Two Is Not Always Better than One: Concurrent Criminal Jurisdiction in Indian Country and the Withering of Tribal Sovereignty Following McGirt and Castro-Huerta
By Marina Berardino. Full Text. There is a violence epidemic plaguing the Native American population across the country. Native women are disproportionality victimized by both sexual and non-sexual violence—over eighty-five percent of Native women are expected to be victims of intimate partner violence, stalking, or sexual violence at some point in their life. Most often,…
Continue ReadingPlatform Unions
By Charlotte Garden. Full Text. How should we regulate social media platforms to prevent harmful treatment of users? Regulators, advocates, and scholars have grappled with this problem for years. Many proposed solutions, ranging from improving privacy disclosures, to promoting competition between platforms, to requiring platforms to pay users for their data, are at best incomplete.…
Continue ReadingFixing Disparate Prosecution
Shima Baradaran Baughman and Jensen Lillquist. Full Text. America’s system of public prosecution is broken. Prosecutors who charge harshly or disparately are shielded from any consequences or recourse, and defendants are left with few options. This asymmetry in power results in prosecutors singlehandedly maintaining mass incarceration in the United States and leads to some states…
Continue ReadingContract Customization, Sex, and Islamic Law
By Rabea Benhalim. Full Text. Common law has historically deemed marriage and sex outside the right to contract. Yet, couples increasingly use contracts to provide legal rights to the unmarried in a variety of contexts ranging from same-sex relationships to surrogacy. Islamic law, on the other hand, has always conceived of marriage and sexual relationships…
Continue ReadingArticle III and Indian Tribes
By Grant Christensen. Full Text. Among the most basic principles of our federal courts is that they are courts of limited jurisdiction, exercising only those powers delegated to them in Article III. In 1985 the Supreme Court inexplicably created an exception to this constitutional tenet and unilaterally declared a plenary judicial power to review the…
Continue ReadingAnimal Plaintiffs
By Matthew Liebman. Full Text. From endangered Hawaiian songbirds to dolphins deafened by Navy sonar to a neglected horse named Justice, nonhuman animals increasingly appear as plaintiffs in lawsuits alleging their subjection to extinction, abuse, and other injustices. These cases are far more than mere novelties or publicity stunts; they raise important jurisprudential questions about…
Continue ReadingTeaching “Is This Case Rightly Decided?”
By Steven Arrigg Koh. Full Text. “Is this case rightly decided?” From the first week of law school, every law student must grapple with this classroom question. This Essay argues that this vital question is problematically under-specified, creating imprecision in thinking about law. This Essay thus advocates that law professors should present students with a…
Continue ReadingThirty-Five Years of Inaction: The Unfulfilled Promise of the Medicaid Equal Access Provision
By Delaram Takyar. Full Text. In 1989, Congress amended the Social Security Act to ensure that Medicaid recipients would have the same access to medical providers as people covered by private insurance and Medicare. This was meant to remedy the wide disparities in access to care faced by Medicaid beneficiaries. Congress placed the responsibility for…
Continue ReadingIn Defense of Pickering: When a Public Employee’s Social Media Speech, Particularly Political Speech, Conflicts with Their Employer’s Public Service
By Abby Ward. Full Text. With the rise of social media and the United States’ increasing political polarization, public employees take to social media to post about political issues such as race and policing. But when public employees make posts on political issues in an inflammatory or controversial way, public employers often discipline or fire…
Continue ReadingAmericon Dream: Social Pressures and Lackluster Regulation Allow Multi-Level Marketing Companies to Function as De Facto Pyramid Schemes
By Lindsay R. Maher. Full Text. The entrepreneurial spirit goes to the heart of the American Dream. Pull yourself up by the bootstraps. Put your nose to the grindstone. If you could just be given the tools to get started, you, too, can make something of yourself with hard work and perseverance. This mindset drives…
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