By Miranda Perry Fleischer. Full text here. Charities play a vital role in our society. In addition to enhancing pluralism, they meet many societal needs more efficiently, creatively, and effectively than government alone. Charities aid our poor, teach our youth, improve our health, comfort us spiritually, and enrich our cultural lives. Given the charitable sector’s importance…

By Jill Elaine Hasday. Full text here. The Supreme Court in Rostker v. Goldberg (1981) upheld male-only military registration, and endorsed male-only conscription and combat positions. Few cases have challenged restrictions on women’s military service since Rostker, and none have reached the Supreme Court. Federal statutes continue to exclude women from military registration and draft eligibility,…

By Martin H. Redish & Dennis Murashko. Full text here. For more than seven decades since the passage of the Rules Enabling Act, courts and commentators have struggled to define the boundaries of what rules the Supreme Court can and cannot promulgate. We undertake here to explain that lack of success and at the same time…

By Jack M. Balkin. Full text here. During the last part of the twentieth century the United States began developing a new form of governance that features the collection, collation, and analysis of information about populations both in the United States and around the world. This new form of governance is the National Surveillance State. In…

By Jenny Roberts. Full text here. For many people convicted of crimes, the case does not end when the sentence is over. Instead, it follows them out of the courthouse or prison doors in the guise of “collateral,” or non-penal, sanctions. The last several decades have seen unprecedented expansion in the number and severity of the…

By Allan Erbsen. Full text here. This Article constructs frameworks for analyzing federalism’s undertheorized horizontal dimension.  Discussions of federalism generally focus on the hierarchical (or vertical) allocation of power between the national and state governments while overlooking the horizontal allocation of power among coequal states.  Models of federal-state relations tend to treat the fifty states as…

By Steven L. Schwarcz. Full text here. Why did the recent subprime mortgage meltdown undermine financial-market stability notwithstanding the protections provided by market norms and financial regulation? This Essay attempts to answer that question by identifying anomalies and obvious protections that failed by examining hypotheses that might explain the anomalies and failures. Although some of the…

By Michael H. LeRoy. Full text here. State courts are creating conditions for moral hazard in the arbitration of employment disputes. The problem begins when employers compel individuals to arbitrate their legal claims, denying them access to juries and other benefits of a trial. This empirical study identifies a disturbing trend: state courts vacated many arbitration…

By Alan L. Durham. Full text here. According to well-established principles, one cannot patent natural laws or phenomena per se, but one can patent new and useful applications of those laws and phenomena. Justice Breyer’s opinion in Laboratory Corp. of America Holdings v. Metabolite Laboratories, Inc. applies this distinction to inventions exploiting natural relationships, such as…

By A. Mechele Dickerson. Full text here. For several years, bankruptcy and corporate governance scholars have discussed “control rights” in bankruptcy cases and have debated how those rights should be allocated. Data indicate that, as a positive matter, creditors effectively have the ability to decide the fate of an insolvent firm. The scholarship does not, however,…