This Essay argues that the Supreme Court’s political party jurisprudence is predicated on a set of theoretical assumptions that do not hold true in the real world of contemporary American politics. The Court’s jurisprudence is grounded in a theory of democratic accountability—known as “responsible party government”—which views political parties primarily as speakers and presumes that electoral accountability emerges from the choice...
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Introduction Academic life is rarely quite so rewarding. Thanks to the editors of the Columbia Law Review for this opportunity to engage with scholars as gifted as Professors Robert Rabin, Carol Sanger, and Gregory Keating. I have long admired their insights on law, ethics, and institutions. I am grateful and privileged for their trenchant responses […]
Courts regularly consider a parent’s physical disability in child custody disputes. At times, they go as far as to invoke physical disability as a minus factor that weighs against granting custody to that parent. This practice often reflects family court judges’ attitudinal biases, which are premised on ill-conceived notions of how physical disability actually affects one’s ability to parent. Because child custody adjudication affords...
There is a war raging over the admissibility of the prior bad acts of criminal defendants in federal trials. While many circuits treat Federal Rule of Evidence 404(b) as a rule of “inclusion” and liberally admit such prior bad-acts evidence with predictably explosive effects on criminal juries, a few circuits are developing rigorous standards designed to foreclose prosecutorial use of such bad-acts evidence. This Article chronicles the...
Many have argued that the United States’ two major political parties have experienced “asymmetric polarization” in recent decades: The Republican Party has moved significantly further to the right than the Democratic Party has moved to the left. The practice of constitutional hardball, this Essay argues, has followed a similar—and causally related—trajectory. Since at least the mid-1990s, Republican officeholders have been more likely...
Affordable housing residency preferences give residents of a specific geographic “preference area” prioritized access to affordable housing units within that geographic area. Historically, majority-white municipalities have sometimes used affordable housing residency preferences to systematically exclude racial minorities who reside in surrounding communities. Courts have invalidated such residency preferences, usually on the grounds...
Batson v. Kentucky is widely regarded as a failure. In the thirty-plus years since it was decided by the Supreme Court, the doctrine has been subjected to unrelenting criticism for its inability to stop the discriminatory use of peremptory challenges. The scholarly literature is nearly unanimous: Batson is broken. But this Article approaches Batson from a different perspective, focusing on Batson’s appellate...
High drug prices are in the news. In some cases, such as AIDS-treating Daraprim and the life-saving EpiPen, the price increases dramatically. In other cases, which have received less attention, the price stays high longer than it should. Either way, anticompetitive behavior often lurks behind inflated prices. By delaying price-reducing generic competition, this behavior […]
This Note examines the disparate treatment of greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions in the regulatory cost–benefit analysis and the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA) review contexts. In Zero Zone, Inc. v. United States Department of Energy, the Seventh Circuit upheld the use of the social cost of carbon (SCC) when agencies consider GHG emissions in their cost–benefit analyses. At the same time, courts have almost uniformly rejected...
Professor Robert Ferguson enriched all of our lives. The man lived by and luxuriated in words. They are important to all of us, but they had a particularly magical significance to Robert. He chose them carefully, crafted their construction, and gloried in their rhythm. He encouraged all of us—his colleagues, students, friends, and […]