Foreign patrimony laws nationalize ownership of cultural property found within a nation’s borders and prohibit export or private ownership. They are enforceable in the United States under the McClain doctrine. In defending against McClain-doctrine suits to repatriate stolen cultural property, defendants have begun to assert the “inactivity defense,” which is premised on the theory that enforcing certain patrimony...
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Auer deference holds that reviewing courts should defer to agencies when the latter interpret their own preexisting regulations. This doctrine relieves pressure on agencies to undergo costly notice-and-comment rulemaking each time interpretation of existing regulations is necessary. But according to some leading scholars and jurists, the doctrine actually encourages agencies to promulgate vague rules in the first instance, augmenting...
The Supreme Court’s 2018 decision in Masterpiece Cakeshop left unresolved a central question running through the so-called wedding-vendor cases: Can the law ever grant religious exemptions to places of public accommodation without severely undermining antidiscrimination laws? The question is a difficult one, and people on both sides of these cases see the stakes as high. For supporters of same-sex marriage, these cases threaten...
Introduction American party politics may be as nationally competitive as they have ever been, but at the same time they are perhaps as unresponsive to average citizens as they have been in a long time. It is this paradox that Professor Tabatha Abu El-Haj creatively interrogates in her essay, Networking the Party: First Amendment Rights […]
Introduction On October 27, 2016, Casey Camp-Horinek was arrested for praying. The State of North Dakota claims that she was arrested for trespass, rioting, and endangerment by fire, but Camp-Horinek was acting out of a religious duty to protect the purity of Lake Oahe. This Comment will discuss whether the enforcement of these laws against […]
Three successive presidential administrations have opposed immigrant-sanctuary policy, at various intervals characterizing state and local government restrictions on police participation in federal immigration enforcement as reckless, aberrant, and unpatriotic. This Article finds these claims to be ahistorical in light of the long and singular history of a field this Article identifies as “police federalism.” For nearly all of U.S. history,...
With the rise of cryptocurrency as a popular investment, cryptocurrency wallets and exchanges have proliferated, offering platforms that allow investors to hold and trade cryptocurrency. Because these platforms hold cryptocurrency on their customers’ behalf, they present problems associated with custody. Namely, how do investors ensure that these platforms do not misuse or mishandle their assets? And how will customer assets be treated if a platform...
On any given day, local jails detain nearly half-a-million people who cannot afford bail. Opposition to this status quo, and to monetary conditions of pretrial release more broadly, has reached a fever pitch in recent years. Critics from across the political spectrum decry bail as a wellspring of mass incarceration and acknowledge its profoundly discriminatory effects, particularly within low-income communities of color. Academic studies link bail...
In the past decade, major retailers nationwide have begun to employ a private, for-profit system to settle criminal disputes, extracting payment from shoplifting suspects in exchange for a promise not to call the police. This Article examines what retailers’ decisions reveal about our public system of criminal justice and the concerns of the agents who run it, the victims who rely on it, and the suspects whose lives it alters. The private policing...
While income inequality has become an increasingly central focus of public policy debate and public law scholarship, systemic inequality and exclusion are produced not just by disparities in income but also by more hidden and pernicious background rules that systematically disadvantage and subordinate certain constituencies. This Essay focuses on a particularly crucial—and often underappreciated—site for the construction and contestation of...