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Volume 59, Issue 4


Article

The Second-Order Structure of Immigration Law

by  Adam B. Cox & Eric A. Posner

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…

Comment

Choosing Immigrants, Making Citizens

by  Hiroshi Motomura

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…

Article

Taking Compensation Private

by  Abraham Bell & Gideon Parchomovsky

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…

Article

Are Congressionally Authorized Wars Perverse?

by  Jide Nzelibe

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…

Article

The (Unnoticed) Demise of the Doctrine of Equivalents

by  John R. Allison & Mark A. Lemley

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.…

Article

“A Nation of Minorities”

Race, Ethnicity, and Reactionary Colorblindness
by  Ian F. Haney Lopez

Note

The Law of Falling Objects

Byrne v. Boadle and the Birth of Res Ipsa Loquitur
by  G. Gregg Webb

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…

Note

A Proposed Solution to the Problem of Parallel Pricing in Oligopolistic Markets

by  Alan Devlin

This Note seeks to address a systemic and difficult issue in the field of antitrust, namely the problem of proving concerted action for the purpose of price-fixing claims in oligopolistic markets. While antitrust law has been markedly successful in eliminating express cartels, competition policy has been equally noteworthy for its failure to effectively address instances…