In 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…
Continue ReadingThrouples and Family Law
By Philip de Sa e Silva. Full Text. As throuples and other forms of polyamorous relationships gain visibility and acceptance, courts will have to confront the legal issues that will likely arise when a throuple forms and when it dissolves. How should courts determine child custody for three equally situated parents? How should courts divide…
Continue ReadingMulti-Parent Custody
By Jessica Feinberg. Full Text. In recent years, a number of jurisdictions have enacted laws recognizing that a child may have more than two legal parents (multi-parentage). Recognition of multi-parentage represents a significant change to the legal framework governing parentage— for most of U.S. history, it was well established that a child could have a…
Continue ReadingThe Roberts Court and the Unraveling of Labor Law
By Courtlyn G. Roser-Jones. Full Text. Labor law comprises several doctrines and procedures that oversee the relationships between employers, unions, and the workers they represent. These doctrines—the duty of fair representation, exclusivity, good-faith bargaining, captive-audience speech, and rights of equal access—are all component threads to a tapestry designed to facilitate widespread organizing and collective bargaining.…
Continue ReadingMaking Whole, Making Better, and Accommodating Resilience
By Erik Encarnacion. Full Text. The conventional story about compensatory damages is that they aim to make plaintiffs whole, but not better off. This make-whole ideal implies that courts should subtract material gains from compensatory awards because otherwise plaintiffs would be unjustly enriched. This Article undermines this conventional wisdom in three ways. First, it highlights…
Continue ReadingSubjective Costs of Tax Compliance
By Jonathan H. Choi and Ariel Jurow Kleiman. Full Text. This Article introduces and estimates the “subjective costs” of tax compliance, which are costs of tax compliance that people experience directly and individually. To measure these costs, we conducted a survey experiment assessing how much taxpayers would pay to reduce the unpleasantness associated with filing…
Continue ReadingCan the Excessive Fines Clause Mitigate the LFO Crisis? An Assessment of the Caselaw
By Michael O’Hear. Full Text. The nation’s increasing use of fees, fines, forfeiture, and restitution has resulted in chronic debt burdens for millions of poor and working-class Americans. These legal financial obligations (LFOs) likely entrench racial and socioeconomic divides and contribute to the breakdown of trust in the police and courts in disadvantaged communities. One…
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