By Alexander Tsesis. Full text here. The commonly accepted notion that content regulations on speech violate the First Amendment is misleading. In three recent cases—Snyder v. Phelps, Brown v. Entertainment Merchants Ass’n, and United States v. Stevens—the Court made clear that free speech includes the right to express scurrilous, disgusting, and disagreeable ideas. A different set…

By Sean B. Seymore. Full text here. When the Framers of the United States Constitution granted Congress the authority to create a patent system, they certainty did not envision a patent as an a priori entitlement. As it stands now, anyone who files a patent application on anything is entitled to a presumption of patentability. A…

By Paul Ohm. Full text here. This Article focuses on the problem of the privacy lurch, defined as an abrupt change made to the way a company handles data about individuals. Two prominent examples include Google’s decision in early 2012 to tear down the walls that once separated data collected from its different services and Facebook’s…

By Jide Nzelibe. Full text here. The conventional wisdom tends to treat constitutional arrangements, such as the allocation of foreign affairs powers, as efficiency enhancing constraints that yield benefits for all societal actors. This Article argues, on the contrary, that partisan actors can often manipulate the scope of the foreign affairs powers to achieve narrow ideological…

By Shima Baradaran, Michael Findley, Daniel Nielson, & J.C. Sharman. Full text here. The importance of international law has grown in an increasingly global world. States and their citizens are interconnected and depend on each other to enforce and comply with international law to meet common goals. Despite the expanding presence of international law, the…

By Ilya Somin. Full text here. Original meaning originalism may now be the most popular version of constitutional theory in the legal academy. The methodology has been endorsed by at least two Supreme Court justices and well-known scholars from across the political spectrum. Original meaning is usually interpreted as focusing on the public understanding of the…

By Christine Klein. Full text here. Many western states are on the verge of bankruptcy, with debts exceeding assets. And yet, they continue to take on additional debt through contracts and other commitments. Although such distress may sound like an outgrowth of the 2008 recession, this crisis involves water, not money. In particular, the problem concerns…

By Laura K. Donohue. Full text here. Federal interest in using facial recognition technology (FRT) to collect, analyze, and use biometric information is rapidly growing. Despite the swift movement of agencies and contractors into this realm, however, Congress has been virtually silent on the current and potential uses of FRT. No laws directly address facial recognition—much…

By Steven L. Schwarcz. Full text here. States in the American federal system increasingly are raising financing by issuing bonds through special-purpose entities. Although this represents a significant portion—in some cases, the majority—of state financing, relatively little is known or has been written about these entities. This Article examines state special-purpose entities, comparing them to special-purpose entities used…

By J.B. Ruhl. Full text here. Many people and businesses in the United States will receive market and nonmarket benefits from climate change as it moves forward over the next one hundred years. Speaking of climate change benefits is not for polite “green” conversation, but ignoring them—as climate policy dialogue and legal scholarship consistently have—will not…