This Essay surfaces an obstacle to decarceration hiding in plain sight: progressivesโ continued support for the carceral system. Despite progressivesโ increasingly prevalent critiques of criminal law, there is hardly a consensus on the left in opposition to the carceral state. Many left-leaning academics and activists who may critique the criminal system writ large remain enthusiastic about criminal law in certain areasโ often areas in which...
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Introduction In his compelling new book, Invisible Atrocities, Professor Randle DeFalco explores the function of the aesthetics of violence in international law. In particular, he questions international lawโs preference for sanctioning spectacular demonstrations of violence rather than more banal, bureaucratic actions that cause massive scales of suffering and misery. The book resonated with us because […]
People routinely refer to copyright and trademark as โsoft IPโ to distinguish these practices from another area of intellectual property: patent. But the term reflects implicit biases against copyright and trademark doctrine and practitioners. โSoft IPโ implies that patent law alone is hard, even though patents are no more physically, metaphorically, or intellectually hard than copyrights and trademarks. Despite stereotypes to the contrary,...
Plaintiffs in securities class actions have increasingly relied on reports published by anonymous short sellers when alleging the element of loss causation. Indeed, short-seller reports are useful for plaintiffs, as they purport to reveal negative information about a targeted company and generally cause a decline in the targeted companyโs stock price. Unlike other types of corrective disclosures, however, short-seller reports are unique in that...
The Columbia Law Review launched its Karl Llewellyn Lecture series on March 19, 2024, celebrating pioneers in the law who have innovated and challenged legal theory. The inaugural Lecture was delivered by Judge Guido Calabresi who spoke on the promise and peril of “Law and โฆ” disciplines, such as Law and Economics, Law and Philosophy, and Law and History. A transcript of Judge Calabresi’s Lecture is published in this...
The law does not possess the language that we desperately need to accurately capture the totality of the Palestinian condition. From occupation to apartheid and genocide, the most commonly applied legal concepts rely on abstraction and analogy to reveal particular facets of subordination. This Article introduces Nakba as a legal concept to resolve this tension. Meaning โCatastropheโ in Arabic, the term โal-Nakbaโ (ุงูููุจุฉ) is often...
This Piece responds to recent critiques of litigation articulating a religious liberty right to access abortion. It argues that under current and expansive religious liberty doctrine, patients seeking a religious right to abortion have standing to sue even prior to pregnancy, their sincerity should not be unfairly disputed, and existing secular exemptions in abortion laws undermine the stateโs alleged compelling government interest in prohibiting...
For the past several decades, the Supreme Court has repeatedly sought to reinterpret the meaning of โpropertyโ within federal fraud statutes to limit the degree to which federal prosecutors can regulate state official misconduct. While the Courtโs renewed interest in the federal fraud statutes has drawn varying degrees of praise and criticism from different sides of the legal community, this Note seeks to assessโin an apolitical, value-neutral...
Recently, a wave of state legislatures have enacted qui tam provisions to police citizen behavior in a variety of politically and legally contentious environments. The current literature on private enforcement views qui tam as a homogenous species of private enforcement and does little to identify any distinctions within qui tam itself. This gap in the scholarship has made it difficult to assess the legitimacy of the recently adopted state qui...
From subtle shifts in the procedural mechanics of self-defense doctrine to substantive expansions of justified lethal force, legislatures are delegating larger amounts of โviolence workโ to the private sphere. These regulatory innovations layer on top of existing rules that broadly authorize private violenceโboth defensive and offensiveโfor self-protection and the ostensible maintenance of law and order. Yet such significant authority for...