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Popular discourse in the U.S. immigration debate often simply asserts that immigrants take jobs that native workers do not want. Though perhaps politically salient, such slogans overlook the complex interaction between employer preferences, immigration, and legal protections. Building on sociological research, this Comment explores the reality that many employers actually discriminate against U.S...

In the workplace, institutional context clearly affects the shape of constitutional rights. That is underscored by the U.S. Supreme Court’s recent decision in Garcetti v. Ceballos. In denying First Amendment protections to public employees when they speak in the course of doing their jobs, Garcetti gets it wrong; but the right answer to the Garcetti problem is not so obvious. This Article...

First Amendment doctrine is caught between two competing impulses. On the one hand, courts and scholars face what one might call the lure of acontextuality. They seek a set of rules by which First Amendment law can be understood as a purely, formally legal phenomenon, untainted by the brute contingencies of the actual world. On the other hand, their efforts to construct acontextual legal doctrine...

Since September 11, 2001, the Bush Administration has engaged in a host of controversial counterterrorism actions that threaten civil liberties and even the physical safety of those targeted: enemy combatant designations, extreme interrogation techniques, extraordinary renditions, secret overseas prisons, and warrantless domestic surveillance. To justify otherwise unlawful policies, President...

This Article looks at the relationship between constitutional doctrine and institutional context by considering two recent cases in which law schools—perhaps the American institution most personally familiar to the current U.S. Supreme Court—appeared before the Court as litigants. In Grutter v. Bollinger, the Supreme Court upheld a law school’s use of race-conscious affirmative action in its...

First Amendment free speech doctrine has been called “institutionally oblivious” for ignoring how different institutions present different legal questions. This Article analyzes a little-discussed phenomenon in the growing literature about institutional context in constitutional law. With certain institutions, the situation is not institutional obliviousness but the opposite: extreme...

This Article discusses a niche within a niche: Federalism considerations in theories of governmental takings of property. Several property and land use theorists have argued that larger-scale and smaller-scale legislative bodies should be treated differently in takings jurisprudence, because these differently scaled legislatures are likely to behave differently in dealing with individuals’...

Virtually all legal analysts believe that the tripartite framework from Justice Jackson’s Youngstown Sheet & Tube Co. v. Sawyer concurrence provides the correct framework for resolving contests between the U.S. Congress and the president when he acts pursuant to his commander-in-chief powers. This Article identifies a core assumption of the tripartite framework that, up to now, has not been...

As the rapid growth of immigrant communities in recent years transforms the demography of the United States, language diversity is emerging as a critical feature of this transformation. Poor and low-wage workers and their families in the aggressively globalized U.S. economy increasingly are Limited English Proficient, renewing longstanding debates about language diversity. And yet, despite a...

In 2001, in Buckhannon Board "&" Care Home, Inc. v. West Virginia Department of Health and Human Resources, the U.S. Supreme Court rejected the catalyst theory for recovery of attorney’s fees in civil rights enforcement actions. In doing so, the Court dismissed concerns that plaintiffs with meritorious but expensive claims would be discouraged from bringing suit, finding these concerns...

This Article explores the conceptions of responsible agency that informed legal analysis in nineteenth-century America. Standing behind the “reasonable man” famously drawn by Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., there was a second figure, which I call the “default legal person,” who personified mental attributes an individual needed to possess— at a minimum—in order to be deemed a legally accountable...

The history and practice of strict judicial scrutiny are widely misunderstood. Historically, the modern strict scrutiny formula did not emerge until the 1960s, when it took root simultaneously in a number of doctrinal areas. It did not clearly originate in race discrimination cases, as some have suggested, nor in free speech jurisprudence, as Justice Harlan once claimed. Although strict scrutiny...

The No Child Left Behind Act (the Act or NCLB) was enacted with the laudable aim of improving education through a system of accountability for schools and school districts. The Act provides for a system of escalating punishments for schools that fail to make adequate yearly progress toward the goal of full student proficiency in core subjects. One of the options that districts have for dealing...

Mediation offers enticing advantages over adversarial systems for the resolution of commercial disputes. Mediation preserves party autonomy by vesting process development and final-decision authority in the hands of the disputing parties. Despite these benefits, businesses underutilize mediation in international settings in part because of unpredictable enforcement practices predicated on varied...