Are county governments capable stewards of urban life? Across the country, millions of low-income households live in urban enclaves that rely on county government for their most proximate tier of general purpose local government. Material conditions in many of these neighborhoods are reminiscent of early twentieth-century rural poverty, while others are a dystopic vision of twenty-first century...
Rethinking Work and Citizenship
This Article advances a new approach to understanding the relationship between work and citizenship that comes out of research on African American and Latino immigrant low-wage workers. Media accounts typically portray African Americans and Latino immigrants as engaged in a pitched battle for jobs. Conventional wisdom suggests that the source of tension between these groups is labor competition...
The Return of Seditious Libel
Does the First Amendment protect a speaker’s interest in reaching a particular audience if the expressive activity occurs in a traditional public forum? The intuitive answer to this question might be “yes” or “usually,” but the federal courts have taken a decidedly different approach—at least when the intended speech is political protest and the intended audience includes high-ranking government...
Lawyers on Horseback? Thoughts on Judge Advocates and Civil-Military Relations
Uniformed lawyers—judge advocates—are uniquely situated at the heart of the American civil-military relationship. A recent article published in this law review argued that this placement has hindered military operations and disrupted civilian control over the military; left unaddressed, it will negatively affect the nation’s ability to fight and win future wars. This Essay takes issue with such...
Substantially Modifying the Visual Artists Rights Act: A Copyright Proposal for Interpreting the Act's Prejudicial Modification Clause
After years of petitioning by artists and art enthusiasts, the passage of the Visual Artists Rights Act of 1990 finally conferred upon U.S. artists certain moral rights long enjoyed by their European counterparts: the personal, noneconomic rights that artists hold in their works. Specifically, the Act forbids the destruction of works that are “of recognized stature” and modifications of works if...
Priceless? The Economic Costs of Credit Card Merchant Restraints
Merchants pay banks a fee on every credit card transaction. These credit card transactions cost American merchants an average of six times the total cost of cash transactions. The variation in fees among credit cards is also large, with some cards, such as rewards cards, costing merchants twice as much as others. The largest component of the fee merchants pay goes to finance rewards programs...
The Individuals With Disabilities Education Act: Why Considering Individuals One at a Time Creates Untenable Situations for Students and Educators
America’s public schools and teachers face a growing but currently unaddressed problem: How to comply with the law requiring teachers to meet the needs of all students with disabilities when those needs are incompatible. The Individuals with Disabilities Education Act requires schools to meet the individual needs of each student with disabilities. As the number of students with disabilities...
Owning the Center of the Earth
How far below the earth’s surface do property rights extend? The conventional wisdom is that a landowner holds title to everything between the surface and the center of the earth. This Article is the first legal scholarship to challenge the traditional view. It demonstrates that the “center of the earth” theory is poetic hyperbole, not binding law. Broadly speaking, the deeper the disputed...