States abdicate many of their federal responsibilities to local governments. They do not monitor local compliance with those laws, they disclaim responsibility for the actions of their local governments, and they deny state officials the legal capacity to bring local governments into compliance. When sued for noncompliance with these federal laws, states attempt to evade responsibility by arguing that local governments—and not the state—are...
Vol. 117
While vaccination is a hot political topic, it is largely settled as a matter of law. Ever since the Supreme Court’s 1905 decision in Jacobson v. Massachusetts, state governments have possessed the authority to enforce mandatory vaccination laws. Furthermore, courts have long recognized that States are not required to provide religious exemptions to these vaccination mandates, though most do. The Supreme Court recently denied certiorari in a...
Colleges and universities are facing mounting pressure to tackle the pervasive problem of student-perpetrated sexual misconduct. Whether these institutions lack the expertise or, less optimistically, the willpower, colleges and universities have struggled to sift through a morass of Department of Education regulations, conflicting case law, and institutional incentives in order to design disciplinary procedures that protect the rights of both complainant...
“‘Al Hill is the legal scholar’s scholar.’” Al Hill died on December 5, 2015 at the age of 98, outlasting most of his contemporaries. Al had taken senior status when I came to Columbia Law School, and I succeeded him in the course on federal courts. The little I saw of Al left […]
Alfred Hill, a great legal scholar and one of Columbia’s treasures for nearly 50 years, died in 2015 at the age of 98. The Columbia Law Review honored him on his retirement from active teaching in 1991, but Al continued to write important work even into the twenty-first century. Having joined the Faculty in 1962, […]
Introduction A central lesson of the financial crisis of 2007–2008 was that firms behaving like banks should be regulated like banks. Nonbanks that perform the same economic function as banks—so-called “shadow banks”—create the same risks and demand the same regulatory response as depository institutions with bank charters. The principal legislative reform passed in the wake […]
This Article advances a novel positive theory of tort law. The Article’s core insight is that the benefit from the harm-causing activity determines the form and substance of tort liability. This finding is surprising and innovative, since tort scholars universally believe that the doctrines determining individuals’ liability for accidents—negligence, causation, and damage—are driven by harms, not...
Miriam Cedarbaum had been a judge on the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York for six years when I joined that court in 1992. I count myself as lucky for so many reasons, but getting to serve alongside and learn from Judge Cedarbaum falls high on that list. Judge Cedarbaum […]
I must confess that I don’t read law reviews. Of course, I read law review articles, in the course of judicial research and keeping in touch with academic literature in areas of my scholarly interest, but like most judges and lawyers, I don’t have time or interest to just pick up the latest issue […]
The Constitution has long protected the rights of individuals to procreate and parent, free from government intrusion. But as new technologies stretch the boundaries of what it means to create a family, the scope of these rights have come into question. Specifically, modern advances in genetic modification will soon allow parents to make direct modifications to particular embryos. The possibility of such advances gives rise to questions about how...