CLR Forum

Introduction On May 3, 2019, the Fourth Circuit became the first federal court of appeals to hold that the indefinite solitary confinement of people on death row violates the Eighth Amendment. The case, Porter v. Clarke, was praised as a step forward for the rights of those held on death row, as well as a […]

Introduction The Electoral College has resulted in the loser of the national popular vote winning the presidency five times in our history, including twice in the past two decades. Over the course of more than two centuries, it has become one of the two most popular subjects for constitutional amendment proposals. But be­cause of the […]

Introduction The IPO parade of 2019 is making the early shareholders of technology startups such as Uber, Lyft, Slack, and Pinterest (among others) staggeringly wealthy. Now that these companies are publicly trad­ed, equity owners can easily cash out at a huge profit. As shares of stock, this profit would normally be taxed at long-term capital […]

Introduction In Apple Inc. v. Pepper, the Supreme Court held that consumers who allegedly paid too much for apps sold on Apple’s App Store because of an antitrust violation could sue Apple for damages because they were “di­rect purchasers.” The decision sidesteps most of the bizarre complexities that have resulted from the Supreme Court’s 1977 […]

Introduction My article Harmless Errors and Substantial Rights challenged conventional wisdom about the harmless constitutional error doctrine in criminal procedure. Specifically, I contended that the traditional way of understanding harmless error as a remedial doctrine rooted in so-called “constitutional common law” created significant anomalies. The remedial perspective does not explain which errors can properly be […]

The 2010s have been a momentous decade for Medicaid. With enrollment of over seventy-two million people (19% of the country’s population), Medicaid is the nation’s largest public health insurance program, and it is the primary or sole source of health insurance for vulnerable groups such as low-income children and pregnant women, adults with disabilities, and […]

Introduction No matter how it begins, a police encounter may end in death, especially when the encounter involves people of color. There is no safe haven. Police-involved shootings happen everywhere—on the street, in a parked car, in a public park, or inside one’s own home. Police violence is a constant, its occurrence so predictable that […]

Introduction An Estonian team is designing an artificially-intelligent (AI) agent to adjudicate claims of €7,000 or less, with the aim of clearing case backlog. The pilot version will focus on contract disputes: An algorithm will ana­lyze uploaded documents to reach an initial decision, which can then be appealed to a human judge. This is but […]

Introduction Tim Wu’s essay, Will Artificial Intelligence Eat the Law?, posits that automated decisionmaking systems may be taking the place of hu­man adjudication in social media content moderation. Conventional adjudi­cative processes, he explains, are too slow or clumsy to keep up with the speed and scale of online information flows. Their eclipse is immi­nent, inevitable, […]

The First Amendment is currently being pulled in opposite directions by a group of Hasidic schools in New York. Driven by deeply held religious beliefs, the leaders of these schools refuse to teach virtually any of the secular studies required for children by New York state law. Proponents of these schools point to the Free Exercise Clause and the “hybrid rights” of religion and parental control. However the state also has an interest in ensuring...