Once it became apparent that the SEC would not impose a broker-dealer fiduciary duty to retail customers, a number of states proposed regulations that would rectify the perceived shortcomings of Regulation Best Interest (Reg BI). The new SEC rule brought into question the validity of these state fiduciary rules, as well as the common law broker-dealer fiduciary rules in other states. This Note is the first attempt to frame and resolve Reg BI’s...
No. 6
Congress passed the Periodic Payment Settlement Act of 1982 to incentivize structured settlements. The Act sought to encourage tort victims with serious injuries to agree to settlements that offered the best prospect of long-term financial security. But Congress failed to predict the development of a robust secondary market for settlement payment streams: Since the early 1990s, factoring companies have aggressively and unscrupulously...
From mandating separate and unequal gravesites, to condoning mutilation after lynchings, to engaging in cover-ups after wrongful police shootings, governmental actors have often degraded dignity in death. This Article offers an account of the constitutional law of the dead and takes aim at a legal rule that purports to categorically exclude the dead from constitutional protection. The rule rests on two faulty premises. The first...
This Essay scrutinizes the canons of substantive criminal law, with a particular focus on the curricular canon. By curricular canon, I mean the conceptual model used to teach the subject of criminal law, including the cases, narratives, and ideas that are presented to students. Since the middle of the twentieth century, American law schools have offered (and often required) a course in criminal law in which homicide is the paradigm crime and...
For the last fifty years, Congress has valorized the act of borrowing money as a catalyst for equality, embracing the proposition that equality can be bought with a loan. In a series of bedrock statutes aimed at democratizing access to loans and purchase money for marginalized groups, Congress has evinced a “borrowing-as-equality” policy that has largely focused on the capacity of “credit,” while acoustically separating...
On February 14, 2019, hundreds of thousands of text messages were ensnared in a defective communications server—only to be released months later. By the time these messages reached their recipients, their worlds had changed: Heartfelt valentines arrived from loves now lost; other late-arriving messages seemed to come from the ghosts of the recently passed. It could have been worse. Text messages help to enable a wide variety of critical applications,...
Introduction Federal campaign finance law currently prohibits individuals from donating more than $35,500 per year to national political party committees. Yet, in March 2020, former New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg gave $18 million to the DNC. How was he able to do this? The answer is simple: Mayor Bloomberg donated his $18 million not […]