No. 6

The Founders’ constitution—the one they had before the Revolution and the one they fought the Revolution to preserve—was one in which violence played a lawmaking role. An embrace of violence to assert constitutional claims is worked deeply into our intellectual history and culture. It was entailed upon us by the Founding generation, who sincerely believed that people “are only as free as they deserve to be” and that one could tell how...

The age of digital distribution exacerbates transaction costs in two distinct ways. First, the dissemination of large quantities of works requires permissions from myriad copyright holders. Second, new technologies lower the cost of content creation, resulting in millions of individual creators, rather than a discrete set of large industry repeat players. The potential of class actions to address this rising transaction cost problem has gone largely...

The widespread use of body-worn cameras (BWCs) by law enforcement agencies calls into question how those departments store and publicly release the large amounts of video footage they amass under public access laws. This Note identifies a changing landscape of public access law, with a close look at the federal Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) and its state analogues, as the result of the Capitol Insurrection and the national Movement for Black...

American Samoa is the only U.S. jurisdiction that does not recognize gender-neutral marriage despite the Supreme Court’s Obergefell decision invalidating laws that limit marriage to male–female couples. Among U.S. territories, American Samoa has five unique features: It is the only territory that the United States acquired through negotiation with ruling sovereigns, whose land is largely communally owned, whose residents lack birthright...

Nascent tech acquisitions have been the subject of renewed regulatory and antitrust scrutiny in recent years. These acquisitions can often be very small—hundreds of tech deals have occurred in the past decade below the current reporting threshold of $101 million—and the current merger review process of the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) often fails to capture the harms unique to these early-stage deals. This Note argues that the FTC should...

For over a decade, a battle has been raging in the trial courts of this country over something called the “reptile theory,” often simply referred to by insiders as “the reptile.” The term comes from Reptile: The 2009 Manual of the Plaintiff’s Revolution. The book’s thesis is that the way for plaintiffs to win tort cases and secure large verdicts is to appeal to the reptilian part of jurors’ brains, which (like threatened...