In the vast majority of federal cases, interpretive decisions by the U.S. Courts of Appeals are never reexamined by the U.S. Supreme Court. Over time, the circuit courts may also come to reach a longstanding, substantial consensus about the meaning of the words in a particular federal statute. Practically speaking, these circuit court decisions become the last word. For decades, the public and the legal community rely on these interpretations as...
No. 4
In view of decades of devastating police violence and efforts to reform policing, this Note points to two concurrent phenomena that result in the federal tax code granting benefits to the wealthiest taxpayers who lend to municipalities for police brutality settlements. The first phenomenon is cities electing to issue bonds to satisfy these costly payouts. These bonds have been coined “police brutality bonds.” The second phenomenon is the tax...
Coercive policing is conducted mostly by means of commands, and officers usually cannot use force unless they have first issued an order. Yet, despite widespread concern about force and coercion in policing, commands are both underregulated and misunderstood. Officers have no clear legal authority to give many common commands, almost no departmental guidance about how or when to issue them, and almost no legal scrutiny for many commands they give....
Most American workers labor at will, meaning that employers may fire employees for any nondiscriminatory reason or no reason at all. Employers can even dismiss workers for seemingly unfair or arbitrary reasons. This fraught employment relationship has long resulted in a power imbalance for workers. That imbalance is particularly pronounced for pregnant and postpartum workers, who face disproportionate rates of discrimination at work. Even though...
This Essay offers a revisionist account of the Slaughter-House Cases. It argues that the opinion’s primary significance lies not in its gutting of the Privileges or Immunities Clause but in its omission of a people’s archive of slavery.
Decades before the decision, Black abolitionists began compiling the testimonies of refugees who had fled slavery. By 1872, this archival practice had produced a published record of Black struggle and...
Judicial clerkships are typically described in the rosiest of terms—as fostering lifelong mentor-mentee relationships between judges and clerks and conferring only professional benefits. The downsides of clerking are rarely discussed. The clerkship application process is opaque. Little information exists to help law students identify positive work environments and avoid judges who mistreat their clerks. The secretive, fear-infused method of information-sharing...
Kent Greenawalt was my colleague and friend for half a century. Over those years, we shared responsibility both for students at the beginning of their legal studies and for candidates for the doctoral degree. The course in Legal Methods, while we each taught it, was an intensive three-week, thirty-nine class hour introduction to legal […]
In their sunnier moments, law professors sometimes say there is no tension between being a great teacher and being a great scholar—that they are actually complementary. There’s little strong evidence to support this claim. But they like to say it anyway. Kent Greenawalt was indeed an excellent scholar and a great teacher. But I […]
Professor Kent Greenawalt was a kind and exceedingly thoughtful man. To sketch out the life he led is to reflect on the nature of those virtues, for the traits I have mentioned were connected with one another. His thoughtfulness was conveyed in the gentlemanly quality of his personal and collegial interactions. He always cared […]