Most states have laws prohibiting corporations from owning healthcare practices or employing physicians, collectively forming the corporate practice of medicine doctrine (CPOM). CPOM laws were designed to ensure that licensed professionals, not corporate laymen, decide patient treatment.
Large corporations and private equity firms routinely circumvent CPOM laws by creating subsidiary companies that ostensibly “manage” healthcare practices....
Freedom of thought has long been revered as a fundamental right, yet its doctrinal contours have remained underdeveloped. Two recent Supreme Court decisions—National Institute of Family and Life Advocates v. Becerra (NIFLA) and 303 Creative LLC v. Elenis—suggest a nascent but expansive free thought jurisprudence, one that increasingly shields religious actors not just from government interference in belief but also compliance...
Taylor Swift’s songs inspire generations of fans to sing and dance about love and to “shake . . . off” heartbreak. Swift’s hard-earned “reputation” for being a savvy music mogul inspires other creative spirits to be “fearless” in their artistic endeavors. But unless these artists are songwriters and musicians, they should keep their “eyes open” when selling their works, as they may see “red” when they discover their tax...
In constitutional liberties cases, the Supreme Court has tried to reduce balancing, understood loosely to mean determining a right’s contours based on sweeping political-moral considerations, not just text and history. It fears that today’s balancing would displace a balance struck by the Founders. Balancing is indeed problematic—but this campaign to end it is...
Ever since the 1970s when BigLaw firms began to hire Black lawyers into their associate ranks, these firms have wrestled with problems in both recruiting and retaining Black associates. During the ensuing decades, BigLaw firms have minimally increased the low numbers of Black attorneys who have become partners, particularly equity partners, within their organizations. Numerous scholars have explored how racial bias and discrimination, both within...
In spring 2023, the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC) resolved three of the four largest bank failures in U.S. history. When the FDIC resolves failed banks, this Note argues, it (unselfconsciously) allocates coordination rights—that is, the right to legally permitted economic coordination. Specifically, by reflexively merging failed banks into larger banks, the FDIC adopts antitrust law’s preference for hierarchical firm-based coordination....
Throughout the twentieth century, several states adopted a new type of laws: Anti-Corporate Farming (ACF) laws. These laws generally prohibit corporations from owning farmland or engaging in the business of farming. They were originally intended to “encourage and protect the family farm as a basic economic unit” and “insure it as the most socially desirable mode of agricultural production.” While subject to criticism, these laws generally...
Labor unrest poses serious challenges to the development of new industries and to the implementation of public investment projects such as the Inflation Reduction Act. One way to converge the interests of employers, workers, and the public is through labor-peace agreements (LPAs). Because federal and state government actors are some of the biggest investors in the recent development projects, proponents of LPAs argue that these federal and state...
Since the Supreme Court’s District of Columbia v. Heller decision in 2008, lower federal courts have wrestled with Second Amendment claims raised by categories of people excluded from gun possession. Among those cases, several have been brought by noncitizens challenging their prosecutions under 18 U.S.C. § 922(g)(5), the federal criminal ban on possession by unlawfully present noncitizens. In the post-Heller § 922(g)(5) cases,...
In recent years, a growing number of litigants and scholars have argued that—despite the usual rule in federal court that only final orders are appealable—interlocutory orders denying church-autonomy defenses under the First Amendment can be appealed immediately. Proponents ground their claims in the belief that church autonomy provides religious institutions with an immunity from suit, rather than with a mere defense to liability. As a result,...