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 […]
CLR Forum
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...
In their article Unsexing Pregnancy, David Fontana and Naomi Schoenbaum undertake the important project of disentangling the social aspects of pregnancy from those that relate to a pregnant woman’s body. They argue that the law should stop treating the types of work either parent can do—such as purchasing a carseat, finding a pediatrician, or choosing a daycare—as exclusively the domain of the pregnant woman. The project’s primary...
Introduction Professor Kang raises two fundamental worries about the associational path to party reform in The Problem of Irresponsible Party Government, his response to my essay, Networking the Party: First Amendment Rights and the Pursuit of Responsive Party Government. First, he doubts the feasibility of reestablishing thick relational parties given social, technological, and cultural changes […]