The visa application process is laden with discretion and reinforced by consular nonreviewability—an extensive form of judicial deference. Until recently, courts recognized a small exception to consular nonreviewability. Under this exception, courts engaged in limited review of a consular officer’s decision when visa denials implicated the fundamental rights of U.S. citizens.
The Court curtailed this exception in United States Department...
Legislatures, courts, and media outlets have manufactured legal and scientific uncertainty around gender-affirming care. This is the result of a phobic frame that vanishes the perspectives of minors and reduces decisionmakers’ confidence. This Note identifies that gender-affirming care bans should not be understood primarily as forms of sex discrimination, but instead as a form of unjustified impairment of minors’ self-determination. The solution,...
The African Court on Human and Peoples’ Rights, the continental human rights court in Africa, is struggling. Many African states have yet to ratify the protocol that established the Court; and those that have, have begun to withdraw their declarations to allow individuals and nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) to bring cases against them before the Court. The Court’s expanding jurisdiction is part of the problem. Despite being an international...
Commentators posit that reducing domestic abuse requires an increase in prosecutions and a decrease in criminal reform efforts. The “abuser” is as set a role as the “sympathetic victim,” with little room to examine how both may exist simultaneously within an individual. A deeper look into what occurs for survivors reveals that legal discourse often overlooks and scrutinizes Black women’s abuse, particularly with Black women who exist...
The criminal and immigration systems in the United States have increasingly overlapped, adversely affecting noncitizens even distantly involved in criminal activity. Individuals without legal status who have engaged significantly with a criminal organization can cooperate with law enforcement in exchange for formal immigration benefits. There are no formal protections, however, for individuals residing in the country without legal status who have...
Clarifying the extent to which existing legal regimes afford protection to climate migrants must be part of an effective and coordinated response to climate change. This Note argues that climate refugees, a group which it narrowly defines as those who meet the requirements of the 1951 Refugee Convention because they have experienced climate change–induced harm amounting to persecution, should qualify for asylum under U.S. immigration law. To...
In the context of section 10(b) securities fraud class actions, conceptualizing corporate intent is both an unnatural and a necessary exercise. Circuit courts apply a variety of different approaches to analyze the question of corporate scienter, but they typically start with agency law and impute the intentions of corporate employees to the corporation itself.
Recognizing the fraud-deterrence purpose of these class actions suggests that...
Plaintiffs in securities class actions have increasingly relied on reports published by anonymous short sellers when alleging the element of loss causation. Indeed, short-seller reports are useful for plaintiffs, as they purport to reveal negative information about a targeted company and generally cause a decline in the targeted company’s stock price. Unlike other types of corrective disclosures, however, short-seller reports are unique in that...
For the past several decades, the Supreme Court has repeatedly sought to reinterpret the meaning of “property” within federal fraud statutes to limit the degree to which federal prosecutors can regulate state official misconduct. While the Court’s renewed interest in the federal fraud statutes has drawn varying degrees of praise and criticism from different sides of the legal community, this Note seeks to assess—in an apolitical, value-neutral...
Recently, a wave of state legislatures have enacted qui tam provisions to police citizen behavior in a variety of politically and legally contentious environments. The current literature on private enforcement views qui tam as a homogenous species of private enforcement and does little to identify any distinctions within qui tam itself. This gap in the scholarship has made it difficult to assess the legitimacy of the recently adopted state qui...