No. 5

Until recently, the Supreme Court interpreted the Federal Power Act (FPA) to draw an impermeable boundary between the jurisdiction of the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) and those of state public utility commissions. But the Court’s recent decisions in FERC v. Electric Power Supply Association (EPSA) and Hughes v. Talen Energy Marketing, LLC appear to relax the formalistic test tradi­tion­ally used to resolve...

The American criminal justice system is a system of pleas. Few who know it well think it is working. And yet, identifying plausible strategies for law reform proves challenging, given the widely held scholarly assumption that plea bargaining operates “beyond the shadow of the law.” That assumption holds true with respect to substantive and constitutional criminal law—the two most studied bodies of law in the criminal justice system—neither...

Contemporary scholarship and jurisprudence concerning the Constitution’s separation of powers is characterized by sharp disagree­ment about general theory and specific outcomes. The leading theories diverge on how to model the motives of institutional actors; on how to weigh text, history, doctrine, and norms; and on whether to characterize the separation of powers system as abiding in a stable equilibrium or as enthralled by transformative...

This Note assesses First Amendment freedom of speech claims with regard to online civil rights testing. Transactions that have conventionally occurred in person are now more often completed online, and providers transacting online have been increasingly using algo­rithms that synthe­size users’ data. While these algorithms are helpful tools, they may also be yielding discriminatory results, whether inten­tionally or unintentionally.

In...

Introduction Academic life is rarely quite so rewarding. Thanks to the editors of the Columbia Law Review for this opportunity to engage with scholars as gifted as Professors Robert Rabin, Carol Sanger, and Gregory Keating. I have long admired their insights on law, ethics, and institutions. I am grate­ful and privileged for their trenchant responses […]