The case of Bush v. Gore stands out as the seminal decision that decided the disputed presidential election of 2000. For legal researchers, it was a herald of a different sort. With the citation in the per curiam opinion to an online newspaper article, Bush v. Gore fired the first salvo in the death of twentieth-century authority. While courts in the past relied on a select group of print...
Reconsidering RLUIPA: Do Religious Land Use Protections Really Benefit Religious Land Users?
The Religious Land Use and Institutionalized Persons Act of 2000 (RLUIPA), a federal statute enacted to safeguard religious freedoms from governmental interference, has been broadly and forcefully condemned by academics. In the decade since RLUIPA was passed, scholars have repeatedly denounced the statute as a tool that religious individuals and organizations may use to thwart municipal zoning...
Trademark Intersectionality
Even though most scholars and judges treat intellectual property law as a predominantly content-neutral phenomenon, trademark law contains a statutory provision, section 2(a), that provides for the cancellation of marks that are “disparaging,” “immoral,” or “scandalous.” This provision has raised intrinsically powerful constitutional concerns, which invariably affect two central metaphors that...
Broken Promises of Privacy: Responding to the Surprising Failure of Anonymization
Computer scientists have recently undermined our faith in the privacy-protecting power of anonymization, the name for techniques that protect the privacy of individuals in large databases by deleting information like names and social security numbers. These scientists have demonstrated that they can often “reidentify” or “deanonymize” individuals hidden in anonymized data with astonishing ease...
Multijurisdictionality and Federalism: Assessing San Remo Hotel’s Effect on Regulatory Takings
Regulatory takings plaintiffs will increasingly litigate their cases in state court after San Remo Hotel v. City of San Francisco. Previous U.S. Supreme Court precedent held that in order to ripen federal constitutional takings claims, plaintiffs had to first request just compensation from state courts. In San Remo Hotel, the Court held that the federal courts would not make an exception to the...
Ceremonial Deism and the Reasonable Religious Outsider
State invocations of God are common in the United States; indeed, the national motto is “In God We Trust.” Yet the Establishment Clause forbids the state from favoring some religions over others. Nonetheless, courts have found the national motto and other examples of what is termed ceremonial deism constitutional on the ground that the practices are longstanding, have de minimis and nonsectarian...
Picturing the Life Course of Procreative Choice
For a substantial part of women’s lives, regulating fertility is a primary project. This Article depicts the life course of women’s procreative choice through a series of complex visual representations of data derived from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth 1979 and the National Survey of Family Growth 2002. These graphic representations illustrate that preventing procreation, through a...
Setting National Coverage Standards for Health Plans Under Healthcare Reform
On March 23, 2010, President Barack Obama signed into law the Patient Protection Affordable Care Act (Affordable Care Act), the most far-reaching healthcare reform legislation since the establishment of the Medicare program in 1965. The Affordable Care Act directs the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) to establish a minimum level of health benefits, called the essential health...