Social media platforms claim to champion free speech, yet their relentless pursuit of maximal engagement undermines the very autonomy that free speech principles are designed to protect. This Comment argues that platforms’ engagement-seeking algorithms and addictive design features create conditions for what it terms “addictive speech”: a phenomenon in which users are manipulated into making...
De-Weaponizing Prison Transfers
Prison transfers have the power to destroy viable civil rights claims advanced by litigants who are incarcerated against prison officials. These prison transfers can be and have been employed as a litigation tactic to moot claims for relief and shield defendants from personal liability. Prison transfers also indirectly impact ongoing or potential litigation, making it harder for litigants who are...
Crypto Associations
Crypto associations operate the digital ledgers known as blockchains. They generally do not choose to organize as traditional legal entities governed by well-established fiduciary duties. Instead, they claim to have no central manager and rely on economic incentive to spur decentralized governance. In litigation, crypto associations have contended that they owe no contractual or other legal...
Reproductive Wrongful Convictions: The Making of "Unfit" Mothers
This Article draws a straight line from wrongful convictions of women in the past to criminal charges based on pregnancy and parenting behaviors today. Faulty forensic evidence and biased evidence relying on sex-based stereotypes have, in combination, been used to convict innocent women, particularly in situations where an accident or health event was misconstrued to be a criminal act. Seventy...
Antitrust's Fading Bright Line: In Defense of Per Se
This Comment confronts the mounting challenges of antitrust jurisprudence. Modern courts struggle to enforce the Sherman Act—an 1890 statute increasingly strained by the realities of contemporary markets. These difficulties are compounded by a shifting regulatory landscape: a Trump administration that champions free-market ideals, legislation aimed at curbing corporate dominance, and a judiciary...
Republicanism, Reconstruction, and Federalism: Article IV's Guarantee of a Republican Form of Government as a Forgotten Source of Congressional Power
In recent years, the Supreme Court of the United States has expressed profound skepticism of congressional action that risks intruding upon the operation of state governments. Simultaneously, the Court has taken a dim view of federal efforts to protect the right to vote. Th is Comment argues that both doctrinal shift s are in tension with the Constitution’s requirement that the federal government...
The War on Immigrants
Resurgent rhetoric equating border crossing with invasion and migrants with criminality has fueled a new wave of state criminal-immigration legislation. Although scholars have extensively critiqued crimmigration—the long-running fusion of immigration enforcement and criminal law—this Article identifies a distinct escalation. Invoking dehumanizing notions of “illegality,” states are directly...
The Legitimacy of Institutional Reform Litigation
Institutional reform litigation (IRL) includes lawsuits brought to reform dysfunctional government bureaucracies. These cases attempt to improve prison conditions, the operation of child welfare systems, the provision of indigent defense, and other policy regimes whose incompetent administrations inflict systemic harm on groups of vulnerable people. IRL originated in school desegregation...
"Smoke and Mirrors": Disingenuous Litigation and Article III's Imminent Injury Problem
Article III standing is supposed to shut the courthouse doors to ideologically motivated plaintiff s with no personal stake in their litigation and open its doors to good-faith plaintiff s with a real risk of future injury—but the doctrine sometimes does the opposite. Th at malfunction is due to three inconsistencies in standing’s imminent injury requirement: (1) courts make erratic evidentiary...
Rethinking Lyng: Applying the Equal Liberty Approach to Sacred Sites
The United States oft en styles itself a haven for the freedom of religion and equal justice. In spite of these lofty ideals, U.S. courts oft en apply the Free Exercise Clause of the First Amendment unevenly, protecting Old World religions but not Native American religions in the context of sacred sites. These issues recently took center stage in Apache Stronghold v. United States, but the case...
Suppressing Constitutional Law: Qualified Immunity and Non-Precedential Opinions
Federal appellate courts label most opinions as “non-precedent.” The label is supposed to have no doctrinal impact. But in the context of qualified immunity, the non-precedential label dramatically impacts doctrine. Th is Article first examines the tension between qualified immunity doctrine and core common law values of predictability, consistency, and perceived integrity of the judicial process...
The Specter of Jury Nullification
Attention to the trial of Luigi Mangione has renewed debate about nullification—the jury’s inviolate power to acquit a defendant contrary to the evidence presented. Jury nullification proponents hold that it is a mechanism of last resort for refusing to apply laws that conflict with the public conscience. Opponents, by contrast, argue that nullification undermines the law by diminishing its...
Regulating Government Consultants: McKinsey and Conflicts of Interest
The opioid epidemic has killed hundreds of thousands of people and decimated many communities. Investigative reporters and litigation have uncovered that the consulting firm McKinsey & Company drove prescription opioid use through the advice that it gave to Purdue Pharma. To add insult to injury, while McKinsey was consulting for Purdue, McKinsey was also working as a government contractor...
The Three-Body Problem
In most circumstances, when constitutionally protected autonomy rights are at issue, the law balances the individual’s constitutional right of control against the countervailing power of the state. How these two competing claims to control are resolved can be highly contested, but the task of balancing one against the other is a coherent inquiry well captured in constitutional doctrine. Early...
