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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

Note

A Site to Save a Life: The Case for Lobbying Congress to Restrict the Department of Justice from Targeting Supervised Drug Consumption Sites

Trevor Thompson

J.D., Cornell Law School 2022; B.A. Columbia University, 2018.

This Note will begin with an overview of fentanyl’s role in exacerbating the opioid crisis that has now claimed over a million American lives. It will then offer a partial explanation for why the crisis has gotten worse over the past few years: the Food and Drug Administration’s (“FDA”) refusal to initiate a prescription to…

Sep 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

Has the Alien Tort Statute Made a Difference?: A Historical, Empirical, and Normative Assessment

Christopher Ewell, J.D., Yale Law School (2022); Oona A. Hathaway, Gerard C. and Bernice Latrobe Smith Professor of Law, Yale Law School & Ellen Nohle, J.S.D. Candidate, Yale Law School (2023)

The Alien Tort Statute (ATS), which allows aliens to file civil suit in U.S. courts for violations of the law of nations, has been considered by many to be one of the most important legal tools for human rights litigation in the United States and perhaps even the world. The effectiveness of this tool, however,…

Oct 2022

Article

Antidiscrimination and Tax Exemption

Alex Zhang, Law Clerk, United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit. J.D., Yale Law School; Ph.D., Yale University

“The Supreme Court held, in Bob Jones University v. United States, that violations of fundamental public policy—including race discrimination in education—disqualify an entity for tax exemption. The holding of the case was broad, and its results cohered with the ideals of progressive society: the government ought not to subsidize discrimination, particularly of marginalized groups. But…

Oct 2022

Note

A Response-Dependent Perspective on the Theory of Insanity

Bruno Patrick Babij, B.A., Stanford University, 2018; M.Phil., University of Cambridge, 2019;
J.D., Cornell Law School, 2022

“This Note has three parts. The first introduces the idea of response-dependent responsibility in more detail. The second part argues that the traditional tests for insanity assume the view of responsibility the response-dependent account sought to correct and that the failure of these tests to provide satisfactory results follows from that assumption. The third part…

Oct 2022

Note

“F*ck School”? Reconceptualizing Student Speech Rights in the Digital Age

Hannah Middlebrooks, J.D., Cornell Law School, 2022; B.A. in English, French, and Women’s Studies, University of Georgia, 2017

“This Note will examine the impact that the nationwide shift to online distance learning due to the pandemic has had on K12 public school students’ First Amendment speech rights. I will begin with the four foundational Supreme Court cases about on-campus student speech. Next, I will briefly examine the federal circuit split regarding off-campus student…

Oct 2022

Article

Resurrecting Arbitrariness

Kathryn E. Miller, Clinical Assistant Professor of Law, Cardozo Law School. Staff Attorney, Equal Justice Initiative, 2012–2015

What allows judges to sentence a child to die in prison? For years, they did so without constitutional restriction. That all changed in 2012’s Miller v. Alabama, which banned mandatory sentences of life without parole for children convicted of homicide crimes. Miller held that this extreme sentence was constitutional only for the worst offenders—the “permanently…

Sep 2022