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Reparations for Gentrification?: A Response to Professor Infranca’s ‘Differentiating Exclusionary Tendencies’

Ken Stahl

Abstract Response to John Infranca, Differentiating Exclusionary Tendencies Professor John Infranca’s important article, Differentiating Exclusionary Tendencies, takes on one of the most difficult questions in local politics today. The status quo in every area entrusted to local governments—housing, transportation, schools, policing—practically by definition has disproportionately negative impacts on the most disadvantaged and marginalized members of […]

Residents Against Housing: A Response to Professor Infranca’s ‘Differentiating Exclusionary Tendencies’

Lee Anne Fennell

Abstract Response to John Infranca’s, Differentiating Exclusionary Tendencies Incumbent residents routinely oppose residential development. Interestingly, this is true of both homeowners and renters, if for opposite reasons. Homeowners typically worry that new housing will cause the market value of their own homes to fall, resulting in a hit to what is usually a house-heavy personal […]

Supreme Risk

Benjamin P. Edwards

Abstract While many have discussed the social issues that might arise because of a majority-conservative Supreme Court, one critical consequence of the current Court has been overlooked: the role of the Court in generating or avoiding systemic risk. For some time, systemic financial risk has been regulated by a mix of self-regulatory organizations (SROs), such […]

2021 Allen L. Poucher Lecture

Standing in the Shadows of the New Fourth Amendment Traditionalism

Nicholas A. Kahn-Fogel

Abstract In the past decade, the Supreme Court of the United States has revived an originalist, property-based approach to evaluating Fourth Amendment problems. The Court has used this approach to broaden its understanding of the sorts of governmental conduct that qualify as Fourth Amendment searches. So far, however, neither the Court nor scholars have offered […]

Foreign Territorial Sea-zures: Article I Supports the Application of the Maritime Drug Law Enforcement Act to Drug Trafficking within Foreign Territorial Seas

Ryan R. Babb

Abstract Maritime drug trafficking poses a serious threat to the security and societal well-being of the United States. As one of the largest consumers of foreign-cultivated illicit drugs, the United States serves as a lucrative market for international drug trafficking organizations. Exploiting this insatiable demand, drug traffickers often use maritime routes in the Eastern Pacific […]

Come, Stay, and Enjoy Your Day: Sex Trafficking and Franchisor Liability Under Section 1595 of the Trafficking Victims Protection Reauthorization Act

Alexa Goldstein

Abstract Commercial sex trafficking continues to be a major national and international issue. In 2000, Congress enacted the Trafficking Victims Protection Act to combat sex trafficking, protect victims, and punish violators through developing international minimum standards and a complex, national legal scheme for bringing human trafficking claims. In 2003, Congress added § 1595, a civil […]

Super Deference and Heightened Scrutiny

Jonathan H. Adler

Abstract Judicial review of federal agency action is systematically deferential. Such deference is arguably at its peak where agencies address scientific and highly technical matters within their area of expertise. This is what some call “super deference.” While there may be strong arguments for deferential review of agency scientific determinations as a general matter, there […]

When Police Volunteer to Kill

Alexandra L. Klein

Abstract The Supreme Court has upheld the constitutionality of lethal injection, yet states continue to struggle with drug shortages and botched executions. Some states have authorized alternative methods of execution, including the firing squad. Utah, which has consistently carried out firing squad executions throughout its history, relies on police officers from the jurisdiction where the […]

Reasonableness as Censorship: Section 230 Reform, Content Moderation, and the First Amendment

Enrique Armijo

Abstract For the first time in the Internet’s history, revising Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act’s immunity for social media platforms from liability for third-party content seems to many not just viable, but necessary. Most such calls for reform are built around the longstanding common law liability principles of duty and reasonableness, namely conditioning […]

Separate But Free

Joshua E. Weishart

Abstract “Separate but equal” legally sanctioned segregation in public schools until Brown. Ever since, separate but free has been the prevailing dogma excusing segregation. From “freedom of choice” plans that facilitated massive resistance to desegregation to current school choice plans exacerbating racial, socioeconomic, and disability segregation, proponents have venerated parental freedom as the overriding principle. […]

Acquiring Ethical AI

David S. Rubenstein

Abstract Artificial intelligence (AI) is transforming how the federal government operates. Under the right conditions, AI systems can solve complex problems, reduce administrative burdens, improve human decisions, and optimize resources. Under the wrong conditions, AI systems can lead to widespread discrimination, invasions of privacy, and the erosion of democratic norms. A burgeoning literature has emerged […]

The Normality of Knick: A Response to Sterk and Pollack

Ilya Somin

Abstract Response to Stewart E. Sterk & Michael C. Pollack, A Knock on Knick‘s Revival of Federal Takings Litigation. The Supreme Court’s decision in Knick v. Township of Scott, has been criticized for supposedly wreaking havoc on the normal system for adjudicating takings claims, and for seriously violating norms of stare decisis. Stewart Sterk and Michael […]

A View From the Bench and the Trench(es) in Response to Judge Matthewman’s New Paradigm for EDiscovery: It’s More Complicated

Andrew Jay Peck

Abstract Response to William Matthewman, Towards a New Paradigm for E-Discovery in Civil Litigation: A Judicial Perspective We need more judges like my friend Judge William “Bill” Matthewman, who are willing to reflect on eDiscovery, not as a nuisance to be avoided, but in a thoughtful manner to advance the aims of Rule 1, for […]

Do the Games Never End?

Shubha Ghosh

Abstract Response to Pamela Samuelson, Staking the Boundaries of Software Copyrights in the Shadow of Patents Categories create hours of fun for the legal mind. Is it this? Or is it that? Could it be both? At the end of the day, the best, but nagging, answer might be “None of the above.” Categories are […]

Beyond the Binary: Protecting Sexual Minorities from Workplace Discrimination

Written by: Jessica Williams

Abstract      The LGBT community has benefitted from a rapid change in public perception. In the past few decades alone, the Supreme Court has greatly expanded the civil rights of queer people by decriminalizing homosexual conduct and recognizing gay marriage. Despite this progressive social setting, LGBT employees have yet to receive full protection from employment […]

A Faustian Bargain that Undermines Research Participants’ Privacy Rights and Return of Results

Barbara J. Evans & Susan M. Wolf

Abstract A 2018 committee report published by the highly respected National Academies of Science, Engineering, and Medicine (the Report) recommends stripping research participants of crucial data privacy rights and discarding decades of carefully deliberated consensus guidelines for the ethical return of results and data from research. This Article traces these disturbing recommendations to three root […]

Revisiting Background Principles in Takings Litigation

Michael C. Blumm & Rachel G. Wolfard

Abstract Libertarian property rights enthusiasts celebrated the United States Supreme Court’s 1992 decision in Lucas v. South Carolina Coastal Council as a landmark decision that would revolutionize interpretation of the Constitution’s takings clause and finally fulfill its potential as a vehicle for deregulation. Over a quarter-century later, the Lucas decision has failed to meet those […]

Oh What a Truism the Tenth Amendment Is: State Sovereignty, Sovereign Immunity, and Individual Liberties

Sharon E. Rush

Abstract The United States Supreme Court takes the Tenth Amendment and state sovereignty seriously. It also takes the Eleventh Amendment and state sovereign immunity seriously. Moreover, the contemporary Court’s interpretations of Congress’s Article I powers are based on its concomitant interpretations of the Tenth and Eleventh Amendments. The Court has infused these interpretations with the […]

Reentry Services for the Removed

Written By: Eda Katharine Tinto

Abstract  Response to Amy F. Kimpel, Coordinating Community Reintegration Services for “Deportable Alien” Defendants: A Moral and Financial Imperative Each year, thousands of individuals are released from prisons in the United States. Reentry services—services aimed at helping an individual reintegrate into the community upon his or her release—have long been neglected as an afterthought of […]

Rural Resentment and LGBTQ Equality

Luke A. Boso

Abstract In 2015, the U.S. Supreme Court in Obergefell v. Hodges settled a decades-long national debate over the legality of same-sex marriage. Since Obergefell, however, local and state legislatures in conservative and mostly rural states have proposed and passed hundreds of antiLGBTQ bills. Obergefell may have ended the legal debate over same-sex marriage, but it […]

A View of Copyright from the Digital Ground

Andres Sawicki

Abstract Response to Cathay Y. N. Smith, Beware the Slender Man: Intellectual Property and Internet Folklore Professor Cathay Smith’s Beware the Slender Man: Intellectual Property and Internet Folklore seems at first to fit comfortably within the creativity-without-IP literature, which shows that creative practices can thrive outside of the institutions built up around intellectual property law. […]

Regulation and the Marginalist Revolution

Herbert Hovenkamp

Abstract The marginalist revolution in economics became the foundation for the modern regulatory State with its “mixed” economy. For the classical political economists, value was a function of past averages. Marginalism substituted forward looking theories based on expectations about firm and market performance. Marginalism swept through university economics, and by 1920 or so virtually every […]

Staking the Boundaries of Software Copyrights in the Shadow of Patents

Pamela Samuelson

Abstract Ever since the venerable Supreme Court opinion in Baker v. Selden, courts and commentators have overwhelmingly endorsed the rule that copyright and utility patent protections for intellectual creations are mutually exclusive. That is, an intellectual creation may be eligible for copyright or utility patent protection, but not both. Original works of authorship are channeled […]

Digitizing the Schoolhouse Gate: Protecting Students’ Off-Campus Cyberspeech by Switching the Safety on Tinker’s Trigger

Written by: Joshua Rieger

Abstract Secondary-school students regularly engage in cyberspeech both inside and outside the schoolhouse gate. Internet-era forms of communication allow these students to produce off-campus cyberspeech that can easily be accessed or brought onto campus by other students or faculty. As early as the 1990s, public-school administrations began punishing students for off-campus cyberspeech, accessed or brought […]

“Go Sue Yourself!” Imagining Intrapersonal Liability for Negligently Self-Inflicted Harms

Written by: Lars Noah

Abstract Are “self-inflicted” harms actionable? Courts increasingly have allowed victims to identify other (typically unrelated) parties that may share responsibility for such injuries. Moreover, insofar as judges now also permit lawsuits against closely related parties, they arguably have expanded what it means for a harm to qualify as self-inflicted. Taking these various doctrinal developments to […]

Beware the Slender Man: Intellectual Property and Internet Folklore

Written by: Cathay Y. N. Smith

Abstract Internet folklore is created collaboratively within Internet communities—through memes, blogs, video games, fake news, found footage, creepypastas, art, podcasts, and other digital mediums. The Slender Man mythos is one of the most striking examples of Internet folklore. Slender Man, the tall and faceless monster who preys on children and teenagers, originated on an Internet […]

The Declining Fortunes of American Workers: Six Dimensions and an Agenda for Reform

Written by: Stephen F. Befort

Abstract At the turn of the century, I undertook an assessment of the then-current state of workplace rights and obligations. I concluded that the balance of power between employers and workers was “badly skewed” in favor of employers. This Article revisits that topic for the purpose of assessing twenty-first-century trends through the lens of six […]

Student Loans and Surmountable Access-To-Justice Barriers

Written by: Jason Iuliano

Findings and conclusions from the 2012 American Bankruptcy Law Journal Study and Response to Professor Rafael I. Pardo’s latest piece, The Undue Hardship Thicket: On Access to Justice, Procedural Noncompliance, and Pollutive Litigation in Bankruptcy.

Takings and Extortion

Written by: Daniel P. Selmi

Abstract The Supreme Court has repeatedly employed an extortion narrative in deciding when governmental actions imposing exactions on development projects constitute takings under the Fifth Amendment. In that narrative, local officials act in ever-present bad faith by misusing their regulatory powers to coerce concessions by developers seeking land use approvals. While the extortion narrative has […]

Sandra K. Miller & Karie Davis-Nozemack, Toward Consistent Fiduciary Duties for Publicly Traded Entities

Written by: Sandra K. Miller & Karie Davis-Nozemack

Abstract After the 2008 recession, it is difficult to imagine that the public is investing billions of dollars in publicly traded entities with little regulation of board conflicts and no fiduciary duty protections. Yet, that is precisely the case for more than $284 billion of investments. Investors have flocked to publicly traded limited partnerships (LPs) […]

Disaggregating "Immigration Law"

Written by: Matthew J. Lindsay

Abstract Courts and scholars have long noted the constitutional exceptionalism of the federal immigration power, decried the injustice it produces, and appealed for greater constitutional protection for noncitizens. This Article builds on this robust literature while focusing on a particularly critical conceptual and doctrinal obstacle to legal reform—the notion that laws governing the rights of […]

Pratheepan Gulasekaram & S. Karthick Ramakrishnan, The President and Immigration Federalism

Written: Pratheepan Gulasekaram & S. Karthick Ramakrishnan

Abstract This Article lays out a systematic, conceptual framework to better understand the relationship between federal executive action and state- level legislation in immigration. Prior immigration law scholarship has focused on structural power questions between the U.S. federal government—as a unitary entity—and the states, while newer scholarship has examined separation of powers concerns between the […]

E. Gary Spitko, The Will As An Implied Unilateral Arbitration Contract

68 Fla. L. Rev. 49 Abstract A consensus has begun to develop in the case law, the academic commentary, and the statutory reform movement that a testator’s provision in her will mandating arbitration of any challenge to the will should not be enforceable against a beneficiary who has not agreed to the arbitration provision, at […]

Andrew Jay McClurg, The Second Amendment Right To Be Negligent

68 Fla. L. Rev. 1 Abstract Only two constitutional rights—the First and Second Amendments—have a realistic capacity, through judicial interpretation or legislative action or inaction, to confer a “right to be negligent” on private citizens; that is, a right to engage in objectively unreasonable risk-creating conduct without legal consequences. In the First Amendment context, for […]

Pierce Giboney, Don't Ground Me Bro! Private Ownership of Airspace and How It Invalidates the FAA's Blanket Prohibition On Low Altitude Commercial Drone Operations

Abstract In years past, society has typically associated the word “drone” with the War on Terror and far-off battlefields. With the advent of the smart phone revolution, however, the once prohibitive costs of the technology have decreased to a level the general public can afford. As a consequence, a rising number of entrepreneurs associate the […]

S. Megan Testerman, A World Wide Web of Unwanted Children: The Practice, the Problem, and the Solution to Private Re-Homing

Abstract A deplorable practice has emerged in the world of adoption. Adoptive families are now using the Internet to give their unwanted adopted children over to complete strangers, some of whom are traffickers, pedophiles, child pornographers, or worse. This practice is known as private rehoming. Through the use of online message boards and a simple […]

R. George Wright, Content-Neutral and Content-Based Regulations of Speech: A Distinction That Is No Longer Worth the Fuss

Introduction The binary distinction between content-neutral and content-based speech regulations is of central importance in First Amendment doctrine. This distinction has been the subject of U.S. Supreme Court attention on several occasions.  As the case law has evolved, however, this apparently crucial distinction has become less clear, coherent, and practical, such that further attempts to […]

Sandra F. Sperino, Retaliation and the Reasonable Person

Abstract When a worker complains about discrimination, federal law is supposed to protect that worker from later retaliation. Recent scholarly attention focuses on how courts limit retaliation claims by narrowly framing the causation inquiry. A larger threat to retaliation law is developing in the lower courts. Courts are declaring a wide swath of conduct as […]

W. Keith Robinson, Economic Theory, Divided Infringement, and Enforcing Interactive Patents

Abstract High tech companies—especially in the emerging areas of the Internet of Things, wearable devices, and personalized medicine—have found it difficult to enforce their patents on interactive technologies. Enforcement is especially difficult when multiple parties combine to perform all of the steps of a claimed method, which is referred to as joint or divided infringement. […]

Sapna Kumar, Regulating Digital Trade

Abstract Under § 337 of the Tariff Act, the International Trade Commission (ITC) has jurisdiction over articles that enter the country and infringe intellectual property rights. Recently, the ITC vastly expanded its powers, asserting jurisdiction over imported digital files that infringe intellectual property rights. This Article examines the limits of the ITC’s authority, arguing that […]

Liesa L. Richter, Posnerian Hearsay: Slaying the Discretion Dragon

Abstract Distinguished jurist and scholar, Judge Richard Posner of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit penned a concurrence in United States v. Boyce, 742 F.3d 792 (7th Cir. 2014), in which he launched a scathing attack on the scheme of categorical hearsay exceptions embodied in the Federal Rules of Evidence. After characterizing the […]

Clark S. Splichal, Recent Development: Craigslist and the CFAA: The Untold Story

Craigslist Inc. v. 3Taps Inc., 942 F. Supp. 2d 962 (N.D. Cal. 2013) Craisglist Inc. v. 3Taps Inc., 964 F. Supp. 2d 1178 (N.D. Cal. 2013) There is one area in which Craigslist Inc. appears particularly invested these days: its legal bills. Notoriously cutthroat, this online classified marketplace has steadfastly clung to its bare-boned business […]

Iesha S. Nunes, "Hands Up, Don't Shoot": Police Misconduct and the Need for Body Cameras

Abstract The 2014 shooting of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri is probably the most notable of the many recent cases in the media involving police officers’ use of excessive force. After Officer Darren Wilson shot and killed Brown, varying accounts of what transpired between the two men surfaced. Officer Wilson claimed he was defending himself […]

Margaret Hu, Big Data Blacklisting

Abstract “Big data blacklisting” is the process of categorizing individuals as administratively “guilty until proven innocent” by virtue of suspicious digital data and database screening results. Database screening and digital watchlisting systems are increasingly used to determine who can work, vote, fly, etc. In a big data world, through the deployment of these big data […]

Peter R. Reilly, Incentivizing Corporate America to Eradicate Transnational Bribery Worldwide: Federal Transparency and Voluntary Disclosure Under the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act

Abstract In 1977, the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) discovered that hundreds of U.S. companies had spent hundreds of millions of dollars in bribes to improve business overseas. In response, Congress passed the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act (FCPA), thereby making it illegal to bribe foreign officials to obtain a business advantage. A major tension […]

Felix Mormann, Clean Energy Federalism

Abstract Legal scholarship tends to approach the law and policy of clean energy from an environmental law perspective. As hydraulic fracturing, renewable energy integration, nuclear reactor (re)licensing, transport biofuel mandates, and other energy issues have pushed to the fore front of the environmental law debate, clean energy law has begun to emancipate itself. The emerging […]

John Leubsdorf, The Surprising History of the Preponderance Standard of Civil Proof

Abstract Although much has been written on the history of the requirement of proof of crimes beyond a reasonable doubt, this is the first study to probe the history of its civil counterpart, proof by a preponderance of the evidence. It turns out that the criminal standard did not diverge from a preexisting civil standard, […]

Annemarie Bridy, Internet Payment Blockades

Abstract Internet payment blockades are an attempt to enforce intellectual property rights by “following the money” that flows to online merchants who profit from piracy and counterfeiting. Where corporate copyright and trademark owners failed in the legislature and the judiciary to create binding public law requiring payment processors like MasterCard and Visa to act as […]

Vitaliy Kats, Because, the Internet: The Limits of Online Campaign Finance Disclosure

During the 2011–2012 election cycle, Shaun McCutcheon contributed $33,088 to sixteen different candidates for federal office.  McCutcheon’s donations complied with the base limits the Federal Election Commission (FEC) set for contributions to individual candidates.McCutcheon wanted to contribute more but was barred by the FEC’s aggregate limit on contributions.In June of 2012, McCutcheon and the Republication […]

Stephen Carr, Class Actions Removability and the Changing Business of the Supreme Court: Dart Cherokee Basin Operating Co. v. Owens

Problems of appellate jurisdiction are, by their nature, mainly pragmatic problems. The U.S. Circuit Courts of Appeals are forced to balance the need to provide timely, effective appellate review of district court decisions against the understandable desire for judicial economy.In addition to this inherent tension between fairness and economy, the law is constantly evolving, causing […]

Cole Barnett & Chris Weeg, Intervention in the Tax Court and the Appellate Review of Tax Court Procedural Decisions

The Tax Court is an Article I court. It resolves more than 95% of all tax-related litigation—actually nearly 97% of the total federal tax docket in 2012. Despite this substantial role in federal litigation, scholars and courts have generally put aside the issue of what standard is appropriate when a U.S. federal court of appeals […]

Marla Spector Bowman, Docs v. Glocks: Doctors, Guns, Discrimination, and Privacy – Is Anyone Winning?

Americans discuss some of the most intimate details of their lives within the small confines of their neighborhood doctor’s office. Many Americans, however, may be taken aback if their physician asked them whether they owned a firearm during a routine physical examination. Although most Americans might not consider firearms education to be their physician’s primary […]

Rigel C. Oliveri, Single Family Zoning, Intimate Association, and the Right to Choose Household Companions

Many local governments use single-family zoning ordinances to restrict occupancy in residential areas to households whose members are all related to one another by blood, marriage, or adoption. The Supreme Court upheld such ordinances in the 1974 case of Belle Terre v. Boraas, and they have been used to prevent all sorts of groups from […]

Dru D. Stevenson & Nicholas J. Wagoner, Bargaining in the Shadow of Big Data

Attorney bargaining has traditionally taken place in the shadow of trial as litigants adjust tactics—and their inclination to negotiate a settlement—based on their forecast of the outcome of a trial and its associated costs. Lawyers bargaining on the verge of trial have traditionally relied on their intuition, knowledge of precedent, and previous interactions with the […]

Rebekah R. Runyon, Am I Under Arrest? Why the U.S. Sentencing Guidelines Need A Strict Definition of What Constitutes an Intervening Arrest

Congress provided for the creation of the U.S. Sentencing Guidelines to promote fairness and produce proportional and uniform sentences. The Guidelines provide judges with a guideline range for sentencing based on a defendant’s criminal history score and the offense level of the defendant’s criminal conduct. A defendant’s prior “intervening arrests” are considered in computing her […]

Andrew Daechsel,Fake Arbitration: Why Florida's Nonbinding Arbitration Procedure Is Not Arbitration Within the Scope of the Federal Arbitration Act

Does the Federal Arbitration Act (FAA) govern Florida’s nonbinding arbitration procedure? At present, this question is unresolved. As its name suggests, the FAA generally governs arbitration agreements. But the FAA does not define “arbitration,” and the U.S. Courts of Appeals have different standards for what constitutes arbitration under the FAA. This Note discusses those different […]

Johannes W. Fedderke & Marco Ventoruzzo,Do Conservative Justices Favor Wall Street? Ideology and the Supreme Court's Securities Regulation Decisions

The appointment of Supreme Court justices is a politically-charged process and the “ideology” (or “judicial philosophy”) of the nominees is perceived as playing a potentially relevant role in their future decision making. It is fairly easy to intuit that ideology somehow enters the analysis with respect to politically divisive issues such as abortion and procreative […]

Samuel R. Wiseman,What Is Federal Habeas Worth?

Federal habeas review of state non-capital cases under the Antiterrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act of 1996 (AEDPA) is widely regarded as deeply flawed for producing a huge volume of costly litigation and very little relief. Many scholars have called for AEDPA’s repeal and a return to more robust federal review, but recently, several prominent […]

Keith Cunningham-Parmeter, Marriage Equality, Workplace Inequality: The Next Gay Rights Battle

Same-sex marriage is not the only civil rights issue impacting the gay community. Although the Supreme Court’s decision in Obergefell v. Hodges represented a momentous victory on same-sex marriage, workplace protections affect far more people and remain a high priority for many lesbians and gay men. Today, even though the Supreme Court has invalidated state […]

Harwell Wells, A Long View of Shareholder Power: From the Antebellum Corporation to the Twenty-First Century

For most of the twentieth century, the conventional wisdom held—probably correctly—that shareholders in America’s large, public corporations were passive and powerless and that managers wielded the real power. Beginning in the 1980s, however, shareholders in the form of institutional investors started to push for a greater say in corporate decision-making. In the twenty-first century, hedge […]

Henry N. Butler, REMS-Restricted Drug Distribution Programs and the Antitrust Economics of Refusals to Deal with Potential General Competitors

The Food and Drug Administration Amendments Act of 2007 (FDAAA) grants the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) authority to require a Risk Evaluation and Mitigation Strategy (REMS) from drug manufacturers to ensure that a certain drug’s benefits outweigh its risks. Through REMS, the FDA restricts the distribution of drugs with dangerous characteristics, such as high […]

Sonja Wolf Sahlsten, I'm a Little Treepot: Conceptual Separability and Affording Copyright Protection to Useful Articles

To determine if a useful article—generally ineligible for copyright protection—has pictorial, graphic, or sculptural features that are copyrightable, the Copyright Act and the legislative intent expressed through the Act’s legislative history require that those artistic features be identified separately and capable of existing independently of the utilitarian function of the work. If the artistic features […]

Stephen Carr, Reconsidering Indirect-Purchaser Class Actions

Few issues have proven more vexing to private antitrust enforcement than those related to indirect-purchaser class actions. The current dual system of enforcement—federal and state—exacerbates the difficulty of litigating indirect-purchaser claims by layering procedural complexity on top of substantive complexity and by explicitly allowing (perhaps even incentivizing) duplicative recovery. Almost all commentators are in substantial […]

John F. Preis, How the Federal Cause of Action Relates to Rights, Remedies, and Jurisdiction

Time and again, the U.S. Supreme Court has declared that the federal cause of action is “analytically distinct” from rights, remedies, and jurisdiction. Yet, just pages away in the U.S. Reports are other cases in which rights, remedies, and jurisdiction all hinge on the existence of a cause of action. What, then, is the proper […]

Alan Devlin, Antitrust Limits on Targeted Patent Aggregation

Patent-assertion entities (PAEs) are non-technology-practicing companies that aggregate and license patents under threat of suit. Their activities have drawn fire, including presidential condemnation, and spurred proposed legislation to protect operating firms against them. PAEs leverage flaws in the patent system to extort firms that independently invent and sell technological goods to consumers. Since PAEs tax […]

Kristen M. Blankley, Impact Preemption: A New Theory of Federal Arbitration Act Preemption

The United States Supreme Court has expanded its arbitration preemption jurisprudence to unprecedented and unexplained bounds, ultimately creating a new type of preemption, herein coined “impact preemption.” As applied by the Court, the scope of impact preemption is broader than even field preemption. The future policy implications of impact preemption are significant. Impact preemption shifts […]

Onnig H. Dombalagian, Principles for Publicness

What duties does a “public” company owe investors, markets, and society? In recent years, Congress has both strengthened and diluted the federal disclosure and corporate governance regime that applies to public companies in the United States. However, it has never articulated a framework for what it means to be “public,” and how the obligations of […]

Jeffrey A. Lefstin, Inventive Application: A History

The Supreme Court’s recent cases on patent-eligible subject matter have struggled to draw the line between unpatentable fundamental principles, such as laws of nature and abstract ideas, and patentable inventions. In Mayo v. Prometheus, the Court suggested that only “inventive applications” of fundamental principles fall within the domain of the patent system. Both Mayo and […]

Alafair S. Burke, Consent Searches and Fourth Amendment Reasonableness

This Article builds on a growing body of scholarship discussing the role of reasonableness in consent-search doctrine. Although the language of “voluntary consent” implies a subjective inquiry into the state of mind of the person granting consent, the U.S. Supreme Court has repeatedly injected an objective standard of reasonableness into its analysis of a citizen’s […]

Albert W. Alschuler, Limiting Political Contributions After McCutcheon, Citizens United, and SpeechNow

There was something unreal about the opinions in McCutcheon v. FEC. These opinions examined a series of strategies for circumventing the limits on contributions to candidates imposed by federal election law, but they failed to notice that the limits were no longer breathing. The D.C. Circuit’s decision in SpeechNow.org v. FEC had created a far […]

Sean F. Nolon, Bargaining for Development Post-Koontz: How the Supreme Court Invaded Local Government

The U.S. Supreme Court’s decision in Koontz v. St. Johns River Water Management District injected significant confusion into negotiations over land development approvals. The principal source of this confusion is the majority’s unwillingness to clarify when and how a proposed condition offered in a negotiation becomes a demand that triggers heightened scrutiny under the Takings […]

Jennifer Lada, Bouncing the Proverbial Blank Check: An Argument for Including Candidates for Public Office Within the Scope of the Hobbs Act

The Hobbs Act, codified at 18 U.S.C. § 1951, criminalizes bribery of and extortion by public officials. Under the statute, “‘extortion’ means the obtaining of property from another, with his consent, induced by wrongful use of actual or threatened force, violence, or fear, or under color of official right.” But the meaning of “under color […]

Bethany R. Berger, In the Name of the Child: Race, Gender, and Economics in Adoptive Couple v. Baby Girl

On June 25, 2013, the Supreme Court decided Adoptive Couple v. Baby Girl, holding that the Indian Child Welfare Act did not permit the Cherokee father in that case to object to termination of his parental rights. The case was ostensibly about a dispute between prospective adoptive parents and a biological father. But this Article […]

Gregory Scopino, Do Automated Trading Systems Dream of Manipulating the Price of Futures Contracts? Policing Markets for Improper Trading Practices by Algorithmic Robots

This Article seeks to determine if the CFTC needs new tools to combat disruptive, manipulative, or otherwise harmful trading practices that originate solely from the “minds” of ATSs. Part I of this Article provides a brief regulatory background of the derivatives markets, then examines the increased automation in those markets today, and concludes by looking at […]

Xuan-Thao Nguyen, In the Name of Patent Stewardship: The Federal Circuit's Overreach into Commercial Law

While the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit has admirably commandeered its stewardship of patent law—Congress bestowed the Federal Circuit with exclusive jurisdiction over patent appeals since 1982—the court has unabashedly extended its reach, unwelcomed, into commercial law. Camouflaged in the name of patent stewardship, the Federal Circuit’s foray into commercial law has […]

Reid Kress Weisbord, Trust Term Extension

Over the last thirty years, most jurisdictions in the United States have repealed or abrogated the Rule Against Perpetuities, which prohibits perpetual donor control over property. This, in turn, has led estate planning practitioners to consider whether a trust created to comply with the Rule could, after the Rule’s repeal, be extended in perpetuity to […]

Oren Gross, The New Way of War: Is There a Duty to Use Drones?

Part I of this Article briefly describes the newest battlespace occupants. Robotic systems have been taking active part in combat. They now inhabit the air, the land, and the sea. They carry out missions ranging from surveillance and bomb disposal to “destroy and disable.” Part II examines the relevant principles of LOAC. It argues that […]

Aubrey Burris, Hell Hath No Fury like a Woman Porned: Revenge Porn and the Need for a Federal Nonconsensual Pornography Statute

Revenge porn is the term used to describe an intimate image or video that is initially shared within the context of a private relationship but is later publicly disclosed, usually on the Internet, without the consent of the individual featured in the explicit graphic. This nonconsensual disclosure is generally fueled by an intent to harm, […]

Cole Barnett, Is Injury a Tortious Act?: Interpreting Florida's Long-Arm Statute

Florida Statute § 48.193 enumerates several acts that grant Florida courts personal jurisdiction over nonresident defendants. Under Florida Statute § 48.193(1)(a)(2), nonresident defendants may become subject to personal jurisdiction in Florida by “committing a tortious act within this state.” The Florida district courts of appeal are split over the correct interpretation of this phrase. Along […]

Brannon P. Denning, One Toke over the (State) Line: Constitutional Limits on "Pot Tourism" Restrictions

Among the myriad legal issues confronting states—like Colorado—that are experimenting with the legalization of marijuana, is the need to regulate “pot tourism” by visitors from other states where marijuana remains illegal. In Colorado, the final recommendations from the Amendment 64 Implementation Task Force included a proposal “to limit purchases by state residents to an ounce […]

Lily Kahng, The Taxation of Intellectual Capital

Intellectual capital—broadly defined to include nonphysical sources of value such as patents and copyrights, computer software, organizational processes, and know-how—has a long history of being undervalued and excluded from measures of economic productivity and wealth. In recent years, however, intellectual capital has finally gained wide recognition as a central driver of economic productivity and growth. […]

Paul Rose, Shareholder Proposals in the Market for Corporate Influence

The period from 2003 to 2013 shows a remarkable shift in the use and effectiveness of shareholder proposals. While shareholders pursued many different types of proposals over this period, this Article identifies eight types of proposals as most important to corporate governance. This Article then provides evidence of how shareholders used and voted on these […]

Rafael I. Pardo, The Undue Hardship Thicket: On Access to Justice, Procedural Noncompliance, and Pollutive Litigation in Bankruptcy

This Article offers new insights into understanding the complexities and costs of the litigation burden that Congress has imposed on debtors who seek a fresh start in bankruptcy. In order to explore the problems inherent in a system that necessitates litigation as the path for obtaining certain types of bankruptcy relief, this Article focuses on […]

Robert D. Sowell, New Decisions Highlight Old Misgivings: A Reassessment of the Foreign Trade Antitrust Improvements Act Following Minn-Chem

What role does the United States play in policing international commerce? At what point do the laws of the United States end and those of other nations begin? These questions, among others, arise in determining when U.S. antitrust laws apply to foreign conduct. Looking back, the Sherman Act, for some time, has applied to foreign […]

William Hubbard, The Debilitating Effect of Exclusive Rights: Patents and Productive Inefficiency

Are we underestimating the costs of patent protection? Scholars have long recognized that patent law is a double-edged sword. While patents promote innovation, they also limit the number of people who can benefit from new inventions. In the past, policy makers striving to balance the costs and benefits of patents have analyzed patent law through […]

Jason Rantanen & Lee Petherbridge, Ph.D., Disuniformity

The United States Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit is a response to a failure in judicial administration that produced a fractured, unworkable patent law—one that Congress concluded ill-served entrepreneurship and innovation. The purpose of the response—vesting exclusive jurisdiction for patent appeals in the Federal Circuit—was to permit that court to develop patent law […]

Christopher R. Drahozal & Erin O'Hara O'Connor, Unbundling Procedure: Carve-Outs From Arbitration Clauses

A rich literature analyzes how parties choose between courts and arbitration. Within this literature, scholars traditionally assume that sophisticated parties make a single choice between courts and arbitration based on the bundle of dispute resolution services that seems most appealing ex ante. As with the literature on bundling generally, however, legal scholars are increasingly focusing […]

Margaret Tarkington, Lost in the Compromise: Free Speech, Criminal Justice, and Attorney Pretrial Publicity

The right to a jury trial, the presumption of innocence, the social compact between the individual and the State—these are among the weighty interests in our criminal justice system that can be bolstered or undermined through attorney pretrial publicity. The procedural protections that exist in the Constitution for criminal justice are neither technicalities nor formalities. […]

F. Patrick Hubbard, "Sophisticated Robots": Balancing Liability, Regulation, and Innovation

Our lives are being transformed by large, mobile, “sophisticated robots” with increasingly higher levels of autonomy, intelligence, and interconnectivity among themselves. For example, driverless automobiles are likely to become commercially available within a decade. Many people who suffer physical injuries from these robots will seek legal redress for their injury, and regulatory schemes are likely […]

Cole Barnett, United States v. Woods and the Future of the Tax Blue Book as a Means of Penalty Avoidance and Statutory Interpretation

The Blue Book is a “General Explanation” of tax law prepared by the Joint Committee on Taxation, and is commonly relied upon by both taxpayers and the Internal Revenue Service (IRS). In United States v. Woods, the U.S. Supreme Court broadly disapproved of judicial deference to the Blue Book when courts are faced with such […]

Anna P. Hayes, Fernandez v. California and the Expansion of Third-Party Consent Searches

Imagine a day when the police come knocking at your door: you open the door, and the police ask you if they may conduct a warrantless search of your residence. As any good constitutional law student would, you explain to them that you are well aware of your rights under the Fourth Amendment, and that […]

Adam M. Hapner, You Have the Right to Remain Silent, But Anything You Don’t Say May Be Used Against You: The Admissibility of Silence as Evidence After Salinas v. Texas

In Salinas v. Texas, the United States Supreme Court held that a suspect’s refusal to answer an officer’s questions during a noncustodial, pre-Miranda, criminal interrogation is admissible at trial as substantive evidence of guilt. In a plurality decision, Justice Samuel Alito emphasized that before a suspect can rely on the privilege against self-incrimination, the suspect […]

Robert D. Sowell, Misuse of Information Under the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act: On What Side of the Circuit Split Will the Second and Third Circuits Wind Up?

The Computer Fraud and Abuse Act (CFAA) has reached a breaking point. The much-discussed issue is whether the CFAA provides a cause of action against persons who use electronic information in a way that violates a relevant computer-use policy.  Four circuit courts of appeals have held that the CFAA provides a cause of action for […]

William C. Matthews, Aventura Management, LLC v. Spiaggia Ocean Condominium Association: Condominium Associations Beware

In late January 2013, the Third District Court of Appeal sent shockwaves throughout the real estate community with regards to condominium associations’ rights as unit owners. In AventuraManagement, LLC v. Spiaggia Ocean Condominium Association1 (Spiaggia), the appellate court interpreted Florida Statute § 718.1162 in an unprecedented way. The court held that if a condominium association […]

Marc B. Hernandez, Guilt Without Mens Rea: How Florida’s Elimination of Mens Rea for Drug Possession is Constitutional

The Florida Comprehensive Drug Abuse Prevention and Control Act is almost unique among criminal drug statutes in the United States. Like all states, Florida prohibits the possession, sale, and delivery of certain controlled substances. However, a recent revision of the Florida Comprehensive Drug Act removed Florida’s burden of proving one aspect of defendants’ mens rea […]

Judge Emmett Ripley Cox, Thirty-Two Years on the Federal Bench: Some Things I Have Learned

In this Essay, prepared as the basis for the 2014 Dunwody Distinguished Lecture in Law at the University of Florida Levin College of Law, Judge Cox discusses a few things he learned from his experience as a trial judge and later as an appellate judge. Specifically, he addresses how the proliferation of federal law—both criminal and civil—imposes […]

Jonathan Remy Nash, Expertise and Opinion Assignment on the Courts of Appeals: A Preliminary Investigation

This Article examines the role of expertise in judicial opinion assignment and offers four contributions: First, this Article develops a general theory of opinion assignment on multimember courts. Second, this Article uses that theory to predict how expertise might influence opinion assignment. Third, because the theory advanced in this Article suggests that the courts of […]

Rachel Arnow-Richman, Mainstreaming Employment Contract Law: The Common Law Case for Reasonable Notice of Termination

This Article simultaneously exposes a fundamental error in employment termination doctrine and a paradox in contract law jurisprudence. Contemporary employment law has developed under the assumption that at-will parties may terminate their relationship both without reason and without notice. This Article argues that the second half of this formulation—the idea that parties reserve the procedural […]

Edward A. Purcell, Jr., Democracy, the Constitution, and Legal Positivism in America: Lessons from a Winding and Troubled History

This Article explores the political and philosophical background of the current debate between positivist “originalism” and evolutionary “living constitutionalism” and, more generally, the significance of positivist ideas for both democratic and constitutional theory. Noting the tensions between positivist and nonpositivist ideas that existed in early American constitutionalism, it focuses on the impact of John Austin’s […]

William C. Matthews, The Fifth Circuit’s Misguided Interpretation of Title VII’s Anti-Retalliation Provision in Hernandez v. Yellow Transportation, Inc.

After Burlington Northern & Santa Fe Railway Co. v. White resolved the issue of what constitutes an “adverse action” under the Title VII anti-retaliation statute, the scope of employer liability was substantially broadened. The Supreme Court’s decision reinforced the broad intent behind the anti-retaliation statute and acknowledged the statute’s remedial purpose. The Fifth Circuit, however, […]

Karl Gruss, Freedom of Information Act and Federal Licensing Procedures: Invoking Exemption 7(F) to Protect Examination Materials

The United States Supreme Court’s 2011 decision in Milner v. Department of the Navy shut the door on an expansive interpretation of one of the nine enumerated exemptions to the public disclosure requirements mandated under the Freedom of Information Act. No longer can federal agencies seek cover behind the judicially crafted interpretation of Exemption 2 […]

Patricia L. Reid, Fact Sheet #71: Shortchanging the Unpaid Academic Intern

On the eve of the Fair Labor Standards Act’s seventy-fifth anniversary, unpaid academic internships threaten to outpace government regulation and undermine opportunities for gainful employment. Although coveted by students eager to fill a line on their résumé, unpaid academic internships are a subspecies of unpaid internships that might soon face extinction. While the advent of […]

Thomas J. Fitzpatrick IV & Amy B. Monahan, Who’s Afraid of Good Governance? State Fiscal Crises, Public Pension Underfunding, and the Resistance to Governance Reform

Much attention has been paid to the significant underfunding of many state and local employee pension plans, as well as to efforts by states and cities to alleviate that underfunding by modifying the benefits provided to workers. Yet relatively little attention has been paid to the systemic causes of such financial distress—such as chronic underfunding […]

Gaia Bernstein, Incentivizing the Ordinary User

Disputes regarding the effectiveness of the patent system focus on the appropriate scope of patent rights. This Article departs from the traditional debate and looks instead at the players regulated by the patent system. This Article shows that the patent system fails to effectively encourage technological dissemination because it focuses on the patent owner and […]

Emily S. Bremer, The Unwritten Administrative Constitution

It is widely accepted that the powers of the federal government flow from the U.S. Constitution. Yet in practice, most federal power is exercised through administrative agencies, institutions not mentioned in the Constitution. Since the New Deal Era, administrative law—the seemingly disparate set of rules governing agency action that are found in statutes, judicial decisions, […]

Peter L. Markowitz & Lindsay C. Nash, Constitutional Venue

A foundational concept of American jurisprudence is the principle that it is unfair to allow litigants to be haled into far away tribunals when the litigants and the litigation have little or nothing to do with the location of such courts. Historically, both personal jurisdiction and venue each served this purpose in related, but distinct […]

Sandra F. Sperino, The Tort Label

Courts and commentators often label federal discrimination statutes as torts. The tort label leads to reasoning that is superficial and not transparent about its motivations and goals. Courts do not engage in nuanced discussions about the kind of reasoning they are using or the values they are prioritizing in reaching the result. Importantly, the tort […]

John O. McGinnis & Steven Wasick, Law’s Algorithm

This Article offers a historical, theoretical, and practical perspective on law as an information technology. Law fundamentally concerns information—providing information to the community about the content of legal norms and, at least in its common law form, eliciting information about the world from the disputes before a court. This Article first surveys law’s history as […]

Rodney A. Smolla, Regulating the Speech of Judges and Lawyers: The First Amendment and the Soul of the Profession

The legal profession has historically asserted moral and legal authority to substantially control the speech of judges and lawyers. This impulse to control the speech of judges and lawyers is driven by many of the profession’s most strongly held interests and values. These include such interests as ensuring the fair administration of justice, the promotion […]

Nicole Buonocore Porter, Mutual Marginalization: Individuals with Disabilities and Workers with Caregiving Responsibilities

This Article explores the marginalization of two groups of employees—individuals with disabilities and workers with caregiving responsibilities. One might argue that these two groups have little in common. However, while these groups are not perfectly aligned, they do have much in common in the workplace. First, these employees are unable to consistently meet their employers’ […]

Michael Polatsek, Extortion Through the Public Record: Has the Internet Made Florida’s Sunshine Law Too Bright?

In recent years, privately owned websites around the country have begun to gather arrest records directly from law enforcement websites and republish them on their own sites. Often, the images are displayed without regard to the ultimate disposition of the arrestee’s case. Images and arrest records of individuals who were eventually convicted or acquitted are […]

Stephen E. Ludovici, Rule 60(b)(4): When the Courts of Limited Jurisdiction Yield to Finality

It is basic hornbook law—affirmed by courts across time and space repeatedly and unequivocally—that subject-matter jurisdiction cannot be waived. However, in the context of a Rule 60(b)(4) motion seeking relief from a void final judgment after the time for appeal has expired, the onerous standard of review used by courts causes subject-matter jurisdiction to be […]

Anne R. Traum, Using Outcomes to Reframe Guilty Plea Adjudication

The Supreme Court’s 2012 decisions in Lafler v. Cooper and Missouri v. Frye lay the groundwork for a new approach to judicial oversight of guilty pleas that considers outcomes. These cases confirm that courts possess robust authority to protect defendants’ Sixth Amendment right to the effective assistance of counsel and that plea outcomes are particularly […]

Kevin J. Lynch, The Lock-in Effect of Preliminary Injunctions

One important bias economists and psychologists have identified is the lock-in effect. The lock-in effect causes a decision maker who must revisit an earlier decision to be locked in to that earlier decision. The effect is particularly pronounced where the earlier decision led to the investment of resources that cannot be recovered. Although lock-in does […]

Alex B. Long, The Forgotten Role of Consent in Defamation and Employment Reference Cases

As has been well documented, the fear of defamation suits and related claims lead many employers to refuse to provide meaningful employment references. However, an employer who provides a negative reference concerning an employee enjoys a privilege in an ensuing defamation action if the employee has consented to the release of information concerning the employee’s […]

Alberto R. Gonzales & Amy L. Moore, No Right at All: Putting Consular Notification in its Rightful Place After Medellin

This Article covers the history of consular notification and presentation in the U.S. federal and state courts and in the International Court of Justice. Article 36 of the Vienna Convention on Consular Relations provides that nation-states should notify detained foreign nationals of their right to contact their consulate about their detention. This Article argues that […]

Andrew Guthrie Ferguson, Constitutional Culpability: Questioning the New Exclusionary Rules

This Article addresses the questions left unanswered by the Supreme Court’s recent exclusionary rule cases. The Hudson-Herring-Davis trilogy presents a new and largely unexamined doctrinal landscape for Fourth Amendment suppression hearings. Courts, litigators, and scholars are only now assessing what has changed on the ground in trial practice. Once an automatic remedy for any constitutional […]

Sergio J. Campos, Class Actions and Justiciability

A lingering issue in class action law concerns the case or controversy requirement of Article III, otherwise known as the requirement of justiciability. For purposes of justiciability doctrines such as standing, mootness, and ripeness, is the class action brought by all class members, some class members, or just the class representative? This Article argues that […]

Robert D. Sowell, New Decisions Highlight Old Misgivings: A Reassessment of the Foreign Trade Antitrust Improvements Act Following Minn-Chem

What role does the United States play in policing international commerce? At what point do the laws of the United States end and those of other nations begin? These questions, among others, arise in determining when U.S. antitrust laws apply to foreign conduct. Looking back, the Sherman Act, for some time, has applied to foreign […]

Kathleen Carlson, Social Media and the Workplace: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Privacy Settings and the NLRB

Social media has permeated every aspect of society. The use of social media can easily lead to issues in an employment law context when employees suffer adverse employment actions based on the information they choose to share via their personal social media websites. Today’s laws concerning online privacy are in a nebulous state and have […]

Ben Trachtenberg, Testimonial Is As Testimonial Does

In the decade since Crawford v. Washington declared “testimony” to be the touchstone of the Confrontation Clause, courts—from the humblest criminal trial court to the Supreme Court itself—have struggled with two problems. First, defining “testimonial” has proven difficult. Second, in certain cases, the results of defining “testimonial” as Crawford would seem to require have proven […]

Richard D. Friedman, The Mold That Shapes Hearsay Law

In response to an article previously published in the Florida Law Review by Professor Ben Trachtenberg, Professor Friedman argues that the historical thesis of Crawford v. Washington is basically correct: The Confrontation Clause of the Sixth Amendment reflects a principle about how witnesses should give testimony, and it does not create any broader constraint on the use […]

Bernard S. Sharfman, Shareholder Wealth Maximization and Its Implementation Under Corporate Law

This Article tackles the question of when courts should intervene in the decision-making of a corporation and review a corporate business decision for shareholder wealth maximization. This Article takes a very traditional approach to answering this question. It notes with approval that courts have historically been very hesitant to participate in the process of determining […]

Kevin Barry , From Wolves, Lambs (Part I): The Eighth Amendment Case for Gradual Abolition of the Death Penalty

This spring, the Connecticut Supreme Court will take up a novel question, unprecedented in modern death penalty jurisprudence: Can a state gradually abolish its death penalty? Restated, can it leave the sentences of those currently on death row in place but abolish the death penalty going forward? This Article argues that it can. On simple […]

Gregory N. Mandel, The Public Perception of Intellectual Property

Though the success of intellectual property law depends upon its ability to affect human perception and behavior, the public psychology of intellectual property has barely been explored. Over 1,700 U.S. adults took part in an experimental study designed to investigate popular conceptions of intellectual property rights. Respondents’ views of what intellectual property rights ought to […]

Michelle M. Harner & Jamie Marincic Griffin, Facilitating Successful Failures

Approximately 80,000 businesses fail each year in the United States. This Article presents an original empirical study that surveys more than 400 business restructuring professionals. The study focuses on a critical factor that arguably contributes to these failures—the conduct of boards of directors and management. Anecdotal evidence suggests that management of distressed companies often bury […]

Irina D. Manta, The High Cost of Low Sanctions

Low sanctions can initially appear to be a mitigating factor for unjust or inefficient laws, but this perception is likely wrong. This Article argues that low sanctions may have a pernicious effect on the democratic process and on legislative rule making because, as both public choice theory and historical precedent suggest, the laws accompanying these […]

Miriam H. Baer, Confronting the Two Faces of Corporate Fraud

Some criminals engage in meticulous planning. Others commit crimes in the heat of the moment. Corporate fraud incorporates both planned and spur-of-the-moment misconduct. Although law and economics scholars have traditionally viewed corporate fraud as a manifestation of opportunism among the corporation’s agents, a new generation of scholars, influenced by findings in behavioral psychology, has focused […]

Lawrence A. Cunningham, Deferred Prosecutions and Corporate Governance: An Integrated Approach to Investigation and Reform

When evaluating how to proceed against a corporate investigative target, law enforcement authorities often ignore the target’s governance arrangements, while subsequently negotiating or imposing governance requirements, especially in deferred prosecution agreements. Ignoring governance structures and processes amid investigation can be hazardous, and implementing improvised reforms afterwards may have severe unintended consequences—particularly when prescribing standardized governance […]

Ellen English, “Camels Agree with your Throat" and Other Lies: Why Graphic Warnings are Necessary to Prevent Consumer Deception

The government’s latest attempt to protect consumers from the perils of tobacco use is in jeopardy. In 2009, Congress enacted the Family Smoking Prevention and Tobacco Control Act, which requires cigarette advertisements and packages to bear nine new textual health warnings and gives the FDA authority to regulate tobacco products. In 2011, in compliance with the Act, the FDA issued […]

Robert J. Pushaw, Jr., The Paradox of the Obamacare Decision: How Can the Federal Government have Limited Unlimited Power?

National Federation of Independent Business v. Sebelius, the Supreme Court’s decision upholding the landmark Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (ACA or “Obamacare”), sets forth the most important judicial examination of constitutional power since the New Deal era. The political and media frenzy over the Obamacare case has obscured its actual legal analysis and larger constitutional implications, which warrant more reflective […]

Katrina M. Wyman & Nicholas R. Williams, Migrating Boundaries

The boundaries between land parcels usually are assumed to be static and unchanging. However, not all land borders are stable. An important land boundary that routinely ambulates is the border between what is publicly and privately owned along U.S. coastal shores. This coastal boundary recently has been the subject of renewed attention from the courts, scholars, and even the popular […]

Amy E. Pope, Lawlessness Breeds Lawlessness: A Case for Applying the Fourth Amendment to Extraterritorial Searches

It is a priority of the United States to [h]elp partner countries strengthen governance and transparency, break the corruptive power of transnational criminal networks, and sever state–crime alliances. The United States needs willing, reliable and capable partners to combat the corruption and instability generated by TOC  [Transnational Organized Crime] and related threats to governance. We will help international partners develop […]

Wendy Parker, Recognizing Discrimination: Lessons From White Plaintiffs

The Supreme Court has developed a robust equal protection jurisprudence to recognize the rights of whites complaining of race conscious governmental activity. This was particularly reflected in the Court’s opinion in Parents Involved, where the Roberts Court radically repositioned the meaning of Brown v. Board of Education. That opinion all but guarantees that eventually Abigail Noel Fisher will win her […]

Jennifer Lee Koh, Rethinking Removability

Removability, in the context of immigration law, refers to the government’s legal authority to seek deportation for violations of the federal immigration statute. Removability matters now more than ever before, both for individuals facing possible deportation as well as for the many governmental institutions charged with assessing removability. Using four areas of emerging law—claims to U.S. citizenship, the categorical approach to […]

Lee Harris, CEO Retention

Again and again, economists, corporate law scholars, and Congress have turned to reforms, such as executive compensation reforms, as a solution to executive misbehavior. The root of the evil, they muse, is skyhigh pay with only a flimsy connection to managerial performance. If CEO pay can only be rejiggered on the front end and tied to performance, the argument goes, […]

Alan M. White & Carolina Reid Saving Homes? Bankruptcies and Loan Modifications in the Foreclosure Crisis

Do homeowner bankruptcy filings work to delay or prevent home foreclosures, and how do they compare to voluntary loan modifications specifically targeted to mortgage relief? The 2007–2012 financial crisis provides a unique opportunity to assess whether bankruptcy can help homeowners avoid the negative consequences of over-indebtedness and mortgage default. This empirical study analyzes a large, loan-level mortgage dataset to determine which […]

Adam Mossoff, The Trespass Fallacy in Patent Law

The patent system is broken and in dire need of reform; so says the popular press, scholars, lawyers, judges, congresspersons, and even the President. One common complaint is that patents are now failing as property rights because their boundaries are not as clear as the fences that demarcate real estate—patent infringement is neither as determinate nor as efficient as trespass […]

Thomas J. Horton, Robert H. Lande, & Virginia Callahan APPENDIX

This appendix compares the quality of the investigatory and local journalism contained in “old media” with that contained in “new media” by using the metrics the journalism industry itself uses. We ascertain which type of media has won most of the journalism awards in the years since these awards became open to the new media. […]

Brett McDonnell, Dampening Financial Regulatory Cycles

Financial regulation should be countercyclical, strengthening during speculative booms to contain excessive leverage and loosening following crises so as to not limit credit extension in hard times. And yet, financial regulation in fact tends to be procyclical, strengthening following crises and loosening during booms. This Article considers competing descriptive and normative analyses of that procyclical tendency. All of the models and […]

Chad Flanders, Pardons and the Theory of the “Second-Best”

This Article explains and defends a “second-best” theory of pardons. Pardons are second-best in two ways. First, pardons are second-best because they represent, in part, a response to a failure of justice: the person convicted was not actually guilty, or he or she was punished too harshly, or the punishment no longer fits the crime. In the familiar analogy, pardons […]

Dane Ullian, Retroactive Application of State Long-Arm Statutes

A precondition to a court’s exercising any measure of authority over an individual or an entity is the court’s establishment of personal jurisdiction. A court may exercise personal jurisdiction over a nonresident defendant only if the forum state provides a statutory basis for exercising jurisdiction over the nonresident and the exercise of jurisdiction satisfies the constitutional due process standard. Personal […]

Thomas J. Horton & Robert H. Lande, Should the Internet Exempt the Media Sector From the Antitrust Laws?

Suppose the twenty largest traditional news media companies in the United States, including the Wall Street Journal, New York Times, Washington Post, ABC, NBC, CBS, Fox, and CNN, announced the merger of their news operations. They would likely claim that this merger would result in tremendous cost savings by eliminating duplicative news gathering expenses. They would be correct. They […]

Todd J. Zywicki, The Economics and Regulation of Network Branded Prepaid Cards

One of the fastest growing sectors of the consumer payments marketplace is the general-purpose reloadable prepaid card sector. Their importance accelerated as a consequence of new regulations enacted in the wake of the 2008 financial crisis. This increased use of prepaid cards also increased angst among regulators, especially regarding the number and size of fees on prepaid cards. State and […]

Amy Widman, The Rostrum Principle: Why the Boundaries of the Public Forum Matter to Statutory Interpretation

There is a section of dicta in the recent Supreme Court decision on health care reform that might portend new ground, although not in Commerce Clause jurisprudence. Rather, in his dissent, Justice Antonin Scalia did a curious thing for those interested in statutory interpretation: He cited an op-ed in The New York Times that quoted […]

Kathleen Carlson, Ryan v. Gonzalez and the Potential Elimination of the Ineffective Assistance of Counsel Post Conviction Failsafe

Recently, the United States Supreme Court addressed in Ryan v. Gonzales “whether the incompetence of a state prisoner requires suspension of the prisoner’s federal habeas corpus proceedings.” In a unanimous decision, the Court held that “the Courts of Appeals for the Ninth and Sixth Circuits both erred in holding that district courts must stay federal habeas proceedings when […]

Daniel J. DiMatteo, To Enforce a Privacy Right: The Sovereign Immunity Canon and the Privacy Act's Civil Remedies Provision After Cooper

In 2005, a joint investigation between separate government agencies revealed that Stanmore Cooper, a pilot, failed to disclose to the Federal Aviation Administration that he was HIV positive. Cooper sued the agencies in the United States District Court for the Northern District of California, claiming that they violated the Privacy Act by disclosing his medical records to one another without […]

Laura M. Beard, Small Claims, Big Recovery: Proposals For Settlement in Florida's Small Claims Courts Post-Nichols

After a debilitating car accident left Shannon Nichols injured and saddled with nearly $10,000 in medical bills, she sought only one thing—a road to recovery. Instead, Nichols faced a harrowing reality—after turning down a proposal for settlement from her insurer and losing at trial, not only did Nichols fail to receive reimbursement for her medical expenses, but […]

Camilla Cohen, Goodyear Dunlop's Failed Attempt to Refine the Scope of General Personal Jurisdiction

In first-year civil procedure, students spend a great deal of time parsing an “answer” to a deceptively simple question: When may a state exercise its adjudicatory authority over an out-of-state defendant? Since Pennoyer v. Neff, the United States Supreme Court has addressed the issue of personal jurisdiction in at least thirty-five cases spanning three centuries. Following the Court’s decision in International […]

Kelly M. Gay, Hunger, Food Prices, and the Food Safety Modernization Act: Balancing Physical Safety and Food Security

The Food and Drug Administration (FDA) Food Safety Modernization Act (Modernization Act) was signed into law by President Barack Obama on January 4, 2011. The goal of the Act is to reform the United States’ food safety regulations that attempt to safeguard the American public from foodborne illness. However, America is also in the middle of a hunger crisis—millions of […]

John Terwilleger, Can A Professional Limit Liability Contractually Under Florida Law?

Florida law is currently unclear on the issue of whether a professional may rely upon a limitation of liability clause in a professional services contract. Limitation of liability clauses are common in business contracts, especially in construction, a field that includes many professionals such as engineers and architects. While Florida has historically enforced limitation of liability clauses in professional services contracts, […]

Randy E. Barnett, No Small Feat: Who Won the Health Care Case (and Why Did So Many Law Professors Miss the Boat)?

In this Essay, prepared as the basis for the 2013 Dunwody Distinguished Lecture in Law at the University of Florida Levin College of Law, I describe five aspects of the United States Supreme Court’s decision in National Federation of Independent Business v. Sebelius that are sometimes overlooked or misunderstood: (1) the Court held that imposing economic mandates on the […]

Robert E. Wagner, Criminal Corporate Character

In the last few years, corporations have been accused of crimes ranging from environmental pollution on an unprecedented scale, to manslaughter, to election tampering, to large-scale antitrust violations. Many of these accused companies had previously committed similar acts or even the exact same offense. Unfortunately, the rules of evidence in the federal system and in virtually every state system prohibit […]

Deborah Thompson Eisenberg, Regulation by Amicus:The Department of Labor's Policy Making in the Courts

This Article examines the practice of “regulation by amicus”: that is, an agency’s attempt to mold statutory interpretation and establish policy by filing “friend of the court” briefs in private litigation. Since the United States Supreme Court recognized agency amicus interpretations as a source of controlling law entitled to deference in Auer v. Robbins, agencies have used amicus curiae briefs—in […]

Naomi Harlin Goodno, When the Commerce Clause Goes International: A Proposed Legal Framework for the Foreign Commerce Clause

The world is becoming a smaller place. Technology and the Internet have made global travel and communication easier, quicker, and more common. Novel legal issues arise every day to deal with this modern interconnected world. How does the law address these new problems? Congress is allowed “[t]o regulate Commerce with foreign Nations, and among the […]

Jessica Erickson, The New Professional Plaintiffs in Shareholder Litigation

In 1995, Congress solved the problem of professional plaintiffs in shareholder litigation—or so it thought. The Private Securities Litigation Reform Act (PSLRA) was designed to end the influence of shareholder plaintiffs who had little or no connection to the underlying suit. Yet it may have failed to accomplish its goal. In the wake of the […]

Steven G. Calabresi & Abe Salander, Religion and the Equal Protection Clause: Why the Constitution Requires School Vouchers

Ask anyone whether the Constitution permits discrimination on the basis of religion, and the response will undoubtedly be no. Yet the modern Supreme Court has not recognized that the antidiscrimination command of the Fourteenth Amendment protects religion in the same way that the Amendment protects against discrimination on the basis of race or gender. In […]

David R. Maass, If it Looks Like a Vessel: the Supreme Court's "Reasonable Observer" Test for Vessel Status

What is a vessel? In maritime law, important rights and duties turn on whether something is a vessel. For example, the owner of a vessel can limit his liability for damages caused by the vessel under the Limitation of Shipowners’ Liability Act, and an injured seaman who is a member of the crew of a […]

Steven Nauman, Brown v. Plata: Renewing the Call to End Mandatory Minimum Sentencing

After more than twenty years of litigation, the United States Supreme Court finally determined whether California’s overcrowded prison system created a constitutional violation in Brown v. Plata. With prisons and jails across the country operating at well over 100% capacity, the Court concluded what advocates had been screaming for over a decade: prison overcrowding cannot […]

Mariko K. Shitama, Bringing Our Children Back From the Land of Nod: Why the Eighth Amendment Forbids Condemning Juveniles to Die in Prison for Accessorial Felony Murder

Over 2,589 individuals sit in prison, where they have been condemned to die for crimes they committed before their eighteenth birthday. At least a quarter of these individuals received this sentence for accessorial felony murder, or a crime in which they did not kill or intend to kill the victim. Beginning with Roper v. Simmons in […]

Sam Kamin & Justin Marceau, Vicarious Aggravators

In Gregg v. Georgia, the Supreme Court held that the death penalty was constitutional so long as it provided a non-arbitrary statutory mechanism for determining who are the worst of the worst, and therefore, deserving of the death penalty. As a general matter, this process of narrowing the class of death eligible offenders is done […]

Andrew S. Pollis, Civil Rule 54(B): Seventy-Five and Ready for Retirement

As we commemorate the diamond anniversary of the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure, this Article takes a critical look at one of the failed Rules: Rule 54(b). Although many commentators have noted difficulties with Rule 54(b), this is the first effort to describe those difficulties comprehensively, analyze their root causes, and offer a workable alternative. When […]

Robert G. Natelson, Founding-Era Conventions and the Meaning of the Constitution's "Convention for Proposing Amendments"

Under Article V of the U.S. Constitution, two thirds of state legislatures may require Congress to call a “Convention for proposing Amendments.” Because this procedure has never been used, commentators frequently debate the composition of the convention and the rules governing the application and convention process. However, the debate has proceeded almost entirely without knowledge of the many multi-colony and multi-state […]

Stephen McCullers, A Dangerous Servant and a Fearful Master: Why Florida's Prescribed Fire Statute Should be Amended

Fire will not be denied its opportunity to burn through Florida’s forests. The citizens of Florida, however, can accept the responsibility of deciding how the forest will burn. Fire can be purposefully ignited under exact weather conditions, acting as a controlled but dangerous servant with a slim chance of escape or harm. Or, if Floridians […]

Marc Edelman, Closing the “Free Speech” Loophole: the Case for Protecting College Athletes’ Publicity Rights in Commercial Video Games

When Electronic Arts Inc. (Electronic Arts) launched its video game series NCAA Football in June 1993, the available technology limited developers to crafting avatars that looked like faceless figurines. Today, however, advancements in digital technology have enabled developers to create “virtual players” that strongly resemble their reallife counterparts. For example, in NCAA Football 12, the […]

Charles Gardner Geyh, The Dimensions of Judicial Impartiality

Scholars have traditionally analyzed judicial impartiality piecemeal, in disconnected debates on discrete topics. As a consequence, current understandings of judicial impartiality are balkanized and muddled. This Article seeks to reconceptualize judicial impartiality comprehensively, across contexts. In an era when “we are all legal realists now,” perfect impartiality—the complete absence of bias or prejudice—is at most […]

F. Andrew Hessick & Jathan P. McLaughlin, Judicial Logrolling

In the federal judicial system, multiple judges hear cases on appeal. Although assigning cases to multiple judges provides a number of benefits, it also generates the potential for conflict. Because each judge has his own set of preferences and values, judges on appellate panels often disagree with each other. Judges currently resolve these disagreements by […]

Amanda M. Rose & Larry J. LeBlanc, Policing Public Companies: an Empirical Examination of the Enforcement Landscape and the Role Played by State Securities Regulators

Multiple different securities law enforcers can pursue U.S. public companies for the same misconduct. These enforcers include a variety of federal agencies, class action attorneys, and derivative litigation attorneys, as well as fifty separate state regulators. Scholars and policy makers have increasingly questioned whether the benefits of this multienforcer approach are worth the costs, or […]

William Hubbard, Competitive Patent Law

Can U.S. patent law help American businesses compete in global markets? In early 2011, President Barack Obama argued that, to obtain economic prosperity, the United States must “out-innovate . . . the rest of the world,”1 and that patent reform is a “critical dimension[]”2 of this innovation agenda. Soon thereafter, Congress enacted the most sweeping […]

Christian Turner, State Action Problems

The state action doctrine is a mess. Explanations for why federal courts sometimes treat the private actions of private parties as public actions subject to the Constitution, as the Supreme Court did in Shelley v. Kraemer, are either vastly over-inclusive or fail to explain our law and values. A better approach is to understand the […]

Sapna Kumar, The Accidental Agency?

This Article presents a new model for examining the role of the Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit (Federal Circuit) with regard to patent law, positing that the Federal Circuit behaves like an agency and serves as the de facto administrator of the Patent Act. The Federal Circuit has traditionally engaged in a form […]

Hanah Metchis Volokh, Constitutional Authority Statements in Congress

“Congress has the power to enact this legislation pursuant to the following: This bill is enacted pursuant to the power granted to Congress under Article I, Section 8, Clause 2 of the United States Constitution.” “Congress has the power to enact this legislation pursuant to the following: The Katie Sepich Enhanced DNA Collection Act is […]

Janai S. Nelson, The First amendment, Equal Protection and Felon Disenfranchisement: A New Viewpoint

This Article engages the equality principles of the First Amendment and the Equal Protection Clause to reconsider the constitutionality of one of the last and most entrenched barriers to universal suffrage—felon disenfranchisement. A deeply racialized problem, felon disenfranchisement is additionally and independently a legislative judgment as to which citizen‘s ideas are worthy of inclusion in […]

Steven J. Cleveland, Resurrecting Deference to the Securities and Exchange Commission: Mark Cuban and Trading on Inside Information

By applying the Supreme Court‘s administrative law jurisprudence to the examination of the validity of Rule 10b5-2(b)(1)—a rule recently adopted by the Securities and Exchange Commission (Commission)—this Article fills a significant gap in the existing literature. To date, commentators have argued against the rule‘s validity by applying the Supreme Court‘s securities law jurisprudence without considering […]

David Haddock, Tonja Jacobi, Matthew Sag, League Structure & Stadium Rent Seeking—the Role of Antitrust Revisted

    Professional North American sporting teams receive enormous public funding for new and renovated stadiums after threatening to depart their hometowns, or by actually moving elsewhere. In contrast, English sporting teams neither receive much public money for such projects, nor move towns. This Article argues that no inherent cultural or political transatlantic variations cause […]

Lauren Rehm, A Proposal for Settling the Interpretation of Florida's Proposals for Settlement

Although created to encourage settlement, few rules have generated more collateral litigation than Florida’s proposals for settlement provisions. While Florida Statutes section 768.79 creates a substantive right to attorney’s fees, Florida Rule of Civil Procedure 1.442 provides a procedural enforcement mechanism. However, through its unprecedented application of strict construction to a rule of civil procedure, […]

Nicole Kuncl, Seeing Red: The Legal Backlash Against Red-Light Cameras in Florida

This Note will examine Florida’s Mark Wandall Traffic Safety Act, which authorizes the use of traffic infraction detectors (red-light cameras) to enforce traffic laws. Florida, like many other states, currently finds itself in the midst of a heated debate over the use of red-light cameras to issue traffic citations. Strong arguments can be made both […]

Derek W. Black, Civil Rights, Charter Schools, and Lessons to be Learned

Two major structural shifts have occurred in education reform in the past two decades: the decline of civil rights reforms and the rise of charter schools. Courts and policy makers have relegated traditional civil rights reforms that address segregation, poverty, disability, and language barriers to near irrelevance, while charter schools and policies supporting their creation […]

Ben Trachtenberg, Confronting Coventurers: Coconspirator Hearsay, Sir Walter Raleigh, and the Sixth Amendment Confrontation Clause

Using the example of a recent major terrorism prosecution, this Article addresses “coventurer hearsay” in the context of the ongoing Confrontation Clause debate concerning the United States Supreme Court’s decision in Crawford v. Washington. Courts have recently begun admitting hearsay evidence pursuant to a revisionist interpretation of the coconspirator statement exception to the hearsay rule. […]

George W. Dent, Jr., Corporate Governance: The Swedish Solution

The optimal allocation of authority among executives, directors, and shareholders of public companies has been debated as long as there have been public companies, and the issue now seems further from resolution than ever. In recent years Sweden has changed its corporate governance system by delegating the nomination of corporate directors (and thus, in effect, […]

Sergio J. Campos, Erie as a Choice of Enforcement Defaults

The Erie doctrine governs, among other things, when a federal court sitting in diversity jurisdiction may use a federal procedure that differs from the procedure a state court would use. Displacing the state procedure with the federal procedure (or not) may impact the substantive objectives of either state or federal law, but the current Erie […]

Gary Lawson, No History, No Certainty, No Legitimacy . . . No Problem: Originalism and the Limits of Legal Theory

Professor Martin H. Redish is on the warpath. Like General Sherman marching toward Atlanta (or Justin Tuck marching toward Tom Brady), Professor Redish, together with Matthew Arnould, lays waste to every constitutional theory that he encounters. Originalism, with its “belief that constitutional interpretation should be characterized exclusively by an effort to determine the Constitution’s meaning […]

Erwin Chemerinsky, The Elusive Quest for Value Neutral Judging: A Response to Redish and Arnould

In October 2012, the United States Supreme Court heard oral arguments in Fisher v. University of Texas at Austin and again faced the question of whether colleges and universities can consider race as a factor in admissions decisions to benefit minorities and enhance diversity. As was true when the Court last considered this issue in […]

Martin H. Redish & Matthew B. Arnould, Judicial Review, Constitutional Interpretation, and the Democratic Dilemma: Proposing a "Controlled Activism" Alternative

No problem generates more debate among constitutional scholars than how to approach constitutional interpretation. This Article critiques two representative theories (or families of theories), originalism and nontextualism, and offers a principled alternative, which we call “controlled activism.” By candidly acknowledging the judge’s creative role in constitutional lawmaking, controlled activism promises real limits on judicial discretion.

Amanda Harris, Surpassing Sentencing: The Controversial Next Step in Confrontation Clause Jurisprudence

After Crawford v. Washington opened the door to a Confrontation Clause debate in 2004, the United States Supreme Court has consistently confronted confrontation issues arising out of the Crawford interpretation. One issue that the Supreme Court has not yet tackled is whether the Confrontation Clause applies during non-capital and capital sentencing. While many states and […]

Stuart R. Cohn, The New Crowdfunding Registration Exemption: Good Idea, Bad Execution

Title III of the JOBS Act, signed by President Obama on April 5, 2012, sets forth a new exemption from federal and state securities registration for so-called “crowdfunding” promotions. Crowdfunding is an increasingly popular form of raising capital through broad-based internet solicitation of donors. Many promotions simply seek charitable or other donations. But the lure […]

Scott G. Hawkins, Perspective on Judicial Merit Retention in Florida

This November, voters will decide whether to retain in office three justices of the Florida Supreme Court and fifteen judges of the district courts of appeal. This Essay explains the merit retention process and puts that process in historical context. It analyzes the challenges voters face in making decisions about whether to retain appellate court […]

Justin R. Pidot, The Invisibility of Jurisdictional Procedure and Its Consequences

Modern standing doctrine has been the subject of substantial scholarly inquiry. Critics charge that it allows judges to resolve cases based on their own ideologies, favoring corporations over individuals and those who harm over those harmed. The doctrine likewise disserves social justice, preventing adjudication of indisputably meritorious claims. Yet the focus on the substance of […]

Chad Flanders, Election Law Behind a Veil of Ignorance

Election law struggles with the question of neutrality, not only with its possibility—can election rules truly be neutral between parties?—but also with its definition. What does it mean for election laws to be ―neutral‖? This Article examines one form of election law neutrality, found in what it terms ―veil of ignorance rules.‖ Such rules are […]

Jacqueline D. Lipton, Law of the Intermediated Information Exchange

When Wikipedia, Google, and other online service providers staged a ―blackout protest‖ against the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) in January 2012, their actions inadvertently emphasized a fundamental truth that is often missed about the nature of cyberlaw. In attempts to address what is unique about the field, commentators have failed to appreciate that the […]

Michael Risch, America's First Patents

Courts and commentators vigorously debate early American patent history because of a spotty documentary record. To fill these gaps, scholars have examined the adoption of the Intellectual Property Clause of the Constitution, correspondence, dictionaries, and British and colonial case law. But there is one largely ignored body of information—the content of early patents themselves. While […]

Gerard N. Magliocca, The Gold Clause Cases and Constitutional Necessity

This Article presents a case study of how constitutional actors respond when the rule of law and necessity are sharply at odds and provides some background on Section Four of the Fourteenth Amendment. In 1935, the Supreme Court heard constitutional challenges to the abrogation of “gold clauses” in contracts and Treasury bonds. Gold clauses guaranteed […]

Chad M. Oldfather, Joseph P. Bockhorst, Brian P. Dimmer, Triangulating Judicial Responsiveness: Automated Content Analysis, Judicial Opinions, and the Methodology of Legal Scholarship

The increasing availability of digital versions of court documents, coupled with increases in the power and sophistication of computational methods of textual analysis, promises to enable both the creation of new avenues of scholarly inquiry and the refinement of old ones. This Article advances that project in three respects. First, it examines the potential for […]

Benjamin H. Barton, An Empirical Study of Supreme Court Justice Pre-Appointment Experience

This Article compares the years of experience that preceded each Justice‘s appointment to the United States Supreme Court. This Article seeks to demonstrate that the background experiences of the Roberts Court Justices are quite different from those of earlier Supreme Court Justices and to persuade the reader that this is harmful. To determine how the […]

Giselle Gutierrez, Hurd v. Espinoza: "Third Party Confidential Information" in Delaware Corporate Litigation

On June 24, 2010, celebrity attorney Gloria Allred sent a letter (the Allred Letter) to Mark Hurd, then the Chief Executive Officer of Hewlett-Packard Company (HP), claiming that Hurd sexually harassed her client Jodie Fisher, a former HP contractor. In addition to being marked “CONFIDENTIAL TO BE OPENED BY ADDRESSEE ONLY,” the letter included a […]

Lauren Millcarek, Eighteenth Century Law, Twenty-First Century Problems: Jones, GPS Tracking, and the Future of Privacy

In 2004, law enforcement officers began investigating Antoine Jones, a Washington, D.C. nightclub owner, for suspected drug trafficking. After gathering information through stakeouts, cameras, and a wiretap on Jones’ phone, the officers obtained a warrant to place a Global Positioning System (GPS) tracker on Jones’ wife’s car, which Jones possessed and used regularly. However, the […]

Fay O. Pappas, Wrong Means to an Unjust End? The Eleventh Circuit's Decision in First Vagabonds Church of God

In 2005, Orlando Food Not Bombs (OFNB), a conglomeration of political activists who advocate a “right to food,” began conducting “food-sharing events” once a week in downtown Orlando, Florida. OFNB distributed free vegan meals in Lake Eola Park to the hungry and homeless. Soon, however, the City began receiving complaints related to the number of […]

Peter K. Yu, Intellectual Property and Human Rights in the Nonmultilateral Era

In the past decade, countries have actively established bilateral, plurilateral, and regional trade and investment agreements, such as the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement and the Trans-Pacific Partnership Agreement. Although commentators have examined the conflict and tension between intellectual property and human rights in the past, the arrival of these agreements has ushered in a new era […]

Richard Esenberg, A Modest Proposal for Human Limitations on Cyberdiscovery

Many lawyers, whether by training or disposition, have come to regard discovery as a process in which no stone is to be left unturned. With the advent of electronically stored information, the stones have become too numerous to account. Discovery rules that seek the perfection of preserving and producing all potentially pertinent information have become […]

E. Donald Elliott, Twombly in Context: Why Federal Rule of Civil Procedure 4(B) Is Unconstitutional

Rule 4(b) of the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure delegates to private parties state authority to compel a person to appear and answer civil charges in court without any preliminary state review or screening for reasonableness. This is argued to be unconstitutional as a unreasonable seizure of the person, a deprivation of private property without […]

Ronald J. Allen, How to Think About Errors, Costs, and Their Allocation

There is an ongoing, robust debate about the structure of litigation, and in particular, about access to the courts. For a considerable period of time, the mantra that the courts should be readily available to all the people so that people may present claims that their rights have been violated has dominated academic discourse and […]

Martin H. Redish, Pleading, Discovery, and the Federal Rules: Exploring the Foundation of Modern Procedure

This Article provides a foundational structural analysis underlying the federal procedural system and explores the implications of that normative framework for the proper shaping of the federal system’s pleading and discovery rules. By analyzing and synthesizing the different elements of this underlying “litigation matrix,” the Article concludes that the Supreme Court’s “plausibility” test for pleading […]

R. George Wright, Electoral Lies and the Broader Problems of Strict Scrutiny

States often attempt to regulate political speech in the form of deliberate lies related to ballot initiatives, referenda, candidates, or their political positions. Some courts focus on the various harms of electoral lies, while others focus more on the risks of bias and partisan abuse involved in such speech regulations; the cases are in disarray. […]

Meghan J. Ryan, The Missing Jury: The Neglected Role of Juries in Eighth Amendment Punishments Clause Determinations

A recent study of death penalty cases has revealed that judges, who are ordinarily thought of as the guardians of criminal defendants‘ constitutional rights, often impose harsher punishments than jurors. This may be unsettling in its own right, but it is especially concerning when one considers that judges are the individuals charged with determining whether […]

Jacy Owens, A Progressive Response: Judicial Delegation of Authority to Federal Probation Officers

Federal probation officers supervise millions of offenders who must each comply with a multitude of probation conditions. These officers need enough flexibility to deal with the evolving needs of each offender, without having to clog the court system with repeated requests for modifications. Yet federal courts differ in the amount of discretionary authority they grant […]

Abigail R. Moncrieff, Safeguarding the Safeguards: The ACA Litigation and the Extension of Indirect Protection to Nonfundamental Liberties

As the lawsuits challenging the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (ACA) have evolved, one feature of the litigation has proven especially rankling to the legal academy: the courts‘ incorporation of substantive libertarian concerns into their structural federalism analyses. The breadth and depth of scholarly criticism is surprising, especially given that judges frequently choose indirect […]

Andrew C.W. Lund, Compensation as Signaling

Why do scholars and activists pay such close attention to how executive compensation is structured? Appropriate pay structure has traditionally been seen as a mechanism for reducing agency costs imposed on public firms by managers. But as that view has lost explanatory power in recent years, the intense focus on executive pay structure has become […]

Jocelyn Ho, Bullied to Death: Cyberbullying and Student Online Speech Rights

In the age of online social networking, photo and video sharing, blogs, text messaging, and other forms of communication technology, bullying among teenagers has reached a whole new level. It has transcended the traditional schoolyard context and crossed into cyberspace, leaving victims of bullying more vulnerable than ever. Recent headline-grabbing suicides, such as the cyberbullying-related […]

Jeremy A. Blumenthal, Expert Paternalism

Scholars and policymakers from multiple disciplines have long debated whether and when paternalistic intervention might be appropriate to guide ordinary decision makers choices and behaviors. Recently, the use of empirical data has begun to inform this debate. Some such research has demonstrated that individuals‘ susceptibility to cognitive and emotional biases leads to nonoptimal decisions in […]

William W. Berry III, Practicing Proportionality

At the heart of the Eighth Amendment‘s Cruel and Unusual Punishments Clause are two concepts of proportionality—absolute and relative. Absolute proportionality (“cruel”) asks whether the sentence is commensurate with the state‘s purposes of punishment. Relative proportionality (?unusual?), by contrast, asks whether the sentence is relatively similar to the outcomes of similar cases. Absolute proportionality sets […]

Rebecca E. Zietlow, Popular Originalism? The Tea Party Movement and Constitutional Theory

The U.S. Constitution is currently the subject of a heated political debate. Tea Party activists have invoked the Constitution as the foundation of their conservative political philosophy. These activists are engaged in “popular originalism,” using popular constitutionalism—constitutional interpretation outside of the courts—to invoke originalism as interpretive method. The Tea Party movement thus provides an excellent […]

Elizabeth R. Sheyn, Toward a Specific Intent Requirement in White Collar Crime Statutes: How the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act of 2010 Sheds Light on the “General Intent Revolution”

The recent passage of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act of 2010, as amended by the Health Care and Education Reconciliation Act of 2010 (collectively, ACA), has altered the landscape of health care and health insurance. However, it has also served to highlight the revolution in the intent requirement for white collar crimes. In […]

Charles W. “Rocky” Rhodes, Nineteenth Century Personal Jurisdiction Doctrine in a Twenty-First Century World

The initial twenty-first century personal jurisdiction decisions from the Supreme Court reveal that personal jurisdiction doctrine has not changed much since the nineteenth century. The nomenclature has changed, realism has replaced formalism, some fictions purportedly have been discarded, and the adjudicatory reach of courts has somewhat expanded, but the doctrine retains the same conceptual core—the […]

Nancy Leong, The Open Road and the Traffic Stop: Narratives and Counter-Narratives of the American Dream

American culture is steeped in the mythology of the open road. In our collective imagination, the road represents freedom, escape, friendship, romance, and above all, the possibility for a better life. But our shared dream of the open road comes to a halt in the mundane reality of the traffic stop—a judicially authorized policing procedure […]

Kelly G. Dunberg, Just What the Doctor Ordered? How the Patient Safety and Quality Improvement Act May Cure Florida’s Patients’ Right to Know About Adverse Medical Incidents (Amendment 7)

This Note addresses the impact of Florida’s Patients’ Right to Know About Adverse Medical Incidents (commonly known as Amendment 7) on the peer review process and the quality of healthcare in Florida. Enacted in 2004 as an amendment to the Florida Constitution, Amendment 7 provides citizens access to records and reports of past adverse medical […]

R. Michael Cassidy & Gregory I. Massing, The Model Penal Code’s Wrong Turn: Renunciation as a Defense to Criminal Conspiracy

While the Model Penal Code was certainly one of the most influential developments in criminal law in the past century, the American Law Institute (ALI) took a seriously wrong turn by recognizing “renunciation” as a defense to the crime of conspiracy. Under the Model Penal Code formulation, a member of a conspiracy who later disavows […]

Allison Fischman, Case Comment: Preserving Legal Avenues For Climate Justice In Florida Post-American Electric Power

64 Fla. L. Rev. 295 (2012)|

Victor B. Flatt, Essay: Adapting Laws For A Changing World: A Systemic Approach To Climate Change Adaptation

64 Fla. L. Rev. 269 (2012)|

Sarah Krakoff, Planetarian Identity Formation And The Relocalization Of Environmental Law

64 Fla. L. Rev. 1 (2011)| | Local food, local work, local energy production-all are hallmarks of a resurgence of localism throughout contemporary environmental thought and action. The renaissance of localism might be seen as a retreat from the world’s global environmental problems. This Article maintains, however, that some forms of localism are actually expressions, […]

David Markell and J.B. Ruhl, An Empirical Assessment of Climate Change In The Courts: A New Jurisprudence Or Business As Usual?

64 Fla. L. Rev. 15 (2012)| | | With the demise of climate legislation in Congress, and the Supreme Court’s rejection of climate-related lawsuits brought under federal common law, rapt attention has turned to the Environmental Protection Agency’s (EPA) efforts to bring greenhouse gases into the regulatory fold. Certainly, as the works in this special […]

Robert W. Adler, Balancing Compassion And Risk In Climate Adaptation: U.S. Water, Drought, And Agricultural Law

64 Fla. L. Rev. 201 (2012)|

Dave Owen, Critical Habitat And The Challenge Of Regulating Small Harms

64 Fla. L. Rev. 141 (2012)|

Lisa Heinzerling, Introduction: Climate Change at EPA

64 Fla. L. Rev. 1 (2012)| With the demise of climate legislation in Congress, and the Supreme Court’s rejection of climate-related lawsuits brought under federal common law, rapt attention has turned to the Environmental Protection Agency’s (EPA) efforts to bring greenhouse gases into the regulatory fold. Certainly, as the works in this special issue of […]

Caycee Hampton, Confirmation of a Catch-22: Glik V. Cunniffe and the Paradox of Citizen Recording

63 Fla. L. Rev. 1549 (2011)| | | | On October 1, 2007, Simon Glik observed several police officers arresting a young man on the Boston Common. Concerned that the officers were employing excessive force, Glik began to record the arrest with his cell phone. After successfully arresting the young man, an officer asked Glik […]

Kathryn A. Kimball, Losing our Soul: Judicial Discretion in Sentencing Child Pornography Offenders

63 Fla. L. Rev. 1515 (2011)| | | | Child pornography offenders capitalize on the vulnerability of children and find pleasure in their victims’ humiliation. In United States v. Irey, the defendant sadistically raped, sodomized, and tortured more than fifty prepubescent girls and then broadcast this abuse across the Internet; yet the court characterized Irey […]

Jordan E. Pratt, An Open and Shut Case: Why (and How) The Eleventh Circuit Should Restrain the Government's Forum Closure Power

63 Fla. L. Rev. 1487 (2011)| | | |||| The Supreme Court has made it clear that when the government opens a nontraditional public forum, it retains the power to shut down the forum subsequently. But the Court has not specifically addressed whether this forum closure power knows any constitutional limitations. Several circuits, including the […]

Courtney Gaughan, Some More Watters, Please: The Dodd-Frank Act's New Preemption Standards Lighten Consumers' Wallets

63 Fla. L. Rev. 1459 (2011)| | | | The Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act precipitates innumerable changes that will both directly and indirectly shape the future of the financial industry. This Note addresses two important subsets of the Dodd-Frank Act- Section 1044 and Section 1046-which vitiate the authority of federally chartered […]

Scott A. Moss, The Overhyped Path from Tinker to Morse: How the Student Speech Cases Show the Limits of Supreme Court Decisions-for The Law and for the Litigants

63 Fla. L. Rev. 1407 (2011)| | | | Each of the Supreme Court’s high school student speech cases reflected the social angst of its era. In 1965’s Tinker v. Des Moines Independent Community School District, three Iowa teens broke school rules to wear armbands protesting the Vietnam War. In 1983, amidst parental and political […]

Jeffrey Manns, Building Better Bailouts: The Case for a Long-Term Investment Approach

63 Fla. L. Rev. 1349 (2011)| | | | The Article seeks to fill a crucial gap in the Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act: the failure to create a framework for dealing with future financial bailouts. It argues that the federal government’s ad hoc, “break even” approach to the recent bailouts not […]

Richard A. Epstein, Dunwody Distinguished Lecture in Law: The Constitutional Paradox of the Durbin Amendment: How Monopolies are Offered Constitutional Protections Denied to Competitive Firms

63 Fla. L. Rev. 1307 (2011)| | | | The Durbin Amendment is the first of the major provisions of the Dodd-Frank Act to have been implemented-but only after it withstood a constitutional challenge on the basis of the Takings Clause in the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Eighth Circuit. Now that the Amendment […]

Steven L. Schwarcz, Compensating Market Value Losses: Rethinking the Theory of Damages in a Market Economy

63 Fla. L. Rev. 1053 (2011)| | | ARTICLE :: The BP Deepwater Horizon oil spill and the Toyota car recalls have highlighted an important legal anomaly that has been overlooked by scholars: judicial inconsistency and confusion in ruling whether to compensate for the loss in market value of wrongfully affected property. This Article seeks […]

Hari M. Osofsky, Multidimensional Governance and the BP Deepwater Horizon Oil Spill

63 Fla. L. Rev. 1077 (2011)| | | ARTICLE :: This Article explores the governance challenges posed by the BP Deepwater Horizon oil spill and proposes strategies for developing more inclusive, responsive institutions to help meet them. It begins by analyzing the incident through five core dimensions-vertical, horizontal, direction of hierarchy, cooperativeness, and public- private-to […]

Stewart E. Sterk and Kimberly J. Brunelle, Zoning Finality: Reconceptualizing Res Judicata Doctrine in Land Use Cases

63 Fla. L. Rev. 1139 (2011)| | | ARTICLE :: Zoning disputes provide many Americans with their only firsthand exposure to the workings of democratic government. Land use issues trigger participation because neighbors perceive the wrong kind of development as posing a double-barreled threat to the stability of the community in which they have chosen […]

Jonathan Witmer-Rich, Interrogation and the Roberts Court

63 Fla. L. Rev. 1189 (2011)| | | ARTICLE :: Through 2010, the Roberts Court decided five cases involving the rules for police interrogation under the Fifth and Sixth Amendments: Kansas v. Ventris; Montejo v. Louisiana; Florida v. Powell; Maryland v. Shatzer; and Berghuis v. Thompkins. This Article argues that these decisions show the Roberts […]

Benjamin J. Steinberg and Dwayne Antonio Robinson, Making BP's Blood Curd-Le: Duty, Economic Loss, and the Potential Cardozian Nightmare after Curd v. Mosaic Fertilizer

63 Fla. L. Rev. 1245 (2011)| | | ARTICLE :: The traditional economic loss rule precludes plaintiffs-such as those affected by the BP Deepwater Horizon oil spill-from recovering losses not resulting from damage to person or property. Most states have applied the rule to various circumstances and have carved out several exceptions over time, including […]

Jacob D. Moore, The Forgotten Victim in the Human Gene Patenting Debate: Pharmaceutical Companies

63 Fla. L. Rev. 1277 (2011)| | | NOTE :: Scientific innovation is crucial to the prosperity, security, and health of a nation. During the founding years of the United States, political leaders realized the need for such innovation and created the patent law system 2 as a means of protecting American citizens. The major […]

2011 Law Review Candidates

Please congratulate the following students on receiving an invitation to become a 2011 Florida Law Review Candidate: Cem Akleman Olga Balderas Laura Beard Camilla Cohen Frank Comparetto Paul D’Alessandro Daniel DiMatteo Hanna Edeback Bonnie Foster Kelly Gay Hayley Gerson Aaron Goldman Michael Hacker Amanda Harris Sara Hoffman Megan Kelberman Lance D. King Nicole Kuncl Robin […]

Frances H. Foster, Should Pets Inherit?

63 Fla. L. Rev. 801 (2011)|  | | ARTICLE :: On August 20, 2007, billionaire hotelier Leona Helmsley died, survived by her brother, four grandchildren, twelve great-grandchildren, and her beloved companion of eight years, a white Maltese dog named Trouble. One week later came news that shocked the world. Helmsley left $12 million to Trouble.

Shannon Weeks McCormack, Too Close to Home: Limiting the Organizations Subsidized by the Charitable Deduction to Those in Economic Need

63 Fla. L. Rev. 857 (2011)|  | | ARTICLE :: The charitable deduction allows taxpayers to deduct amounts donated to organizations pursuing statutorily designated purposes from their otherwise taxable income. By lowering the after-tax cost of giving and encouraging taxpayers to donate more than they otherwise would, the charitable deduction subsidizes a broad variety of organizations. […]

Kit Johnson, The Wonderful World of Disney Visas

63 Fla. L. Rev. 915 (2011)|  | | ARTICLE :: International workers play an important role in perpetuating the carefully crafted fantasy that to visit the Walt Disney World Resort in Orlando, Florida is to be transported to far-off destinations around the globe. This Article examines how Disney has filled its need for these workers in […]

Kimon Korres, Bankrupting Bankruptcy: Circumventing Chapter 11 Protections Through Manipulation of the Business Justification Standard in § 363 Asset Sales, and a Refined Standard to Safeguard Against Abuse

63 Fla. L. Rev. 959 (2011)|  | | NOTE :: Of the twenty largest public company bankruptcy filings from 1980 to the present, seventeen have taken place since 2001, and ten of those seventeen were filed between March of 2007 and August of 2009. One such example is In re Chrysler LLC, in which Chrysler, on […]

R. Benjamin Lingle, Post-Kelo Eminent Domain Reform: A Double-Edged Sword for Historic Preservation

63 Fla. L. Rev. 985 (2011)|  | | NOTE :: The preservation of historic structures provides communities across the nation with both a source of pride in our national history and a window through which to view that history. Governments’ powers of eminent domain have long served as a tool for historic preservation; however, eminent domain […]

Heather Reynolds, Irreconcilable Regulations: Why the Sun Has Set on the Cuban Adjustment Act in Florida

63 Fla. L. Rev. 1013 (2011)|  | | NOTE :: Just past midnight, four Cubans walked off the beach in the dark and began to wade through warm waves out into the Florida Straits. They walked nearly a mile in waist-high water, carrying all of their possessions above their heads. They knew to stop when they […]

Lauren A. Kirkpatrick, Treading on Sacred Ground: Denying the Appointment of a Testator's Nominated Personal Representative

63 Fla. L. Rev. 1041 (2011)|  | | PDF CASE COMMENT, Schleider v. Estate of Schleider, 770 So. 2d 1252 (Fla. 4th DCA 2000) :: Muriel’s mother had just died. She and her sister, Orit, had been fighting for years during their parents’ guardianship. Now Orit was bringing Muriel to court over who would act as […]

Third Circuit Court of Appeals Cites Professor Lee Goldman's April 2011 Article, Student Speech and the First Amendment: A Comprehensive Approach

On June 13, 2011, the United States Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit handed down its opinion  in the case of J.S. v. Blue Mountain School District.  The en banc court held, inter alia, that suspending student J.S. for creating a MySpace profile mocking her middle school principal violated J.S.’s First Amendment free speech rights. […]

Nathan A. Frazier, Amending for Justice's Sake: Codified Disclosure Rule Needed to Provide Guidance to Prosecutor's Duty to Disclose

63 Fla. L. Rev. 771 (2011)| | | | ABSTRACT :: “I wouldn’t wish what I am going through on anyone,” Senator Ted Stevens commented after losing his seat in the United States Senate on November 18, 2008. Senator Stevens lost the race largely because a criminal conviction damaged his reputation. After Senator Stevens endured […]

Wendy F. Hensel & Leslie E. Wolf, Playing God: The Legality of Plans Denying Scarce Resources to People with Disabilities in Public Health Emergencies

63 Fla. L. Rev. 719 (2011)| | | | ABSTRACT :: Public health emergencies can arise in a number of different ways. They can follow a natural disaster, such as Hurricane Katrina, the 2004 tsunami, and the recent earthquakes in Haiti and Chile. They may be man-made, such as the September 11 attacks and the […]

David Marcus, Flawed but Noble: Desegregation Litigation and its Implications for the Modern Class Action

63 Fla. L. Rev. 657 (2011)| | | | INTRODUCTION :: From the perspective of the present day, Rule 23 of the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure contains a difficult puzzle. After a court certifies a class pursuant to Rule 23(b)(3) in a money damages case, absent class members must receive notice and have a […]

Robert A. Garda, Jr., The White Interest in School Integration

63 Fla. L. Rev. 599 (2011)| | | | ABSTRACT :: Discussions concerning desegregation, affirmative action, and voluntary integration focus primarily, if not exclusively, on whether such policies harm or benefit minorities. Scant attention is paid to the benefits whites receive in multiracial schools, despite white interests underpinning more than thirty years of Supreme Court […]