Defense contractors lie at the heart of the U.S. national security regime. Each year, over half of the federal defense budget is allocated to contracts outsourcing military operations, projects, and services to private companies. However, defense outsourcing carries a ticking time bomb: mounting private debt. Today, the defense industry is among the nation’s most indebted sectors, fueled largely by the rise of private equity. Over the past two decades, more than 1,500 defense contractors have been acquired by private equity firms through leveraged buyouts (LBOs)—high-risk takeovers funded almost entirely by debt. At any moment, this private debt time bomb could detonate, triggering a cascade of financial failures destabilizing the defense supply chain.
This rapid debt accumulation has introduced a new national security risk: bankruptcy. Private equity’s aggressive use of debt in LBOs has heightened the risks of default and foreclosure of defense contractors they acquire. Yet, private equity firms shield themselves from these risks through “bankruptcy-remote” structuring. As a result, a rising tide of LBO-induced defense contractor bankruptcies have disrupted critical defense supply chains, jeopardizing national security.
The existing legal regime is ill-suited to address this risk. Despite the interconnectedness between bankruptcy and national security, Congress has designed them as separate regimes with conflicting goals. The Bankruptcy Code respects contractual freedom and prioritizes efficient debtor rehabilitation through private ordering. In contrast, the Anti-Assignment Acts impose strict limits on contractual freedom when national security is at stake. Private equity exploits this gap by operating beyond both regimes. Though the Bankruptcy Code prevents third-party abuses that hinder debtor rehabilitation, it does not address risks outside of bankruptcy where LBO-induced risks originate. Likewise, private equity exploits a loophole in the Anti-Assignment Acts, which restrict contract assignments but do not prevent entire companies from being resold. This allows private equity to extract value from defense contractors and exit without accountability.
This Article proposes ex ante risk mitigation as a solution. Existing law offers only ex post remedies after a defense contractor files for bankruptcy, even though the seeds of failure are often sewn years before filing, when private equity completes an LBO. The proposed solution has three components: (1) deleverage the defense industry by altering incentives for debt financing; (2) hold private equity accountable through an LBO review mechanism; and (3) make defense contractors less vulnerable in bankruptcy by amending the executory contract exception in the Bankruptcy Code.

What makes a conviction wrongful? Developments in DNA science have led to a wave of exonerations over the past thirty years, revealing sources of error in the criminal legal process. Innocence organizations proliferated to represent people whose convictions could be overturned by newly discovered evidence. This is vital work for the individuals who are released and for the purpose of systemic change. At the same time, a focus on exonerations constructs a relatively narrow conception of wrongful convictions—one that is synonymous with factual innocence.

This Article argues that a broader conception of wrongful convictions may be revealed through co-ideation with people in prison who are engaged in efforts to contest criminal law. Taking one example as a case study, we focus on a coalition called We Are Joint Venture, Inc., which is comprised of incarcerated organizers whose convictions rest on imputed liability murder doctrines like accomplice/joint venture liability and felony murder. These organizers highlight procedural and substantive features of imputed liability murder doctrines that lead to convictions contradicting community expectations of accountability—something we call “the innocence trap.”

Drawing on the methods of movement law and Participatory Law Scholarship, this Article is coauthored by the director of We Are Joint Venture, Inc ., who is serving a life sentence for murder under the joint venture theory, and a law scholar who has written about imputed liability doctrines. Our analysis contributes to legal thought in three ways. First, it builds on scholarship questioning the legitimacy of imputed liability murder doctrines and offers new possibilities for legislative and judicial interventions. Second, we advance a conception of wrongful convictions that invites inquiry into the logic and merits of criminal law, transforming even entrenched doctrines into sites of contestation. Finally, this Article underscores the epistemic, democratic, and substantive benefits of engaging with legal thinkers whose insights about the law stem not from the academy but from experience, study, and struggle.

The Administrative Procedure Act (APA) requires federal agencies to simply “incorporate in the rules adopted a concise general statement of their basis and purpose” after they receive comments from the public, and the Supreme Court ruled in Overton Park that courts are to adjudicate whether rules are arbitrary and capricious based on agencies’ contemporaneous rationales. Judge-created doctrines incentivize agencies to rely on these “concise” statements to elucidate their rationales, and, as a result, rulemaking preambles have ballooned in size as agencies seek to insulate themselves from critical courts.

This Article contends that although the APA’s statutory requirement is in tension with this “hard look review” jurisprudence, that need not be the case; the latter can and should accommodate the former. It explains how agencies may supplement their rules’ preambles with memoranda, emails, and even affidavits to reveal their contemporaneous rationales to the courts. This Article concludes by arguing that doing so will not only ensure compliance with congressional intent but also satisfy the needs of courts and provide efficiencies for agencies.

Cancer is surging among youth and young adults in the United States, yet, instead of public regulation addressing its root causes, we have outsourced the management of cancer to the private sector. A suite of laws, embodying faith that corporations will cure cancer, has subsidized the cancer biomedical enterprise and transformed quasi-public institutions into marketized, profit-seeking entities. These changes, across patent law, healthcare law, innovation law, and Food and Drug Administration ( FDA ) law, have privatized cancer.

The market failures I describe in U.S. cancer care raise larger questions about who we entrust with managing critical social problems. This Article provides theoretical clarity on the trans-substantive use of the term “privatization.” I theorize that privatization underscores a shift from community-centered approaches to ones centered on individuals and firms. Further, in contrast with the traditional, economic understanding of privatization, I deconstruct privatization into five categorical forms: delegation, individualization, marketization, capture, and cultural privatization.

From climate change to reproductive justice to cancer, privatization has undermined public goals by warping systems in a way that promotes corporate interests and individualized framings over the common good. We must take seriously the harms to all Americans from unbridled privatization and push for a renewed promise of government intervention in the world we inhabit.

Single-family zoning has long dictated not only where people may live but also with whom. Although extensively critiqued for perpetuating racial and economic exclusion, these laws also privilege relationships defined by blood, marriage, or adoption and marginalize nontraditional families. This Article focuses on a particularly overlooked group: polyamorous families who often face legal uncertainty, social exclusion, and housing discrimination due to restrictive zoning definitions of “family.”

As polyamory gains cultural visibility and increasing legal recognition—through West 49th Street, LLC v. O’Neill and municipal reforms in cities like Somerville and Cambridge—now is the time to examine zoningÊs role in reinforcing outdated conceptions of family. Drawing on recent demographic data on poly relationships and broader shifts in family structure, this Article traces how zoning definitions have evolved from early functional approaches to rigid frameworks that exclude nontraditional households. It then argues for reform, proposing a new definition that recognizes relationships of mutual support, care, and commitment, aligning with Obergefell v. Hodges and modern family realities.

Updating zoning definitions is both a legal necessity and a recognition of how families actually function today. By removing outdated barriers, municipalities can create inclusive, equitable housing policies that reflect the full spectrum of familial relationships. This Article provides a path toward reform to ensure every family, regardless of structure, has the right to call a place home.

Trying juvenile defendants as adults is a cruel, yet enduring practice in U.S. criminal law. If convicted, these youthful offenders face brutal conditions in adult prison and a lifelong stigma. Although these devastating consequences of conviction are readily apparent, juvenile transfer is insidious even absent a prison sentence or criminal record.

State-level legislation that mandates or creates a presumption for subjecting juveniles to any degree of proceedings in adult court disregards their unique capacity for rehabilitation—a characteristic of youth that both modern neuroscience and the U.S. Supreme Court have recognized for decades. In the context of sentencing juveniles to life without parole, the Court has acknowledged that the Constitution affords additional protection to children. Accordingly, with few exceptions, this type of sentence violates the Eighth Amendment. But the preclusion of disproportionately harsh punishment for children should not—and cannot—be confined to this one area of criminal law.

Instead, this Note promotes an expansive application of the constitutional prohibition of cruel and unusual punishment with respect to juvenile defendants. Guided by the Supreme Court’s jurisprudence regarding juvenile life without parole, this Note offers a lens to identify the more subtle dangers of transfer legislation that fails to account for the difference between children and adults.

‘Law must be stable, and yet it cannot stand still.’ Here is the great antinomy confronting us at every turn. Rest and motion, unrelieved and unchecked, are equally destructive. The law, like human kind, if life is to continue, must find some path of compromise. – Judge Cardozo

In the summer of 2024, the world of administrative law was upended when the Supreme Court overruled the Chevron decision. Chevron had long served as one of administrative law’s foundational cases and it had been the foremost vehicle by which Courts analyzed agency interpretations for decades. But suddenly, the case was gone . With its overruling, an old case has taken on new importance: Skidmore v. Swift.

Skidmore is a short administrative law case from 1944 with modest facts. The decision, which can fit on three sheets of paper, briefly and arcanely stated that deference awarded to agency interpretations will “depend upon the thoroughness evident in [their] consideration, the validity of [their] reasoning, [their] consistency with earlier and later pronouncements, and all those factors which give [them] power to persuade . . . .” Eighty years later, these words are no less clear. Yet Skidmore has become more important than at any point in history, meaning a clear interpretation is needed now more than ever.

This Note seeks to resolve the continued indeterminacy of Skidmore. It argues that the existing methods of interpreting Skidmore fall short and proposes a new path forward: the Skidmore tiebreaker. This interpretation of Skidmore would only be used by interpreters when judges are faced with interpretive ties that have no other method of resolution. Only then can judges resort to applying the agency’s interpretation. This method of interpreting Skidmore ensures that agency interpretations never overrule the best meaning of the statute, instead facilitating the judge in his or her interpretive quest. In addition, the tiebreaker continues the long tradition of respect for agency interpretations beyond that of the typical litigant.

This Note explains the intricacies of the Skidmore tie-breaker and illustrates its application through comparison to similar rules inside and outside the law. It also considers and rebuts anticipated objections that could be brought towards the use of Skidmore as a tiebreaker, mainly that interpretive ties never occur and that the tiebreaker is merely Chevron under another name. This Note conclude s by urging the adoption of the Skidmore tiebreaker as a compromise for the future of administrative law.