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...
Interpreting Communities: Lawyering Across Language Difference
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...
The Procedural Attack on Civil Rights: The Empirical Reality of Buckhannon for the Private Attorney General
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...
The Default Legal Person
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...
Strict Judicial Scrutiny
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...
School Reconstitution Under No Child Left Behind: Why School Officials Should Think Twice
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...
Enforcing International Commercial Mediation Agreements as Arbital Awards Under the New York Convention
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...
Foreign Law and the U.S. Constitution: Delimiting the Range of Persuasive Authority
In recent years, hostility against judges who invoke foreign law in constitutional cases has escalated dramatically. Comparative approaches are presumed to present a significant threat to democratic accountability. In addition, judges have been faulted for failing to articulate objective criteria for selecting foreign authorities. The issue, however, is more nuanced than critics tend to...
The New Wal-Mart Effect: The Role of Private Contracting in Global Governance
This Article argues that networks of private contracts serve a public regulatory function in the global environmental arena. These networks fill the regulatory gaps created when global trade increases the exploitation of global commons resources and shifts production to exporting countries with lax environmental standards. As critics of trade liberalization have noted, public responses often are...
The Implied Warranty of Habitability, Foreseeability, and Landlord Liability for Third-Party Criminal Acts Against Tenants
Over the past several decades, two of the most significant developments in landlord-tenant law have been the establishment of the implied warranty of habitability and the advent of landlord tort liability for third-party criminal acts against tenants. For the most part, the implied warranty of habitability and landlord liability for third-party criminal acts were created by separate movements...
Limiting Constitutional Rights
The structure of constitutional rights in the United States and most other countries grants to legislatures a limited power to override rights when they conflict with certain public policy objectives. This limited override power contrasts with an absolute one, as enshrined in section 33 of the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms, and is also both general and noninterpretive in nature, unlike...
Just Until Payday
The growth of payday lending markets during the last fifteen years has been the focus of substantial regulatory attention both in the United States and abroad, producing a dizzying array of initiatives by federal and state policymakers. Those initiatives have had conflicting purposes—some have sought to remove barriers to entry while others have sought to impose limits on the business. As is...
The Rise and Fall of School Vouchers: A Story of Religion, Race, and Politics
Five years ago, in Zelman v. Simmons-Harris, the U.S. Supreme Court upheld the constitutionality of a Cleveland program that provided school vouchers to low-income parents seeking private school alternatives for their children. Zelman was heralded as of great historical significance when it was decided. Yet, in the years since Zelman, school vouchers have made little political headway—only three...
Autonomy and Informed Consent in Nontherapeutic Biomedical Research
The common law and federal regulations create overlapping legal regimes that require researchers to obtain the informed consent of most human subjects of medical research. The fast-growing field of biomedical research generally, and stem cell research in particular, gives rise to a range of unresolved and contested legal issues concerning the extent and implementation of the informed consent...