As we draw closer to the November election, it becomes clearer that this year’s contest, thanks to the Supreme Court’s 2010 Citizens United decision, will be financially dominated by big money, including, whether directly or indirectly, big money from the treasuries of corporations of all kinds. Without a significant change in how our campaign finance system regulates the influence of corporations, the American election process, and even the Supreme Court itself, face a more durable, long-term crisis of legitimacy. [...]

The Supreme Court’s decision on the constitutionality of the Affordable Care Act (ACA) will likely be handed down on the last day of this year’s term. If the Court finds that the ACA—either in whole or in part—violates the Constitution, the health care industry will be shaken to its core. And, no matter what legal justification the Court uses to invalidate the ACA, the structure of constitutional law will be severely undercut. The resulting medical and legal chaos will be expensive, divisive, and completely unnecessary. Nothing in the text, history or structure of the Constitution warrants the Court overturning Congress’s effort to address our national health care problems. [...]

The U.S. Supreme Court will soon determine whether a trained narcotics dog’s sniff at the front door of a home constitutes a Fourth Amendment search. The case, Florida v. Jardines, has privacy scholars abuzz because it presents two possible shifts in Fourth Amendment jurisprudence. First, the Court might expand the physical spaces rationale from Justice Scalia’s majority opinion in United States v. Jones. A favorable outcome for Mr. Jardines could reinforce that the home is a formidable privacy fortress, protecting all information from government detection unless that information is visible to the human eye. Alternatively, and more sensibly, the Court may choose to revisit its previous dog sniff cases, United States v. Place and Illinois v. Caballes. [...]

On September 16, 2011, President Obama signed into law the Leahy-Smith America Invents Act. It embodies the most substantial legislative overhaul of patent law and practice in more than half a century. Commentators have begun the sizable task of unearthing and calling attention to the many effects the Act may have on the American and international innovation communities. Debates have sprung up over the consequences to inventors small and large, and commentators have obsessed over the Act’s so-called “first-to-file” and “post-grant review” provisions. Lost in the frenzy to understand the consequences of the new Act has been the demise of patent law’s “best mode” requirement. [...]

How should the legal system adjust to our evolving and oftentimes conflicting expectations of privacy? Experts weigh in on this important question in this 2012 Symposium Issue. [...]

• A Reasonableness Approach to Searches After the Jones GPS Tracking Case by Peter Swire
• Privacy in the Age of Big Data by Omer Tene & Jules Polonetsky
• Yes We Can (Profile You) by Daniel Kreiss
• Paving the Regulatory Road to the "Learning Health Care System" by Deven McGraw
• Famous for Fifteen People by Simon J. Frankel, Laura Brookover & Stephen Satterfield
• The Right to Be Forgotten by Jeffrey Rosen
• The Dead Past by Alex Kozinski

There is a concern among supporters of marriage equality, especially those in the legal academy, that the decision of the Ninth Circuit in Perry v. Brown was too good to be true or, perhaps, too clever to be sustainable. Judges Reinhardt and Hawkins crafted a decision that struck down Proposition 8 with reasoning that applies only to California. All but ignoring Judge Walker’s far-reaching trial court opinion in Perry v. Schwarzenegger, they grounded their analysis in an application of heightened rational basis scrutiny, derived from Romer v. Evans, that emphasized the significance of taking away an important right from an unpopular minority. [...]

The Cybersecurity Act of 2012, which was recently introduced in the Senate Homeland Security and Governance Affairs Committee, is the latest legislative attempt to enhance the nation’s cybersecurity. If enacted, the bill would grant new powers to the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) to oversee U.S. government cybersecurity, set “cybersecurity performance requirements” for firms operating what DHS deems to be “critical infrastructure,” and create “exchanges” to promote information sharing. In its current form, the bill is a useful step in the right direction but falls short of what is required. Fundamentally the bill misconstrues the scale and complexity of the evolving cyber threat by defining critical infrastructure too narrowly and relying too much on voluntary incentives and risk mitigation strategies. The Act might improve on the status quo, but it will not foster genuine and lasting cybersecurity. [...]

At this moment, it looks as though the law of eminent domain takings is in a quiet phase, as the Supreme Court has not recently taken any major case that examines the foundations of the field. One apparently settled area of takings jurisprudence deals with rent control, where the Court provides only scant protection to landlords who claim that their property has been taken when states and local governments pass local laws that restrict their right to evict tenants at the expiration of their leases. For example, a recent challenge to New York’s rent control law received a polite dust-off in the Second Circuit in Harmon v. Kimmel. The head of New York City’s Rent Guidelines Board declined to answer Harmon’s petition for certiorari in the United States Supreme Court. Much to everyone’s surprise, the Supreme Court requested an answer from the New York City defendants, which is now scheduled to be filed by March 5, 2012. [...]

In Perry v. Brown, the Ninth Circuit ruled that California’s Proposition 8 violates the Equal Protection Clause. Reacting to the state supreme court’s recognition of marriage equality for lesbian and gay couples, Proposition 8 was a 2008 voter initiative that altered the state constitution to “restore” the “traditional” understanding of civil marriage to exclude same-sex couples. The major theme of the Yes-on-Eight campaign was that the state should not deem lesbian and gay unions to be “marriages” because schoolchildren would then think that lesbian and gay relationships are just as good as straight “marriages.” [...]