When a court determines that an agency action violates the Administrative Procedure Act, the conventional remedy is to invalidate the action and remand to the agency. Only rarely do the courts entertain the possibility of holding agency errors harmless. The courts’ strict approach to error holds some appeal: Better a hard rule that encourages procedural fastidiousness than a remedial standard that might tempt agencies to cut corners. But the...
Issue Archives
Introduction In Fisher v. University of Texas in June 2016, the Supreme Court upheld the use of race-conscious affirmative action in college admissions. While recognizing a university’s interest in the educational benefits that derive from a diverse student body, Justice Kennedy cautioned in the majority opinion: “A university’s goals cannot be elusory or amorphous—they must […]
Introduction The Judicial Conference of the United States is charged with “carry[ing] on a continuous study of the operation and effect” of the national rules of court procedure promulgated under the Rules Enabling Act. The cycle of rulemaking regularly produces amendments that supersede or abrogate rules. Do the now-dead versions of a rule have any […]
Introduction Evidence compellingly demonstrates—as Congress famously recognized in Title I of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act of 1965 (ESEA)—that children from economically disadvantaged backgrounds require more educational resources than other students. Yet, a half century later, many school districts still spend less money on high-poverty schools than on more privileged schools. In 2011, a […]
Introduction The Constitution protects us from criminal conviction unless the state can prove guilt beyond a reasonable doubt. However, after defining reasonable doubt, many trial courts will then instruct jurors “to search for the truth” of what they think really happened. Defendants have argued that such truth-related language reduces the state’s burden of proof to […]
In the 1932 case Gebardi v. United States, the Supreme Court held that the failure of a statute to punish a party necessary to the commission of the proscribed conduct reflected an affirmative legislative policy to leave such party unpunished. As such, the Court declined to use the conspiracy statute to frustrate Congress’s grant of immunity. In doing so, the Court carved out an exception to the federal conspiracy statute: an exception...
Copyright protection attaches to an original work of expression the moment it is created and fixed in a tangible medium. Yet modern copyright law contains no viable mechanism by which to examine whether someone is causally responsible for the creation and fixation of the work. Whenever the issue of causation arises, copyright law relies on its preexisting doctrinal devices to resolve the issue, in the process cloaking its intuitions about causation...
The Supreme Court’s 2014 decision in Fifth Third Bancorp v. Dudenhoeffer rejected a long-held presumption in the U.S. circuit courts that fiduciaries of employee stock ownership plans (ESOPs) act prudently in investing in company stock. Instead, the Supreme Court held, ESOP fiduciaries should be subject to the same duty of prudence as all ERISA fiduciaries, leaving ESOP fiduciaries vulnerable to plaintiffs testing the new standard.
To...
A pharmacist fills a prescription for birth control pills with prenatal vitamins. An in vitro lab loses a cancer survivor’s eggs. A fertility clinic exposes embryos to mad cow disease. A sperm bank switches a selected sample with one from a donor of a different race. An obstetrician predicts that a healthy fetus will be born with a debilitating condition.
These errors go virtually unchecked in a profession that operates free of meaningful...
Introduction Pressure is building again for Congress to reform patent law. Various proposals would reduce patent-litigation costs through fee shifting, delaying discovery, or allowing manufacturers to defend suits on behalf of their customers. Eluding consideration, however, is one simple change that might eliminate millions or even billions of dollars worth of waste across the entire […]