Issue Archives

The Columbia Law Review’s Karl Llewellyn Lecture series celebrates pioneers in the law who have innovated and challenged legal theory. The third annual Lecture was delivered by Cahill Gordon & Reindel LLP Senior Counsel and distinguished First Amendment litigator Floyd Abrams on February 12, 2026. A transcript of Mr. Abrams’s Lecture is published in this Issue.

The full text of this Lecture...

The over $250 billion video game industry, the largest entertainment industry in the world, has rapidly developed unregulated monetary systems. Gaming companies issue what this Article terms “gaming money”—points earned in play, gift cards, and platform-stored balances—and increasingly enable conversion of these instruments into bank deposits at scale. Although they adopt many of the features of “money,” they evade existing regulatory...

International organizations frequently use democratic transitional agreements as the primary framework for restoring peace after intrastate conflict. These postconflict peacebuilding efforts often result in transitional peace agreements that include a version of interim governance, typically with some power-sharing component, that aims to end armed conflict and usher in democratic elections after a set period. By examining Sudan’s 2022 Political...

The conventional view of the Sixth Amendment right to counsel for indigent defendants is that its enforcement depends on the political branches to implement the right by appropriating the money to enforce it. But that’s not how enforcement of the modern version of the right started. For more than twenty-five years, between 1938, when Johnson v. Zerbst established a right to appointed counsel for federal defendants, and 1964, when Congress began...

The harmful effects of climate change have already arrived in cities and states across America, with disasters increasing markedly in recent years along with more gradual environmental changes like sea-level rise and drought. To protect populations and natural resources, significant funding will be necessary for preventative measures as well as disaster response.

At present, it is states and ordinary taxpayers who must shoulder the enormous...

This Note argues that the allocations of power within the federal Constitution’s separation-of-powers framework hinder effective governance of environmental issues. The true problem is more than the sum of its parts: Several key failings of domestic environmental law result not from the shortcomings of any given statutory scheme but from the relationship between such statutory schemes, the boundary-defying and factually messy nature of environmental...

This Piece is a call to eliminate the de facto requirement that a law review article conclude with a list of actionable and feasible prescriptions, often law or policy reforms, that respond to the questions or analysis at the heart of the article. Traditionally, this is Part IV of the law review article, in which a scholar is expected to explain how the preceding twenty thousand words can and should bear on how we move forward in the world. These...

This Essay identifies mechanisms by which the law regulates access to marriage for adults with intellectual disabilities, exploring how statutes and court decisions give meaning to the concept of “capacity to marry.” The Essay identifies two previously unstudied and contradictory understandings of the relationship between marriage and capacity. One notion of “capacity to marry” operates to exclude adults with intellectual disabilities from...

Courts and scholars have long disagreed about whether arbitrators follow the law. It is difficult, however, to assess whether arbitration is lawless. For one, the process is private, usually confidential, and often generates unreasoned unwritten awards. In addition, determining whether an arbitrator decided a case “correctly” is highly subjective. Thus, the literature on point relies on crude proxies such as surveys of arbitrators, the frequency...

In recent years, the Supreme Court has developed a robust antidiscrimination principle rooted in the Free Exercise Clause that commands that generally available public benefits may not be denied to religious organizations because of their religious identity. In St. Isidore v. Drummond ex rel. Oklahoma, school-choice advocates sought to extend this principle to Oklahoma’s public charter school program, arguing that excluding a Catholic...