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...
Note
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....
In class action practice, settlements play a central role. As in all litigation, the parties on both sides see settlement as a way to make peace and avoid the risk associated with going to trial. Class settlements, however, offer defendants something that they cannot obtain by any other means—namely, the ability to cause individuals not in front of the court to release all claims that relate to the events at issue in the class action. Given the...
In 2018, the Delaware courts confronted an extraordinary crisis of corporate governance: an open conflict between a corporation’s board of directors and its controlling shareholder. The board of CBS Corporation, a large media firm, voted to issue a dividend that would have diluted the shares of its controlling shareholder, National Amusements, Inc. (NAI). The dividend would have severed NAI’s control, leaving the board in sole command of CBS’s...
Data scraping—the automated collection of data on the internet—is used in a variety of contexts. On the commercial side, scraping might be used as a means of competition—such as scraping by one company to retrieve information on prices for services provided by a competitor. On the noncommercial side, scraping could be used as a research tool—such as scraping by a news outlet to investigate Amazon’s...
The Supreme Court’s 2018 Jesner v. Arab Bank, PLC decision caused uncertainty for future and ongoing Alien Tort Statute (ATS) litigation in federal courts. In holding that foreign corporations are not subject to liability under the ATS, the Court foreclosed one avenue human rights plaintiffs have sought to use for the past few decades to garner attention, and in some cases receive significant monetary settlements, for the abuses. Further,...
This Note attempts to resolve a significant impediment to the religious free exercise of prisoners. The Religious Land Use and Institutionalized Persons Act (RLUIPA) forbids the government from placing a “substantial burden” on a prisoner’s religious exercise. Congress did not define substantial burden in the statute, instead indicating that courts should rely on the Supreme Court’s free exercise jurisprudence for a definition.
Despite...