Can Congress command a federal court to rule in favor of a particular party in a pending case? The answer to this seemingly simple question is unsettled. The Constitution permits Congress to enact rules of law that courts must follow; and it permits the courts to decide cases pending before them. Constitutional conflict arises when…
Introduction Aggregation has emerged in the past few years as a critical tool by which agencies can quickly resolve groups of claims that would otherwise languish for years in bureaucratic limbo. The idea is simple: Consolidating many similar claims in a single proceeding would help agencies process claims more quickly, efficiently, and fairly. But aggregation…
Introduction Promising to inject empirical rigor into the enterprise of statutory interpretation, corpus linguistics has, over the past couple years, taken the legal academy by storm. A product of linguistics departments, corpus linguistics is an empirical approach to the study of language through the use of large, electronic, and searchable databases of text called corpora.…
Blockchain technology can maintain accurate chains of title to securities and other legal instruments in a reliable electronic form. As private industries begin to recognize the cost-saving and risk-reducing potential of this technology, state legislatures are responding. Arizona’s H.B. 2417 is a prototypical state solution. In essence, the law requires parties to treat blockchain-secured records,…
For its October 2017 term, the U.S. Supreme Court took up a noteworthy securities law case, Leidos, Inc. v. Indiana Public Retirement System. The legal question presented in Leidos was whether a failure to comply with a regulation issued by the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), Item 303 of Regulation S-K (Item 303), can be grounds for a…
Certain state governments have adopted statutes that are designed to prevent city governments from eliminating memorials to Confederate forces and leaders. Critics of these controversial statutes generally focus on the moral issue of preserving statues honoring white supremacy. This Essay highlights a different set of concerns: These statutes suppress the speech of cities while compelling…
The words lawyers choose can change the decisions people make. Psychologists call the mechanics of this change “framing.” They’ve found, for example, that more people will decide to have a surgery if they are told that the “survival rate is 90%” than if they are told that the “mortality rate is 10%”—even though a survival…
Introduction Government hacking is everywhere. Hackers working for the Russian government broke into computers run by the Democratic National Committee and stole e-mails relating to the 2016 Presidential election. Hackers traced to the Chinese government broke into U.S. government computers and copied personnel files of over 22 million employees. North Korean hackers intruded into Sony…
Introduction Fair use is copyright law’s most important defense against claims of copyright infringement. Major corporations depend on it to pursue a variety of technological innovations; universities rely on it for a number of educational purposes; and innovative parties frequently resort to it in creating works that build upon the creativity of others. In short,…
Introduction The financial crisis of 2007-2008 repeatedly forced regulators to face terrible choices between risking catastrophic contagion by letting particular firms or markets fail, and intervening to bail them out. One explanation of why these dilemmas arose was that financial firms were “too big to fail.” Nearly a decade after the onset of the crisis,…
Introduction The recent defeat device scandal at Volkswagen, in which VW engineers created and installed a computer algorithm to cheat emissions testing on over eleven million automobiles, brings together two things I spend time thinking about: white collar crime and cars. While that may seem like an odd combination, VW’s troubles happen to marry my…
I. American Pipe Tolling and the Problem of Protective Filings In American Pipe & Construction Co. v. Utah, the Supreme Court wisely rationalized class action law and policy under Rule 23 by holding that the filing of a class action complaint “suspends the applicable statute of limitations as to all asserted members of the class…
Days after the release of the mobile game Pokémon Go, a privacy flap ensued from press reports revealing that users on Apple phones who logged in through a Google account had unwittingly granted the developer, Niantic, access to their entire Google account. Moreover, the application’s (app’s) privacy policy allowed Niantic to disclose any information it…
“If it looks like a duck, and quacks like a duck, we have at least to consider the possibility that we have a small aquatic bird of the family Anatidœ on our hands.” —Douglas Adams Introduction In August 2016, Uber startled the world by announcing that its customers would soon have a small chance of…
Introduction On June 23, 2016, the Supreme Court announced its much-anticipated decision in Fisher v. University of Texas at Austin, allowing affirmative action in college admissions to continue. No single feature of Fisher surprised court watchers more than its author, Justice Anthony Kennedy. As Richard Primus wrote in the New York Times: “[T]he most deceptive…
Introduction This Essay considers when U.S. service members deployed to Afghanistan are obligated to report allegations of sexual assault by Afghan security forces (ASF) against Afghan nationals to the U.S. military. The answer requires applying a longstanding Department of Defense (DOD) policy for reporting law of war (LOW) violations and hinges on when sexual assault…
Introduction The Supreme Court’s recent decision in Federal Energy Regulatory Commission v. Electric Power Supply Association (EPSA) may ultimately rank among the most significant energy law cases of all time. Unsurprisingly, the case has received considerable attention within legal circles and even within the popular press. EPSA upheld one of the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission’s…
Introduction This election cycle, CNN’s Republican presidential debates have twice violated campaign finance law, specifically by failing to issue invitations based on “pre-established objective criteria.” These violations went unpunished, not because of the ineptitude of the regulators, but because of the absurdity of the regulation violated, which presumes that television debates violate campaign finance law,…
Introduction What does “because of race” mean in an antidiscrimination statute like the Fair Housing Act of 1968 (FHA)? The question arose last Term in Texas Department of Housing & Community Affairs v. Inclusive Communities Project, Inc., the case in which the Supreme Court recognized a disparate impact cause of action in the FHA. In…
Introduction In November, the Supreme Court heard oral argument in Spokeo, Inc. v. Robins, one of the Term’s most talked-about cases. The case presents a relatively unsympathetic plaintiff, Thomas Robins, and the prospect of sizeable class action damages. That combination may explain why one particular narrative has become popular in both mainstream media and legal-industry press…
