Cornell Law School Logo - white on transparent background

Category: Articles

Article

The Unique Appearance of Corruption in Personal Loan Repayments

John J. Martin

Research Assistant Professor of Law, University of Virginia School of Law.

Under U.S. campaign finance jurisprudence, electoral candidates have the right to self-fund their campaigns without limitation. The majority of self-funded candidates do so by issuing personal loans—i.e., personal money given to their campaign with the expectation of having it paid back. Many such candidates rely on outside contributions to help repay these personal loans, leaving…

Nov 2023

Article

The Constitutional Limits of Criminal Supervision

Eric S. Fish

Acting Professor of Law, University of California at Davis.

Nearly four million people are under criminal supervision in the United States. Most are on probation or parole. They can be sent to prison if a judge concludes that they violated the terms of their supervision. When that happens, there is no right to a jury trial. The violation only needs to be proven to…

Nov 2023

Article

The Independent Agency Myth

Neal Devins & David E. Lewis

Sandra Day O’Connor Professor of Law and Professor of Government, College of William and Mary & Rebecca Webb Wilson University Distinguished Professor, Vanderbilt University.

Republicans and Democrats are fighting the wrong fight over independent agencies. Republicans are wrong to see independent agencies as anathema to hierarchical presidential control of the administrative state. Democrats are likewise wrong to reflexively defend independent agency expertise and influence. Supreme Court Justices also need to break free from this trap; the ongoing struggle over…

Nov 2023

Article

Where is Statutory Law?

Jesse M. Cross

Associate Professor, University of South Carolina School of Law.

Textualism has become the ascendant method of statutory interpretation on the Court, and it is rapidly reshaping the entire judiciary. Yet we still do not understand the “text” in textualism. This is part of a broader failure in legislative studies: we lack a basic understanding of the texts that comprise our statutory law. As this…

Sep 2023

Article

Building Better Species: Assisted Evolution, Genetic Engineering, and the Endangered Species Act

John A. Erwin

Assistant Professor at Florida International University College of Law.

On December 10, 2020, Elizabeth Ann, a black-footed ferret, was born. This was a momentous occasion, as it was the first time a native species listed under the Endangered Species Act (“ESA”) had been cloned. This is the first major attempt to use biotechnology to aid in the conservation of an endangered species, but it…

Sep 2023

Article

Vigilante Federalism

Jon D. Michaels & David L. Noll

Professor of Law, UCLA School of law & Associate Dean for Faculty Research and Development and Professor of Law, Rutgers Law School.

In battles over abortion, religion, sexuality, gender, and race, state legislatures are mass producing a new weapon. From Texas’s S.B. 8 to book bans and a flurry of bills empowering parents to sue schools that acknowledge LGBTQ+ identities or implement anti-racist curricula, state legislatures are enacting laws that call on private parties—and sometimes only private…

Sep 2023

Article

Theorizing Corroboration

Maggie Wittlin

Associate Professor, Fordham Law School

A child makes an out-of-court statement accusing an adult of abuse. That statement is important proof, but it also presents serious reliability concerns. When deciding whether it is sufficiently reliable to be admitted, should a court consider whether the child’s statement is corroborated—whether, for example, there is medical evidence of abuse? More broadly, should courts…

Jul 2023

Article

International Law in the Boardroom

Kishanthi Parella,

Professor, Washing & Lee University School of Law.

Conventional wisdom expects that international law will proceed through a “state pathway” before regulating corporations: it binds national governments that then bind corporations. But recent corporate practices confound this story. American corporations complied with international laws even when the state pathway broke down. This unexpected compliance leads to three questions: How did corporations comply? Why…

Jul 2023

Article

The Private Enforcement of National Security

Maryam Jamshidi

Associate Professor of Law, University of Colorado Law School.

The private enforcement of public law is a central feature of the American administrative state. As various scholars have argued, the federal government depends upon private parties to enforce public laws through litigation in order to achieve the government’s regulatory objectives. This scholarship has, however, largely overlooked the phenomenon of private enforcement in the national…

Jul 2023

Article

Property in Wolves

Jack H.L. Whiteley
Teaching Fellow & Supervisory Attorney, Georgetown University Law Center; Associate Professor of Law Designate, University of Minnesota Law School.

From colonial times until the mid-twentieth century, governments paid bounties to extirpate wolves, mountain lions, and other ecologically important wild animals. Clearing the wild was a sustained legislative project. I argue that these bounty statutes have implications for the history and theory of property. The statutes, in their intent and effect, selected among land uses….

Jun 2023