of the mark in commerce. This Piece reports the results of new empirical work showing that an appreciable number of U.S. trademark applications originating in China...
On February 14, 2019, hundreds of thousands of text messages were ensnared in a defective communications server—only to be released months later. By the time these messages reached their recipients, their worlds had changed: Heartfelt valentines arrived from loves now lost; other late-arriving messages seemed to come from the ghosts of the recently passed. It could have been worse. Text messages help to enable a wide variety of critical applications,...
Introduction Federal campaign finance law currently prohibits individuals from donating more than $35,500 per year to national political party committees. Yet, in March 2020, former New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg gave $18 million to the DNC. How was he able to do this? The answer is simple: Mayor Bloomberg donated his $18 million not […]
In District of Columbia v. Wesby, the Supreme Court determined that a prudent officer had probable cause to arrest attendees at a festive house party for criminal trespass without a warrant. While reactions from scholars of criminal law have begun to emerge, this Piece is the first to conceive of the decision through the lens of property theory. In this regard, the Piece offers two principal claims. First, on interpretive grounds, it contends that,...
For twenty-five years, the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) has brought enforcement actions against companies for data breaches using its statutory authority under Section 5 of the FTC Act to police “unfair or deceptive acts or practices.” While the Commission originally brought cases under the “deceptive” prong of Section 5, more recent cases have been brought under the vague “unfairness” prong. These cases allege that a company that...