In June 2015, the Supreme Court decided Texas Department of Housing and Community Affairs v. Inclusive Communities Project, Inc. and held that disparate impact claims are cognizable under the Fair Housing Act. Four years later, in August 2019, the Department of Housing and Urban Development published a proposed rule purporting to align the agency’s regulations with the Supreme Court’s interpretation of the Fair Housing Act in Inclusive...
Note
In 2019, the Supreme Court slammed the federal courthouse doors on partisan gerrymandering claims from contested state redistricting plans in Rucho v. Common Cause. Yet racial gerrymandering claims remain justiciable. Judicial review of contested redistricting plans is therefore suspended in a state where racial gerrymandering is unconstitutional at the same time that partisan gerrymandering is nonjusticiable, leaving federal courts in...
Once it became apparent that the SEC would not impose a broker-dealer fiduciary duty to retail customers, a number of states proposed regulations that would rectify the perceived shortcomings of Regulation Best Interest (Reg BI). The new SEC rule brought into question the validity of these state fiduciary rules, as well as the common law broker-dealer fiduciary rules in other states. This Note is the first attempt to frame and resolve Reg BI’s...
Congress passed the Periodic Payment Settlement Act of 1982 to incentivize structured settlements. The Act sought to encourage tort victims with serious injuries to agree to settlements that offered the best prospect of long-term financial security. But Congress failed to predict the development of a robust secondary market for settlement payment streams: Since the early 1990s, factoring companies have aggressively and unscrupulously...
As the courts continue to restrict and further restrict the availability of Bivens remedies, one category of claims has been left behind—medical-care claims brought by people detained pretrial. Because of the way the Supreme Court structured the Bivens analysis in Ziglar v. Abbasi, people incarcerated postconviction can, and do, bring claims under the Eighth Amendment for damages resulting from constitutionally defective...
To determine whether there has been a violation of the Fourth Amendment, courts must first analyze whether there has been a “search” or “seizure.” Current doctrine offers two methods of identifying a “search”: the trespassory test and the Katz test. Scholars have criticized the Katz test, which asks whether an individual has a reasonable expectation of privacy, as being difficult to apply. In Carpenter v. United States, Justice Gorsuch...
The California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA) is the first-of-its-kind law in the United States providing Californians (and effectively citizens nationwide) with comprehensive protection of their online data. The CCPA provides consumers with four meaningful rights: (1) a right to access the data companies collect from and about them; (2) a right to have said data deleted; (3) a right to know which categories of third parties these companies are sharing...
In early 2018, North Korea’s Supreme Leader Kim Jong-un and U.S. President Donald Trump were not on the best of terms, publicly lashing out at each other and threatening the destruction of the other’s state. And yet, within the year they were smiling and handshaking in Singapore, followed not long after by a second summit in Vietnam. These summits, focused on the prospect of North Korea’s denuclearization, have in fact raised important...
As James Madison famously wrote, the power of the purse is “the most complete and effectual weapon with which any constitution can arm the immediate representatives of the people.” But the Constitution does not outline specific procedures for how Congress should use that weapon. Over time, Congress has developed a set of norms—the two-step authorization-appropriations process—to effectively execute its power under the Appropriations Clause....
The 2008 financial crash precipitated a liquidity crisis of global proportions. With dollar funding shortages threatening the global financial system, the Federal Reserve turned to foreign central bank liquidity swaps as a key component of its crisis response. First used in the 1960s during the Bretton Woods era, foreign central bank liquidity swaps are essentially contracts between two central banks to lend each other currency....