Note

The SEC’s recent—and controversial—choice to make more frequent use of internal enforcement actions has raised several questions. Some have asked whether the SEC has attempted to advantage itself by prosecuting in-house; others have asked whether the SEC’s internal enforcement scheme is unconstitutional. This Note asks a largely over­looked threshold question: Do—and just as importantly, should—federal district courts have parallel...

Courts regularly consider a parent’s physical disability in child cus­tody disputes. At times, they go as far as to invoke physical disability as a minus factor that weighs against granting custody to that parent. This practice often reflects family court judges’ attitudinal biases, which are premised on ill-conceived notions of how physical disability actually af­fects one’s ability to parent. Because child custody adjudication af­fords...

Affordable housing residency preferences give residents of a specific geographic “preference area” prioritized access to affordable housing units within that geographic area. Historically, majority-white munici­palities have sometimes used affordable housing residency preferences to systematically exclude racial minorities who reside in sur­rounding com­munities. Courts have invalidated such residency pref­erences, usually on the grounds...

This Note examines the disparate treatment of greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions in the regulatory cost–benefit analysis and the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA) review contexts. In Zero Zone, Inc. v. United States Department of Energy, the Seventh Circuit upheld the use of the social cost of carbon (SCC) when agencies consider GHG emissions in their cost–benefit analyses. At the same time, courts have almost uniformly rejected...

Employers seeking to test job applicants for strength or speed while adhering to the mandates of Title VII often use gender-normed physical-ability tests. Gender-normed tests set different raw cutoffs for male and female applicants such that each class would be expected to have rough­ly equal pass rates. This practice has helped employers—especially law enforcement agencies—retain physical hiring standards while miti­gating their disparate...

Legislatures often instruct judges to impose harsher punishments on people who have prior criminal convictions—for example, a conviction for a “crime of violence” or for a “crime involving moral turpitude.” But how are judges to determine whether a person has such a conviction? In Mathis v. United States, the Supreme Court clarified that judges can rely on only the legal “elements” of prior convictions, not the factual “means”...

The All Writs Act, 28 U.S.C. § 1651, authorizes federal courts to “issue all writs necessary or appropriate in aid of their respective jurisdictions and agreeable to the usages and principles of law.” The Act has applications in a variety of contexts, including law enforcement investigations, the detention of military prisoners, and the management of complex multidistrict litigation. Another important but less studied area is the Act’s use...

In 2011, Congress created a new administrative pathway through which a party can challenge the validity of a granted patent: inter partes review (IPR). Like preexisting reexamination procedures, IPR is a mechanism through which a private party may ask the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office (PTO) to invalidate or narrow patents that fail to meet the standards of patent eligibility, thus returning subject matter to the public domain and protecting...

This Note analyzes the difficulty that courts have in determining whether nonmarital fathers of Native American children are “parents” within the meaning of the Indian Child Welfare Act of 1978 (ICWA). Part I recounts the history leading to the enactment of ICWA and provides an overview of the subsequent interpretation of ICWA by the Supreme Court, state courts, and the Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA). Part II presents the difficulties that...

Section 3(c) of the Voting Rights Act of 1965 provides a seldom-used path to federal preclearance of changes to state and local voting practices. It allows a federal judge, upon finding that a jurisdic­tion violated the Fourteenth or Fifteenth Amendment, to require that jurisdiction to submit for preapproval any “voting qualification or prerequisite to voting or standard, practice, or procedure with respect to voting.” Originally intended...