How should judges decide which linguistic canons to apply in interpreting statutes? One important answer looks to the inside of the legislative process: Follow the canons that lawmakers contemplate. A different answer, based on the “ordinary meaning” doctrine, looks to the outside: Follow the canons that guide an ordinary person’s understanding of the legal text. We offer a novel framework for empirically testing linguistic canons “from...
Issue Archives
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...
In Kelly v. United States, the Supreme Court vacated the federal corruption convictions of the three government officials behind “Bridgegate.” In the process of doing so, the Court flagged an interesting tool that states have in their anticorruption toolkits that might’ve applied to the conduct before the Court: official misconduct statutes. These dynamic statutes are on the books in twenty-three states and territories, and another...
During and after last year’s expansive Black Lives Matter protests, police departments nationwide publicly shared robust video surveillance of protestors. Much of this footage rendered individual protestors identifiable, sometimes in ways that seemed intentional. Such disclosures raise First Amendment concerns under NAACP v. Alabama ex rel. Patterson and its progeny, including the recent Americans for Prosperity v. Bonta decision....
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...
The conventional view of corporate governance is that it is a neutral set of processes and practices that govern how a company is managed. We demonstrate that this view is profoundly mistaken: For public companies in the United States, corporate governance has become a “system” composed of an array of institutional players, with a powerful shareholderist orientation. Our original account of this “corporate governance machine” generates...
Legal scholars describe Article V of the U.S. Constitution, which sets forth rules for amending the document, as an uncommonly stringent and specific constitutional provision. A unanimous Supreme Court has said that a “mere reading demonstrates” that “Article V is clear in statement and in meaning, contains no ambiguity, and calls for no resort to rules of construction.” Although it is familiar...
An unfamiliar equality principle is gaining prominence in constitutional discourse. Equal value presumptively prohibits government from regulating protected activities while exempting other activities to which the government’s interest applies just as readily. Although the principle is being developed in the context of free exercise, it has implications for other guarantees in constitutional law. This Article offers two arguments....