Section 440.10(1)(i) of the New York Criminal Procedure Law allows victims of sex trafficking to vacate convictions for certain offenses they were forced to commit by their traffickers. This vacatur provision and similar laws in other states have been praised for their ability to give victims of sex trafficking a fresh start, free from the stigma of a criminal record....
In this Article, I identify and critique a phenomenon I call Free Exercise Lochnerism. In promoting corporate religious exemptions from employment and consumer protections, litigants, scholars, and courts are resurrecting Lochner v. New York—a case symbolic of the courts’ widely criticized use of freedom of contract to strike down economic regulation at the turn of the last century. Today, in their interpretations of the First Amendment...
As presently constructed, equal protection doctrine is an identity-based jurisprudence, meaning that the level of scrutiny applied to an alleged act of discrimination turns on the identity category at issue. In that sense, equal protection relies on identity as a proxy, standing in to signify the types of discrimination we find most troubling.
Equal protection’s current use of identity as proxy leads to a number of problems, including...
In 2011, Congress passed the Leahy-Smith America Invents Act, a broad-sweeping reform of the American patent system. Within this landmark piece of legislation, Congress created trial-like administrative proceedings as a cost-effective alternative to litigation. Inter partes review allows third parties to go before the Patent and Trademark Office and attempt to invalidate an already issued patent on the limited grounds that it fails to meet either...
Every year, fee awards enable millions of people to obtain access to justice and strengthen the deterrent effect of the law by motivating lawyers to handle class actions. But little research exists on why judges award the amounts they do or whether they size fee awards correctly. The process remains a black box. Through a detailed study of 431 securities class actions that settled in federal district courts from 2007 through 2012, this Article...
Introduction Major League Baseball (MLB) has honored a single player by retiring his number for every club. Absent special commemorations, no player will wear the number “42” in honor of the man who broke the color barrier to become the first African American to play major league baseball in the modern era: Jackie Robinson. MLB […]
On June 25, 2015, the Supreme Court held in Texas Department of Housing and Community Affairs v. Inclusive Communities Project, Inc. (Inclusive Communities or ICP ) that parts of the federal Fair Housing Act (FHA) include a disparate-impact standard of liability. This standard allows liability without a showing of illegal intent and traces back to the […]
This Essay attempts to describe what is distinctive about the way the protection of individual rights in the areas of national security and foreign affairs has been occurring in recent decades. Historically, the right to protection under the U.S. Constitution and courts has been sharply limited by categorical distinctions based on geography, war, and, to some extent, citizenship. These categorical rules carved out domains where the courts and Constitution...
When a trademark registered with the Patent and Trademark Office is infringed, section 32 of the Lanham Act provides the trade¬mark registrant the opportunity to seek remedies in federal court. Thanks to a broad definition of “registrant,” the Act in fact extends standing beyond the registrant herself to her “legal representatives,” among others. This language has prompted courts to puzzle over the proper definition of a “legal representative.”...