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Volume 107 - Issue 5

Public Law, Private Platforms

By Andrew Keane Woods. Full Text. Our law—both our constitutional law and much of our statutory law—has long drawn a fraught distinction between public and private domains. Indeed, debates about the public/private distinction date as far back as liberalism itself. But today’s private digital platforms strain that distinction to a new degree. Platforms have become…

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Americans, Beyond States and Territories

By Tom C.W. Lin. Full Text. For over a century, the law has systemically marginalized over three million Americans living in the unincorporated Territories of the United States. The law has long defined the Territories homogenously and subserviently to States. It has segregated the rights and privileges of citizenship between those living in States and…

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“Can You Hear Me Now?”: The Right to Counsel Prior to Execution of a Cell Phone Search Warrant

By Nathaniel Mensah. Full Text. As advances in technology allow law enforcement to gain ever more expansive surveillance powers, the criminal justice system scrambles to keep up. The Fourth Amendment has been the primary vehicle through which modern criminal procedure has adapted to new technologies. That limited approach risks undue harm to criminal defendants and…

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Deals in the Heartland: Renewable Energy Projects, Local Resistance, and How Law Can Help

By Christiana Ochoa, Kacey Cook, and Hanna Weil. Full Text. Rural communities in every windblown and sun-drenched region of the United States are enmeshed in legal, political, and social conflicts related to the country’s rapid transition to renewable energy. Organized local opposition has foreclosed millions of acres from renewable energy development, impeding national and state-level…

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The Old Hand Problem

By Xiao Wang. Full Text. Senior status is a special form of retirement for federal judges. When a judge takes senior status, they open a vacancy on their court, yet continue to hear and decide cases. Most active judges today eventually go senior. Yet many do not do so the very moment they become eligible.…

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Nonexclusive Functions and Separation of Powers Law

By Ilan Wurman. Full Text.  The Constitution’s text, structure, and history suggest that some governmental functions strictly and exclusively appertain to a particular branch, and to the exercise of a single vested power. Many governmental functions, however, are nonexclusive: their exercise has some combination of legislative, executive, and judicial characteristics and, as a result, can…

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Brady Lists

By Rachel Moran. Full Text.  Brady lists, named after the Supreme Court’s 1963 decision Brady v. Maryland, are lists some prosecutors maintain of law enforcement officers with histories of misconduct that could impact the officers’ credibility. The lists serve as tools for prosecutors to track officer misconduct and disclose that information to defense counsel where…

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Essential Property

By Timothy M. Mulvaney and Joseph William Singer. Full Text. For a sizable swath of the U.S. population, incomes and wealth are insufficient to cover life’s most basic necessities even in the most ordinary of times. A disturbingly resilient explanation for this state of affairs rests on the view that resource inequities are avoidable through…

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How the Liberal First Amendment Under-Protects Democracy

By Tabatha Abu El-Haj. Full Text.  This Article advances a distinct theoretical account of the First Amendment that stresses its role as the underwriter of a republican form of government. Predicated on a more accurate description of the processes of self-governance, the advanced theory delivers a construction of the First Amendment that actually protects democracy…

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Optional Legislation

By Jacob Bronsther and Guha Krishnamurthi. Full Text.  Not since the nineteenth century has partisanship been this intense. The only thing that Democrats and Republicans can agree upon, it seems, is that “Washington is broken.” Beyond the chimeras of bipartisanship or enduring one-party rule, this Article proposes a new solution to legislative dysfunction in Washington:…

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