For more than fifty years, the problems endemic to municipal policing in the United States—brutality, racial discrimination, corruption, and opacity—have remained remarkably constant. This has occurred notwithstanding the advent of modern constitutional criminal procedure and countless judicial opinions applying it to the police. The municipal police can evade criminal procedure’s legality-based paradigm through formal and informal means....
Vol. 119
In June 2018, the Supreme Court decided Animal Science Products, Inc. v. Hebei Welcome Pharmaceutical Co. and resolved a circuit split regarding the amount of deference courts must give to amicus briefs filed by foreign sovereign governments. The Court articulated a new standard of deference, “respectful consideration,” but did not take the opportunity to give weight or meaning to it. This Note argues that more must be done to develop the respectful...
The First Amendment is currently being pulled in opposite directions by a group of Hasidic schools in New York. Driven by deeply held religious beliefs, the leaders of these schools refuse to teach virtually any of the secular studies required for children by New York state law. Proponents of these schools point to the Free Exercise Clause and the “hybrid rights” of religion and parental control. However the state also has an interest in ensuring...
Civil forfeiture is controversial. Critics allege that law enforcement authorities use forfeiture to take property from often-innocent victims free of the constraints of criminal process. Yet despite recent statutory reforms, a significant obstacle to meaningful change remains: Under longstanding Supreme Court precedent, the Constitution imposes few limits on civil forfeiture. Relying on a perceived tradition of largely unfettered government power...
As the use of predictive technology expands, an increasing number of states have passed legislation encouraging or requiring judges to incorporate recidivism risk assessment algorithms into their bail, parole, and sentencing determinations. And while these tools promise to reduce prison overcrowding, decrease recidivism, and combat racial bias, critics have identified a number of potential constitutional issues that stem from the use of these algorithms....
Beginning in 2010, the Supreme Court severely limited states’ ability to impose juvenile life without parole sentences. In a seminal case, Miller v. Alabama, the Court banned mandatory life without parole sentences for juveniles and declared that only the “rare juvenile offender whose crime reflects irreparable corruption” should be made to spend the rest of their lives in prison. While Miller has been the subject of much...
The financial crisis exposed major fault lines in banking and financial markets more broadly. Policymakers responded with far-reaching regulation that created a new agency—the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau—and changed the structure and function of these markets.
Consumer advocates cheered reforms as welfare enhancing, while the financial sector declared that consumers would be harmed by interventions. With a decade of data now...
In their article Unsexing Pregnancy, David Fontana and Naomi Schoenbaum undertake the important project of disentangling the social aspects of pregnancy from those that relate to a pregnant woman’s body. They argue that the law should stop treating the types of work either parent can do—such as purchasing a carseat, finding a pediatrician, or choosing a daycare—as exclusively the domain of the pregnant woman. The project’s primary...
As the impacts of climate change become increasingly severe and perceptible, corporations that continue to disregard the risks created by the Earth’s shifting climate stand to suffer significant financial harm. Particular sectors, such as the oil and gas industry, are especially susceptible to the effects of climate change and are already experiencing losses in value due to extreme weather events, disrupted operations, and environmental regulations....
Faced with potentially staggering human and economic costs, governments around the world are beginning to plan and implement adaptive measures designed to stem the effects of climate change. Some of these adaptations will likely benefit certain property owners and communities at the expense of others. For example, seawalls intended to save valuable parcels of land from sea-level rise could wind up forcing seawater onto neighboring parcels that...