Several recent high-profile criminal cases have highlighted the dynamic nature of identity crimes in a modern digital era and the boundaries prosecutors sometimes push to squeeze arguably wrongful conduct into an outdated legal framework. In many cases, two federal statutes—18 U.S.C § 1028 and § 1028A—provide prosecutors with potent tools to aggressively pursue...
This Note examines the claim that judges have improperly granted summary judgment where a reasonable jury could find for the non-moving party. It begins by reviewing the literature on summary judgment, particularly three opinions the Supreme Court issued in 1986, as well as claims about the propriety of summary judgment in fact- intensive civil rights cases. To test...
In popular, scholarly, and legal discourse, psychological trauma is an experience that belongs to victims. While we expect victims of crimes to suffer trauma, we never ask whether perpetrators likewise experience those same crimes as trauma. Indeed, if we consider trauma in the perpetration of a crime at all, it is usually to inquire whether a terrible experience earlier...
The project of creating a Banking Union is designed to overcome the fatal link between sovereigns and their banks in the Eurozone. As part of this project, political agreement for a common supervision framework and a common resolution scheme has been reached with difficulty. However, the resolution framework is weak, underfunded and exhibits some serious flaws. Further,...
8 U.S.C. § 1324 prohibits, among other activities, harboring aliens who enter the United States without authorization. In the more than six decades since the law was passed, federal courts’ understandings of what “harboring” means have varied. This Note argues that recent decisions in the Second and Seventh Circuits, both of which narrow the scope of liability...
With a persistent and, in some places, increasing education achievement gap falling along lines of race and class, advocates have often turned to the courts to improve this nation’s public schools. Public law litigation has historically helped to remove some of the most invidious barriers to improvement, but traditional desegregation and school-finance lawsuits have not gone far enough to close the gap. This Note thus seeks to propose a new approach...
This Note argues that the Supreme Court’s decision in Adoptive Couple v. Baby Girl creates an apparent tension in federal Indian law. The Court’s characterization of the broader aims of the Indian Child Welfare Act of 1978 and of biology’s role within it appears irreconcilable with previous interpretations of the Act—including...
Judges must consider domestic violence when determining child custody under state law. Many states guide the custody inquiry with statutory presumptions against awarding custody to abusers. With custody outcomes often hinging on allegations of domestic violence, judges increasingly turn to experts for answers. But expert assessments of domestic violence in the child custody context lack a uniform and reliable methodology. As this Note reveals,...
Bankruptcy scholarship is largely a debate about the comparativemerits of a mandatory regime on one hand and bankruptcy by free design on the other. By the standard account, the current law of corporate reorganization is mandatory. Various rules that cannot be avoided ensure that investors’ actions are limited and they do not exercise their rights against specialized assets in a way that destroys the value of a business as a whole. These...
This Essay uses Peter Strauss’s work as a springboard to explore the particularly precarious position of the agencies charged with promulgating science-intensive rules (“expert agencies”) with respect to presidential oversight. Over the last three decades, agencies promulgating science-intensive rules have worked to enhance the accountability and scientific credibility of their rules by developing elaborate procedures for ensuring both...