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...
Issue Archives
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...
There is an aspect of criminal procedure decisions that has for too long gone unnoticed, unrecognized, and unremarked upon. Embedded in the Supreme Court’s criminal procedure jurisprudence—at times hidden in plain sight, at other times hidden below the surface—are asides about what it means to be a “good citizen.” The good citizen, for example, is willing to aid the police, willingly waives their right to silence, and welcomes police...
Shortly after John Wilkes Booth assassinated Abraham Lincoln on April 14, 1865, President Andrew Johnson directed that Booth’s alleged coconspirators be tried in a makeshift military tribunal, rather than in the Article III court that was open for business just a few blocks from Ford’s Theatre. Johnson’s decision implicated a fundamental constitutional question that was heatedly debated throughout the Civil War: When, if ever, may the federal...
Employers seeking to test job applicants for strength or speed while adhering to the mandates of Title VII often use gender-normed physical-ability tests. Gender-normed tests set different raw cutoffs for male and female applicants such that each class would be expected to have roughly equal pass rates. This practice has helped employers—especially law enforcement agencies—retain physical hiring standards while mitigating their disparate...
The 2016 presidential election was one of the most divisive in recent memory, but it produced a surprising bipartisan consensus. Donald Trump, Hillary Clinton, and Bernie Sanders all agreed that U.S. trade agreements should be, but are not, “fair.” Although it...
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 […]
“But always, always, / A man must wait the final day, and no man / Should ever be called happy before burial.” So warns the narrator of Ovid’s Metamorphoses, in recounting how Cadmus founded Thebes. This dark pronouncement underscores the caprice of fate, to which Cadmus himself would fall prey. Were Robert Ferguson here, […]