Category: Issue 1
Note
Affordable Renewables—Unjust and Unreasonable?
Grace Brosofsky
The Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC)—an independent agency tasked with ensuring “just and reasonable” energy rates—has begun to use energy market payment systems to prop up fossil fuels. FERC has issued orders that prevent renewables from competing with fossil fuels by forcing renewables to bid into energy markets at artificially high rates. FERC has argued…
Dec 2019
Note
Extending United States v. Mendoza: Why Defensive Nonmutual Issue Preclusion is Unavailable Against the Federal Government
Jake E. Goodman
Imagine a situation where the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) is looking to enforce the antifraud provision of the Securities Exchange Act of 1934 against two different companies, arising out of the same transaction. Now suppose the SEC sues Company A first. However, the court finds no violation based on the factual determinations of…
Dec 2019
Article
A Computational Analysis of Constitutional Polarization
David E. Pozen, Eric L. Talley & Julian Nyarko
This Article is the first to use computational methods to investigate the ideological and partisan structure of constitutional discourse outside the courts. We apply a range of machine-learning and text-analysis techniques to a newly available data set comprising all remarks made on the U.S. House and Senate floors from 1873 to 2016, as well as…
Dec 2019
Article
The Audiences of Statutes
David S. Louk
Although a maxim of statutory drafting is to identify the relevant audience and draft so that the audience can “get the message,” conventional theories of statutory interpretation often overlook important considerations about how statutes communicate and delegate to a diverse range of intended audiences. This Article argues that considerations of statutory audience and canons and…
Dec 2019
Article
Virtual Briefing at the Supreme Court
Jeffrey L. Fisher & Allison Orr Larsen
The open secret of Supreme Court advocacy in a digital era is that there is a new way to argue to the Justices. Today’s Supreme Court arguments are developed online: they are dissected and explored in blog posts, fleshed out in popular podcasts, and analyzed and re-analyzed by experts who do not represent the parties…
Dec 2019