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Courts typically apply their own, skeptical judgment to review free speech claims. But when the government is understood to be managing its own institutions (like schools, prisons, or the military) or its own programs (such as those providing abortion counseling or distributing arts grants), courts regularly abandon ordinary principles of First Amendment jurisprudence and defer to the judgments...

This Article explores the historical and present-day significance of proposals for copyright reform advanced in 1918 by the controversial American poet, Ezra Pound. These proposals have never been discussed by legal scholars and have received but scant attention from literary scholars. Yet, like William Wordsworth and Mark Twain, whose efforts to reform copyright law are much better known, Pound...

After decades of struggle with paper discovery rules in an age of electronic discovery, President George W. Bush signed Federal Rule of Evidence 502 into law on September 19, 2008. Rule 502 is aimed at reducing the costs associated with privilege review. More specifically, Rule 502 gives more judicial support for nonwaiver agreements, which are agreements between adversarial parties that preserve...

The Fair Housing Act was enacted in order to protect certain groups against discrimination in housing. The Act extends this protection to any “dwelling,” but its coverage is not well defined for nontraditional sleeping facilities such as homeless shelters, substance abuse treatment facilities, or tent cities. Courts have applied the Fair Housing Act to any residence—defined by one court as “a...

Bias crime statistics legislation does not require law enforcement agencies to collect data on the ages of bias crime perpetrators, and bias crime penalty enhancements do not distinguish between youth and adult offenders. As a result, little data exists on youth bias crime, and the consequences of applying bias crime penalty enhancements to adult and youth offenders are generally the same:...

This Article considers whether and how originalism promotes the Constitution’s democratic legitimacy, in theory and in practice. In the late twentieth century, critics of the Warren and Burger courts argued that judicial review lacks democratic authority when judges depart from the original understanding of those who ratified the Constitution. Originalism’s critics objected that giving past...

This Essay speculates about the substance and timing of likely decisions by lower courts and the Supreme Court in dealing with issues left open by District of Columbia v. Heller. It suggests that lower courts will not address those issues by examining original understandings regarding permissible gun regulations, but will instead apply to such regulations something like an intermediate standard...

How should state and federal constitutional rights to keep and bear arms be turned into workable constitutional doctrine? I argue that unitary tests such as “strict scrutiny,” “intermediate scrutiny,” “undue burden,” and the like don’t make sense here, just as they don’t fully describe the rules applied to most other constitutional rights. Rather, courts should separately consider four different...