Category: Uncategorized

Article

Judicial Institutionalism

Rachel Bayefsky

Associate Professor of Law, University of Virginia School of Law.

The idea of institutionalism figures prominently in today’s debates about the role of federal courts in American democracy. For example, Chief Justice Roberts is often described as an institutionalist who seeks to preserve the Supreme Court’s power or reputation. But what exactly is institutionalism, and should judges be institutionalists? Although institutionalism is invoked in public…

Dec 2024

Article

Earning Trade Secrets

Joseph P. Fishman & Deepa Varadarajan

Professor of Law, Vanderbilt Law School, Associate Professor of Law, Georgia State University College of Law.

Every intellectual property right, like every property right generally, has a moment of birth. Whether and when that moment occurs depend on doctrines of original acquisition. In most IP regimes, these doctrines are so fundamental that they’ve been reduced to a single verb. One can get a patent only by inventing, or a copyright only…

Dec 2024

Article

Reproductive Justice at Work: Employment Law after Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization

Laura T. Kessler

S.J. Quinney Endowed Chair and Professor of Law, University of Utah, S.J. Quinney College of Law.

In June 2022, in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade and Planned Parenthood v. Casey, landmark decisions which held that the U.S. Constitution protected a right to abortion prior to fetal viability. Overnight, about 64 million American women of childbearing age potentially lost the right to decide what…

Dec 2024

Article

Natural‑Person Shareholder Voting

Michael Simkovic

USC Gould School of Law.

“One-share, one-vote” corporate governance often leads to inefficient negative externalities, even when shareholders care about direct harm to themselves and even if corporations respond to shareholder preferences. Because equity ownership is concentrated, while many externalities are more diffuse, corporate voting underweights externalities. But allocating votes according to the principle of “one person, one vote” creates…

Dec 2024

Cornell Law Review Online

Treating the Administrative as Law: Responding to the “Judicial Aggrandizement” Critique

Chad Squitieri

Assistant Professor of Law, Catholic University of America, Columbus School of Law.

Modern separation-of-powers jurisprudence—including key decisions decided during the Supreme Court’s 2023-24 term—has been critiqued on the grounds that it constitutes “judicial aggrandizement,” i.e., that it impermissibly empowers federal courts to decide separation-of-powers questions better left to Congress and the President. This “judicial aggrandizement” critique goes too far to the extent it suggests that federal courts…

Dec 2024

Article

Altered Stakes: Reimagining the Amount-in-Controversy Requirement

Steven Gensler & Roger Michalski

Gene and Elaine Edwards Family Chair in Law, Professor of Law, University of Oklahoma College of Law, Professor of Law, University of Oklahoma College of Law.

Which state-law cases should Congress allow into federal court? Congress’s answer has always been “only the big ones.” This article revisits the choice to limit diversity jurisdiction to higher-value cases and critically examines how Congress has approached setting the amount threshold. It surveys alternate ways Congress could use case value to sort which cases make…

Sep 2024

Article

Defense Lawyering in the Progressive Prosecution Era

Jenny Roberts

Dean and Professor of Law, Maurice A. Deane School of Law, Hofstra University.

The movement to elect so-called “progressive prosecutors” is relatively new, but there is a robust literature analyzing it from a number of angles. Scholars consider how to define “progressive prosecution,” look at the movement through a racial justice lens, and examine it in the context of rural spaces, deportation, and the pandemic. One essay even…

Sep 2024

Article

Taxing Luxury Emissions

Clinton G. Wallace & Shelley Welton

Associate Professor of Law, University of South Carolina School of Law, Presidential Distinguished Professor of Law & Energy Policy, University of Pennsylvania Carey Law School and Kleinman Center for Energy Policy.

Recent economic and sociological studies have documented the rising challenge of carbon inequality—that is, extreme class disparities in carbon emissions both within the United States and globally. These studies show an alarming divide, with the top 10% of emitters producing half of all emissions and the top 1% alone producing 17% of emissions. Meanwhile, the…

Sep 2024

Article

Arousal by Algorithm

Amy Adler

Emily Kempin Professor of Law, NYU School of Law. 

The problem of Big Tech has consumed recent legal scholarship and popular discourse. We are reckoning daily with the threats that digital speech platforms like Facebook, X (formerly known as Twitter), TikTok, and YouTube pose to our personal and political lives. Yet while this conversation is raging in discussions about the impact of technology on…

Aug 2024

Article

Article II and the Federal Reserve

Aditya Bamzai & Aaron L. Nielson

Martha Lubin Karsh and Bruce A. Karsh Bicentennial Professor of Law, University of Virginia School of Law, Professor of Law, J. Reuben Clark Law School, Brigham Young University. 

The Supreme Court has twice held since 2020 that statutory restrictions on the President’s removal power violate Article II of the U.S. Constitution. Because such removal restrictions create a measure of policy independence from the President, these cases have prompted discussion about the future of independent agencies generally, with special attention to the Federal Reserve…

Aug 2024