By Rory Van Loo. Full Text. Consumer law has a conflicted and narrow identity. It is most immediately a form of business law, governing market transactions between people and companies. Accordingly, the microeconomic analysis of markets is the dominant influence on consumer law. But consumer law is often described as, and assumed to be about,…

By Zoë Robinson and Stephen Rushin. Full Text. The law enforcement lobby represents one of the most important and undertheorized barriers to criminal justice reform. We define the law enforcement lobby as the constellation of entrenched actors within the justice system—particularly police unions, correctional officer unions, and prosecutor associations—that exert an outsized role in policy…

By Derek E. Bambauer and Robert W. Woods. Full Text. U.S. trademark law often permits simultaneous use of the same brand by multiple entities. Its approach to deciding when and how this concurrent use is permissible has become antiquated, rooted in outdated assumptions about trade and telecommunications. By using the physical location of mark-users as…

By Thomas B. Bennett. Full Text. Lawyers and judges often talk about “the law of the circuit,” meaning the set of legal rules that apply within a particular federal judicial circuit. Seasoned practitioners are steeped in circuit law, it is said. Some courts have imagined that they confront a choice between applying the law of…

By Michael Risch. Full Text. Lawyers, judges, and professors have always been interested in the way cases unfold procedurally—their procedural posture. To date, however, nobody has provided a generalized theoretical framework to explain how procedural posture influences outcomes. This Article uses social choice theory to fill that void, providing much-needed insight into the ways that…

By Pooja R. Dadhania. Full Text. People fleeing gender-based violence in the home face an uphill battle when seeking asylum in the United States. Through the lens of public and private spheres, this Article explores the underutilized religion ground for asylum for cases involving gender-based violence in the home—i.e., the private sphere. This Article argues…

By Anna Roberts. Full Text. Core terms used by criminal legal academics bolster the criminal system and ward off radical critique. They do this by conveying implicit messages of three types: that the criminal system is generally accurate, that it is necessary, and that it is well-intentioned and moving in the right direction. While recent…

By Derek W. Black. Full Text.  Educational inequality is embedded in the structure of education itself. School districts, not individual schools, are the gatekeepers of educational opportunity. Racial isolation exists between school districts, not within them. Enormous funding gaps exist between neighboring school districts, sometimes in the same city, but not within them. These fault…

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…

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…