Immigration law concerns both first-order issues about the number and types of immigrants who should be admitted into a country and second-order design issues concerning the legal rules and institutions that are used to implement those first-order policy goals. The literature has focused on the first set of issues and largely neglected the second. In fact, many current controversies concern the design issues. [...]

In immigration law as in other areas of legal scholarship, it is hard enough to find answers, but it is even harder and more important to pose the right questions and to understand the assumptions and frames of reference that define the field. For immigration law in particular, one of the basic choices is whether to adopt the traditional definition--as addressing whether noncitizens are allowed to enter and stay--or to embrace a broader range of questions about immigrants' rights, citizenship, and the integration of immigrants. [...]

In light of the expansive interpretation of the "public use" requirement, the payment of "just compensation" remains the only meaningful limit on the government's eminent domain power and, correspondingly, the only safeguard of private property owners' rights against abusive takings. Yet, the current compensation regime is suboptimal. While both efficiency and fairness require paying full compensation for seizures by eminent domain, current law limits the compensation to market value. [...]

In the contemporary debate over the allocation of war powers, the standard account assumes that prior congressional authorization for the use of force will produce unambiguous deliberative effects because it channels the war-making decision through multiple political actors with varying points of view. Contrary to the received wisdom, this experimental Article advances the empirically plausible but counterintuitive assumption that congressional authorization of the use of force might actually have a perverse effect. [...]

Patent lawyers, courts, and scholars have spent an enormous amount of time and energy over the last twenty-five years trying to determine the rationale and scope of the doctrine of equivalents, an exception to normal patent infringement rules that allows patent owners to extend the scope of patents beyond their literal bounds in certain circumstances. Judges and scholars in the late 1990s suggested that the doctrine of equivalents exception was swallowing the rule, complained that it "lacks a coherent vision" and labeled it the most controversial doctrine in all of patent law. [...]

Justice Clarence Thomas insists upon "a 'moral and constitutional equivalence' between laws designed to subjugate a race and those that distribute benefits on the basis of race in order to foster some current notion of equality." This asserted congruence between Jim Crow laws and affirmative action seems intellectually indefensible--but it is now a constitutional commonplace, as it underlies the contemporary rise of an anticlassification understanding of the Equal Protection Clause that accords race-conscious remedies and racial subjugation the same level of legal hostility. [...]

In Latin, the phrase res ipsa loquitur means “the thing speaks for itself.” In the law, few concepts have created more confusion among scholars and practitioners than the evidentiary doctrine of res ipsa loquitur. Commentators have attempted to characterize the phrase alternatively as a rule, principle, doctrine, maxim, and for one particularly frustrated scholar, a myth. Likewise, res ipsa loquitur has resisted all attempts by legal authorities to delineate its scope. [...]