From Citizens United to Hobby Lobby, civil libertarian challenges to the regulation of economic activity are increasingly prevalent. Critics of this trend invoke the specter of Lochner v. New York. They suggest that the First Amendment, the Religious Freedom Restoration Act, and other legislative “conscience clauses” are being used to resurrect the economically libertarian substantive due process jurisprudence of the early...
Issue Archives
Suicide is the leading cause of death in jails, yet many jails and municipalities have insufficient policies for preventing inmate suicide. One of the ways to lead jails and municipalities to change such policies would be through financial pressure from individual lawsuits for damages resulting from an inmate’s suicide; however, due to the legal structure surrounding custodial liability, it is often difficult for inmates’ estates to successfully...
Over the past two decades, legal protections for lesbian, gay, and bisexual individuals have dramatically expanded. Simultaneously, meaningful access to reproductive choice for women has eroded. What accounts for the different trajectories of LGBTQ rights and reproductive rights?
This Piece argues that one explanation—or at least partial explanation—for the advance of LGBTQ rights relative to reproductive rights is the differing degree...
Constitutional rules are norms whose application depends on an interpreter’s identification of a set of facts rather than on her exercise of practical judgment. This Article argues that constitutional interpreters in the United States tend to resolve ambiguity over constitutional rules by reference to originalist sources and tend to resolve uncertainty over the scope of constitutional standards by reference to nonoriginalist sources. This positive...
For over half a century, New York City’s groundbreaking Landmarks Preservation Law has protected the city’s most significant structures and spaces. Yet today, some of New York’s most celebrated interior landmarks are closed off to the public, the very group for whose benefit the spaces have been protected. In order to receive a landmark designation, an interior must be “customarily open...
The United States taxes both corporations and shareholders on corporate profits. In principle, the United States could rely on only one of these taxes, as many commentators have suggested. Although choosing to tax the corporation or its owners may seem like taking money from one pocket or the other, this Essay emphasizes a key difference: These taxes prompt different planning. Relying on one or the other mitigates some distortions and leaks,...
The Supreme Court’s denial of certiorari in Madden v. Midland Funding, LLC leaves a dangerous precedent standing in the Second Circuit that poses a significant risk to the consumer-credit market writ large. This Note highlights the dangers that the Madden ruling presents and in so doing cautions against the adoption of the ruling by other circuits. Moreover, given the centrality of New York in the financial economy...
Islamophobia is escalating at a frightening clip in the United States. Scrutiny of this bigotry, presently understood as “fear and suspicion of Muslims,” is rising at an alarming rate. Its rapid rise is reflected in the legal literature, encompassing scholarship analyzing the emerging national security strategies of the state to the civil liberties infractions and threats they pose to Muslim subjects. In short time, Islamophobia has become...
Administrative law presumes a neat system of agency rulemaking and adjudication followed by judicial review. But the reality of the administrative state departs starkly from this model. One such departure is the use of audited self-regulatory organizations (SROs)—private organizations comprised of specific industries that formulate binding law to regulate themselves. Although SROs operate subject to the oversight of federal agencies, their power...
Scholars traditionally conceptualize private law around a commitment to the values of formal freedom and equality. Critics of the traditional view (including lawyer-economists) dispute the significance of a distinction between public and private law, construing private law as merely one form of public regulation. Both positions are flawed. The traditional position is conceptually misguided and normatively disappointing; the critical position...