This Piece embraces a fictional narrative to illustrate deep flaws in our legal system. It borrows its basic structure and a few choice lines from George Orwell’s classic novel Nineteen Eighty-Four. Like Orwell’s novel, it is set in the not-too-distant future to comment on problems already emerging in the present. The footnotes largely provide examples of some of those problems and how courts have treated them in a constitutional law...
Issue Archives
Scholars, policymakers, and the media acknowledge that surveillance can threaten privacy and increase the risk of discrimination. Surveillance of people with disabilities, however, is positioned as being a convenient way of averting a host of problems: It can be seen as a way to protect people with disabilities from abuse and neglect, to prevent Medicaid fraud, and to proactively protect school communities from mass shootings. Increasingly, as...
In states with restrictive Medicaid statutes, many transgender people seeking gender-affirming care look to the courts for injunctive relief to receive gender-affirming surgery. The standard to obtain injunctive relief necessitates, in part, a finding that the plaintiff would be irreparably harmed without the relief—in this case, without being able to access surgery. This Comment outlines dangerous implications embedded in the Ninth Circuit’s...
Book bans and censorship battles have garnered considerable attention in recent years, but one of the most critical battlegrounds is kept out of the public eye. Prison officials can ban any book that threatens the security or operations of their facility. This means that the knowledge access rights of incarcerated people are subject to the judgments of the people detaining them. This Note focuses on books about Black people in America and books...
Despite a burgeoning conversation about the centrality of information management to governments, scholars are only just beginning to address the role of legal information in sustaining authoritarian rule. This Essay presents a case study showing how legal information can be manipulated: through the deletion of previously published cases from China’s online public database of court decisions. Using our own dataset of all 42 million cases made...
In myriad areas of public life—from voting to professional licensure—the state collects, shares, and uses sex and gender data in complex algorithmic systems that mete out benefits, verify identity, and secure spaces. But in doing so, the state often erases transgender, nonbinary, and gender-nonconforming individuals, subjecting them to the harms of exclusion. These harms are not simply features of technology design, as others have ably written....
In a series of recent cases, the Supreme Court has reconfigured the administrative state in line with a particular version of Article II. According to the Court’s scheme, known as the theory of the “unitary executive,” all of the government’s operations must be housed under one of three branches, with the head of the executive branch shouldering unique and personal responsibility for the administration of federal law.
Guiding the...
Jurisprudence aims to identify and explain important features of law. To accomplish this task, what method should one employ? Elucidating Law, a tour de force in “the philosophy of legal philosophy,” develops an instructive account of how philosophers “elucidate law,” which in turn elucidates jurisprudence’s own aims and methods. This Review introduces the book, with emphasis on its discussion of methodology.
Next, the...
In 2021, the Supreme Court decided City of Chicago v. Fulton, a landmark bankruptcy case that addressed the issue of whether passive retention of estate property violates § 362(a)(3) of the U.S. Bankruptcy Code, commonly known as the “automatic stay” provision. The automatic stay, as its name suggests, is a breathing spell that prevents creditors from taking certain collection actions against the debtor after a bankruptcy petition...
We analyze whether non-shareholder constituencies are better protected with internal corporate law reform or with external regulation. We reply to Professor Aneil Kovvali’s article, Stark Choices for Corporate Reform, that criticizes some of our previous output, in which we warned that a stakeholderist corporate law reform would stymie efforts to achieve effective stakeholder protections with external regulation. In his article, Kovvali...