By Richard A. Epstein. Full text here. Although the principle of personal autonomy is commonly accepted as the proper guide for health care decisions, that principle has been conspicuously absent in the area of drug regulation, where the FDA has the unquestioned power to keep drugs off the market if it deems them either unsafe or…

By Kristin E. Hickman & Claire A. Hill. Full text here. Law is, of course, always a product of its history. But for some regimes, history matters both more and differently than for others. In some instances, the requirements and scope of a regulatory regime’s coverage are sufficiently attenuated from statutory text and purpose that…

By Mark D. Rosen. Full text here. In arguing that President Washington could not interpret a mutual defense treaty that potentially required America to join battle with France—but that only Congress could interpret the treaty on account of its power to declare war—James Madison reasoned that “the same specific function or act, cannot possibly belong to…

By Christopher C. Lund. Full text here. For fifty years, the Establishment Clause has generally required the government to be neutral on religious questions. That principle of neutrality, however, has become more controversial with time. Now even quite moderate judges and commentators reject it as a conceptual model for the Establishment Clause. Part of it is…

By Holning Lau. Full text here. This Article contributes to the literature on negotiation of identity scripts. For an example of such negotiation, consider the prominent case of Barack Obama. Commentators have noted that Americans typically perceive President Obama as a black man and ascribe him corresponding scripts—that is to say, socially constructed expectations—for “acting black.”…

By Adam J. Hirsch. Full text here. The Article argues that lawmakers ought to recategorize inheritance law and contract law as cognate bodies of doctrine within a larger genus of transfers law. The Article examines comparatively the justifications for freedom of contract and freedom of testation, and concludes that their underlying ration­ales are largely, although not…

By Anne C. Dailey. Full text here. The long history of denying children the full range of constitutional rights has its roots in a choice theory of rights that understands rights as deriving from the decisionmaking autonomy of the individual. From the perspective of choice theory, children do not enjoy most constitutional rights because they lack…

By L. Song Richardson. Full text here. In recent years, legal scholars have utilized the science of implicit social cognition to reveal how unconscious biases affect perceptions, behaviors, and judgments. Employing this science, scholars critique legal doctrine and challenge courts to take accurate theories of human behavior into account or to explain their failure to do…

By Julie A. Roin. Full text here. While the privatization of governmental activities may have begun as an effort to obtain efficiency gains, increasingly privatization transactions have become a mechanism for surreptitiously borrowing money. One city’s 2008 decision to “sell” its parking meters for $1.56 billion provides a perfect example of this sort of revenue-driven “privatization.”…

By Usha Rodrigues. Full text here. The shareholder empowerment provisions enacted as part of the recent bailout legislation are internally incoherent because they fail to address the short-termist realities of shareholder ownership today. Ownership has separated from ownership in modern corporate America: individual investors now largely hold stock through mutual funds, pension funds, and hedge funds.…