Cornell Law School Logo - white on transparent background

Category: Issue 2

Article

Addiction and Liberty

Matthew B. Lawrence

Associate Professor of Law, Emory Law; Affiliate Faculty, Harvard Law School, Petrie-Flom Center for Health Law Policy, Bioethics, and Biotechnology.

This Article explores the interaction between addiction and liberty and identifies a firm legal basis for recognition of a fundamental constitutional right to freedom from addiction. Government interferes with freedom from addiction when it causes addiction or restricts addiction treatment, and government may protect freedom from addiction through legislation empowering individuals against private actors’ efforts…

Apr 2023

Article

Municipal Failures

Nancy Leong

William M. Beaney Memorial Research Chair and Professor of Law, University of Denver Sturm College of Law.

Calls for reforming the civil rights enforcement regime often focus on individual government officers. Recent years have brought demands to abolish qualified immunity—a defense that protects individual officers from liability so long as they did not violate clearly established law—and to end indemnification—a practice in which government employers satisfy judgments against their employees. This Article…

Apr 2023

Note

Unequal Protection: Challenges to Serious Mental Illness Exemptions from the Death Penalty

Claire M. Piorkowski

J.D. Candidate, Cornell Law School, 2023; B.A. in Political Science, University of Cincinnati, 2020.

This Note explores the contention that Ohio House Bill 136 and similar proposed bills with a diagnosis-based categorical approach to death penalty exemptions violate seriously mentally ill individuals’ rights under the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment by limiting the scope of eligible mental illnesses to a narrow subset of specified disorders. This Note…

Apr 2023

Note

Politicization of State Attorneys General: How Partisanship is Changing the Role for the Worse

Marissa A. Smith

J.D. Cornell Law School; B.S. University of Texas at Austin.

The position of State AG has long been said to stand for ‘Aspiring Governor’ rather than Attorney General. It is remarkable how the significance of that joke has changed as the role has become one of the most influential in the country.2 What began as insolent mockery is now a fearsome truth. State attorneys general…

Apr 2023

Article

If We Build It, Will They Legislate? Empirically Testing the Potential Testing the Potential of the Nondelegation Doctrine to Curb Congressional “Abdication”

Daniel E. Walters & Elliot Ash

Associate Professor of Law, Texas A&M University School of Law & Assistant Professor, Law, Economics, and Data Science, ETH Zurich.

A widely held view for why the Supreme Court would be right to revive the nondelegation doctrine is that Congress has perverse incentives to abdicate its legislative role and evade accountability through the use of delegations (either expressly delineated or implied through statutory imprecision), and that enforcement of the nondelegation doctrine would correct for those…

Apr 2023