Category: Issue 3

Article

International Cybertorts: Expanding State Accountability in Cyberspace

Rebecca Crootof, Assistant Professor of Law, University of Richmond School of Law

States are not being held accountable for the vast majority of their harmful cyberoperations, largely because classifications created in physical space do not map well onto the cyber domain. Most injurious and invasive cyberoperations are not cybercrimes and do not constitute cyberwarfare, nor are states extending existing definitions of wrongful acts permitting countermeasures to cyberoperations…

Jul 2020

Note

The Partiality Norm: Systematic Deference in the Office of Legal Counsel

Adoree Kim

 

The Office of Legal Counsel within the Department of Justice counsels the president on the legality and constitutionality of proposed executive action. In the early 2000s, the OLC authorized the Bush administration’s torture of foreign combatants. Scholars have deemed this an act of excessive deference and an aberration, attesting that the OLC has since reformed….

Jul 2020

Note

Using Daubert to Evaluate Evidence-Based Sentencing

Charlotte Hopkinson

Jack and Jill went up the hill,to steal a pail of water,Both were caught and sentenced to jail,But Jack came out two years later. Why? Assume that both Jack and Jill’s cases are identical in facts, procedure, jury composition, and verdict. The only relevant difference is that Jack is a man and Jill is a…

Jul 2020

Article

The Central Claiming Renaissance

Andres Sawicki, Associate Professor, University of Miami School of Law

The Supreme Court has recently reinvigorated the law of patentable subject matter. But beneath the headlines proclaiming the return of limits to patent eligibility, a more profound shift has taken place: central claiming is reborn. The Court’s eligibility cases are significant outliers compared to today’s run-of-the-mill patent law because claim language plays little role in…

Jul 2020

Article

The Rights of Marriage: Obergefell, Din, and the Future of Constitutional Family Law

Kerry Abrams, Professor of Law, University of Virginia School of Law

In the summer of 2015 the United States Supreme Court handed down two groundbreaking constitutional family law decisions. One decision became famous overnight Obergefell v. Hodges declared that same-sex couples have the constitutional right to marry. The other, Kerry v. Din, went largely overlooked. That later case concerned not the right to marry but the…

Jul 2020

Article

Degrees of Deference: Applying vs. Adopting Another Sovereign’s Law

Kevin M. Clermont, Ziff Professor Law, Cornell University.

Familiar to all Federal Courts enthusiasts is the Erie distinction between federal actors’ obligatory application of state law and their voluntary adoption of state law as federal law. This Article’s thesis is that this significant distinction holds in all other situations where a sovereign employs another’s law: not only in the analogous reverse-Erie resolution of…

Jul 2020