Appropriations lie at the core of the administrative state and are becoming increasingly important as deep partisan divides have stymied substantive legislation. Both Congress and the President exploit appropriations to control government and advance their policy agendas, with the border wall battle being just one of several recent high-profile examples. Yet in public law doctrine, appropriations are ignored, pulled out for special...
Issue Archives
In Birth Rights and Wrongs: How Medicine and Technology Are Remaking Reproduction and the Law, Dov Fox schematizes the concept of “reproductive negligence” (also called “reproductive wrongs”) into three categories: procreation imposed, procreation deprived, and procreation confounded. This Book Review aims to extend Fox’s analysis by looking beyond the law of torts, which is Fox’s primary focus. This Review observes that...
Online speech governance stands at an inflection point. The state of emergency that platforms invoked during the COVID-19 pandemic is subsiding, and lawmakers are poised to transform the regulatory landscape. What emerges from this moment will shape the most important channels for communication in the modern era and have profound consequences for individuals, societies, and democratic governance. Tracing the path to this point illuminates the...
Rule 10b-5 and the securities-fraud action provide a private enforcement tool only where litigants can show a defendant’s misrepresentation impacted the price of a security. But investors increasingly demand disclosure about how a corporation interacts with stakeholder groups such as employees, consumers, and communities. Because these “sustainability disclosures” are aimed at long-term value, misrepresentations will only...
When private parties perform contracts, the public bears some of the costs. But what happens when society confronts unexpected contractual risks? During the COVID-19 pandemic, completing particular contracts—such as following through with weddings, conferences, and other large gatherings—will greatly increase the risk of rapidly spreading disease. A close reading of past cases illustrates that when social hazards sharply increase after formation,...
Commentators and policymakers frequently propose new government agencies in response to novel or intractable problems. New agencies can refocus public attention on the problems they regulate. They can attract new talent and bypass calcified or captured channels. But they are also costly, and there is no guarantee that they will be more successful than their predecessors.
This Article examines agency genesis at the state level. In the process,...
From inception to execution of this in memoriam issue, my heart has overflowed with love and gratitude for the members of the Columbia Law Review Class of 2021 who were present every step of the way. To Eitan Arom, Priya Asokan, Ben Covington, Madeleine Durbin, Angie Garcia, José Jesús Martínez III, Yerv Melkonyan, Mie Morikubo, […]
* Associate Justice of the Supreme Court of the United States.
* Shannon Cecil Turner Professor of Jurisprudence, University of California, Berkeley School of Law; Law clerk to the Honorable Ruth Bader Ginsburg, October Term 1999.
* Partner, Wachtell, Lipton, Rosen & Katz, Law Clerk to the Honorable Ruth Bader Ginsburg, October Term 1998.