Many scholars, some lower courts, and at least one Supreme Court justice support the idea that if a law contains secular exceptions, the Free Exercise Clause compels similar religious exemptions from the law. They argue, for instance, that if a police department with a no-beards policy allows exceptions for medical reasons, it must also allow those who wish to grow their beards for religious...
Restoring the Fifteenth Amendment: The Constitutional Right to an Undiluted Vote
In 1965, Congress enacted the Voting Rights Act (VRA) to enforce the Fifteenth Amendment of the U.S. Constitution. Specifically, Section 2 of the VRA, as originally adopted in 1965, closely tracked the language of the Fifteenth Amendment and prohibited voting practices that denied or abridged the right to vote on account of race or color. But in 1980, the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision in City of...
Risk Regulation, Extraterritoriality, and Domicile: The Constitutionalization of American Choice of Law, 1850–1940
This Article examines the developments leading to the U.S. Supreme Court’s decisions in the 1930s that legitimated the extraterritorial application of state law in civil litigation. Today, these decisions are thought of as having established the basic constitutional limitations on choice-of-law rulings by state courts. But they are better understood as the culmination of an historical process in...
Four Futures of Legal Automation
Simple legal jobs (such as document coding) are prime candidates for legal automation. More complex tasks cannot be routinized. So far, the debate on the likely scope and intensity of legal automation has focused on the degree to which legal tasks are simple or complex. Just as important to the legal profession, how-ever, is the degree of regulation or deregulation likely in the future...
National Security’s Broken Windows
This Article examines the federal government’s community engagement efforts with American Muslim communities as part of a larger infrastructure for policing radicalization and countering violent extremism (CVE). While the federal government presents community engagement as a softer alternative to policing, community engagement is integrated into a larger policing apparatus, making the reality far...
Interstitial Federalism
Spillover commons are common-pool resources that cross jurisdictional boundaries. Governing spillover commons poses unique and significant challenges. If jurisdictional boundaries are drawn too narrowly, jurisdictions can externalize costs to neighbors. If the jurisdictional boundaries are drawn too broadly, too many remote stakeholders unnecessarily increase transaction costs. The jurisdictional...
Bankruptcy Survival
Of the large, public companies that seek to remain in business through bankruptcy reorganization, only 70 percent succeed. The assets of the other 30 percent are absorbed into other businesses. Success is important both because it is efficient and because it preserves jobs, communities, supplier and customer relationships, and tax revenues. This Article reports the findings of the first...
A Preferable Way to Treat Preferential Treatment
This Comment advocates for a particular definition of “preferential treatment.” On April 22, 2014, the U.S. Supreme Court held that the State of Michigan’s constitutional amendment forbidding preferential treatment based on race or gender was consistent with the U.S. Constitution. The case was Schuette v. Coalition to Defend Affirmative Action. The amendment, known as Proposal 2, has effectively...