By Karen E. Nelson. Full text here. The sentencing of Bernard Madoff in 2008 closed a chapter in the saga of one of the most extensive and destructive Ponzi schemes in American history. But the fallout from the fraud is just beginning. While every investor in a Ponzi scheme suffers financially once the fraud is exposed,…

By Justin Goetz. Full text here. Due process protections for defendants vary greatly between the numerous federal agencies vested with civil enforcement powers. Many of these agencies fail to provide defendants with basic safeguards, including the protections available in the Federal Rules of Criminal Procedure. As federal administrative agencies continue to increase both the scope of…

By Nathaniel H. Nesbitt. Full text here. The Supreme Court’s decision in Boumediene v. Bush gave suspected terrorists at Guantánamo Bay access to a system in which federal judges in Washington, D.C. adjudicate the legality of their detention. While many, perhaps most, legal commentators praise Boumediene as a victory for individual rights, critics argue that the…

By Steven Schmidt. Full text here. An essential element of any guilty plea is the factual basis requirement. This requirement states that a court may only accept a guilty plea if an underlying set of facts exists that supports the plea. In many circumstances, federal criminal defendants have challenged their guilty pleas in the courts of…

By Eva B. Stensvad. Full text here. Vaccines are one of the most important medical advancements in history. Childhood immunization efforts are widely promoted by state and federal governments as well as medical professionals and institutions. While routine pediatric vaccines prevent many lethal and debilitating diseases, they also carry the potential to cause injury. Predictably, the…

By Laura Arneson. Full text here. The false marking statute was designed to prevent products from being labeled with patents that do not apply to them, but the Federal Circuit recently extended its reach to prevent labeling products with expired patent numbers. This decision has spurred litigation by third parties against the makers of articles covered…

By Trevor Woodage. Full text here. The Note considers possible limits to reasonable expectations of genetic privacy given that people share their DNA sequences with their relatives. Most scholars and members of the general public believe that an individual’s DNA sequence is an intensely personal matter and that access to this information should be tightly controlled.…

By Heather R. Abraham. Full text here. Dubbed by the Washington Post as “undemocratic,” the caucus system for selecting delegates to national party presidential nominating conventions tends to disenfranchise identifiable factions of voters, including deployed service members, religious observers, persons with disabilities or in poor health, students who attend school away from home, and shift workers…

By Reed T. Schuster. Full text here. A dramatic sequence of events starting in the summer of 2007 caused the United States’ banking and financial systems to collapse and thrust the country into the worst financial crisis since the Great Depression. It was not just one thing, but a confluence of factors that led to the…

By Tyler J. Siewert. Full text here. To ensure the perpetuation of balanced budgets, which are legal and practical requirements in forty-nine states, many state legislatures bestow upon the executive branch broad powers to reduce appropriations through unallotment statutes. The Note accentuates two dire legal inefficiencies plaguing an ample number of these laws. First, many statutes…