Note

In Graham v. Connor, the Supreme Court held that a Fourth Amendment reasonableness standard governed the analysis of any allegation that a law enforcement officer used excessive force during an arrest or investigatory stop. In particular, courts were to evaluate the reasonableness of the need to use force from the perspective of a hypothetical reasonable police officer at the scene. While this test seems straightforward, the Supreme Court...

In 2005, the Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agency enacted a policy sanctioning its civil ICE agents to use strategic deception, known as “ruses,” to facilitate community immigration enforcement operations. This policy provided agents a means to overcome the limitation that civil immigration arrest warrants are administrative as opposed to judicial in nature, which effectively precluded agents from entering a target’s home without...

After President Trump declared a national emergency and diverted funds to build a wall on the southern border, several litigants challenged his action as ultra vires, or beyond his constitutional and statutory authority. The litigants asserted abstract equitable rights of action, implied in federal courts’ equitable powers. The Supreme Court has left unclear, however, whether or not such an implied equitable action for statutory...

In the digital context, companies often use “dishonest design”—commonly known as “dark patterns”—to trick or push consumers into doing things they wouldn’t necessarily have done otherwise. Existing scholarship has focused on developing a taxonomy and definitions for different categories of dark patterns, conducting empirical research to better understand the effectiveness of dark patterns, and broadly survey­ing...

Class actions for monetary relief have long been the subject of in­tense legal and political debate. The stakes are now higher than ever. Contractual agreements requiring arbitration are proliferating, limit­ing the availability of class actions as a vehicle for collective redress. In Congress, legislative proposals related to class actions are mired in par­ti­san division. Democrats would roll back mandatory arbitration agree­ments while...

Buildings in the United States are responsible for nine percent of the world’s greenhouse gas emissions, and improvement of building energy efficiency through strong building energy codes can help achieve signifi­cant emissions reductions and cost savings. But building energy code regula­tion across the country is inconsistent: Some states have statewide codes with ambitious clean energy targets, while others have no statewide codes at all....

The COVID-19 pandemic has laid bare the severe public health dan­ger that institutional and congregate care settings pose to people with dis­abilities, older adults, and the care professionals who work in those settings. While the populations residing in congregate care settings are naturally more susceptible to the virus, the COVID-19 crisis in these set­tings could have been far more limited if there had been broader access to home and community-based...

The COVID-19 pandemic has triggered an unprecedented increase in unilateral lawmaking by governors under each state’s emergency exec­utive power statute. These actions have been met with controversy and a significant amount of resistance. This Note argues that the resistance to COVID-19 rules in the United States may be partially attributable to the way state emergency power statutes concentrate virtually all the power to enact emergency rules...

As immigration courts work through never-ending dockets and as detention centers operate beyond capacity, scholars and advocates have raised questions about the effects of pretrial immigration detention on outcomes for noncitizens. While pretrial detention is studied frequently in the criminal context, few empirical studies have addressed the consequences of pretrial immigration detention in particular. To help fill this gap in the literature,...

Agency delay has become a chronic issue in administrative law. As Congress increasingly relies on reducing appropriations to implement its agenda, agencies have shouldered the conflicting burdens of meeting preexisting statutory deadlines for agency action, while also adhering to their newly reduced budgets. The result has been delayed agency action across a broad range of policy areas, such as environmental protection, health care, and economic...