When college coaches face accusations that they violated NCAA rules, their careers can be at stake. It may be in coaches’ best interests for their peers to determine the fate of these allegations, as fellow coaches likely appreciate the intricacies and pressures that accompany today’s highly commercialized college athletics. Thus, it may hearten coaches facing allegations of NCAA rules violations that the NCAA advertises its process as peer reviewed. In reality, however...
The governing boards of nonprofit organizations, and particularly of nonprofits that serve low income and other vulnerable populations, fail to adequately include the populations that they serve. At least this is the common understanding among people familiar with these boards. Professor Atinuke Adediran not only confirms the existence of this problem but clarifies it in four important ways. Professor Adediran also proposes concrete steps to address it; although, the clarity she has brought to the problem raises the question of whether she could have been bolder in her proposed solutions.
Thinking Globally, Acting Locally looks anew at why some cities and other subnational jurisdictions are seeking to limit climate change, a question that has attracted the interest of legal scholars, political scientists, and others since the 2000s. The starting premise for this literature is that subnational actions to reduce greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions are puzzling because these policies may impose costly obligations on local actors that mostly benefit people elsewhere.
In U.S. Fantasy Sports Law: Fifteen Years after UIGEA, Marc Edelman, John T. Holden, and Adam Scott Wandt comprehensively recount the eventful decade-and-a-half overlap between fantasy sports and the Unlawful Internet Gambling Enforcement Act (“UIGEA”). But the authors do not stop there. Edelman, Holden, and Wandt also include a detailed examination of several forward-looking cybersecurity concerns—consumer security, anti-money laundering, and automated bots—that emanate from fantasy sports. Further, the authors pinpoint recent Internal Revenue Service (“IRS”) scrutiny of the industry and the potentially “deleterious effect” on smaller companies if the IRS treats certain fantasy sports companies like traditional sports betting operators. There is one recent development Edelman, Holden, and Wandt do not discuss, however.
Over half a decade ago, law professor Cynthia Lee offered an intriguing argument in an article titled Race, Policing, and Lethal Force: Remedying Shooter Bias with Martial Arts Training. In short, Professor Lee argued that if law enforcement had martial arts training, they would be less likely to incorrectly assume that Black suspects are armed and shoot them. Since the publication of her article, police killings of unarmed and nonthreatening Blacks has persisted resulting in a national outcry. In this essay, I revisit Professor Lee’s argument in a more nuanced manner.
We need some new intellectual property stories. By stories, I don’t mean entertaining fictions. I mean instead accounts or explanations that make sense of the world as it is lived by everyday people. Most of our relevant intellectual property laws were forged in the mid-twentieth century and have failed to keep pace with the transformations in creative and innovative practices of the twenty-first. Being out-of-sync or failing to recognize broader existing stakeholders means laws are poorly aligned with on-the-ground realities and are out-of-touch with values and interests of the people laws serve.
In the debate surrounding whether the District of Columbia should become our nation’s 51st state, understanding the relevant constitutional provisions implicated is key, and there are at least three: (1) the Twenty-Third Amendment, (2) Article I, section 8, clause 17 (the District Clause), and (3) Article IV, section 3 (the Admissions Clause). More importantly, these provisions shed light on whether Congress has the power to radically transform both the size and status of the District of Columbia by simple legislation. In short, it does not...
In 1971, Lake Erie was so polluted that Theodor S. Geisel, a.k.a. Dr. Suess, referenced the lake to convey the toxic consequences of resource exploitation to readers of his children’s book, The Lorax. The Lorax tells the story of an avaricious entrepreneur called the Once-ler who sets up an industrial operation in a Suessian environment that involves toppling Truffula trees...
Using DNA comparisons, the Innocence Project has shown that people are occasionally convicted based on flawed forensic science evidence. A National Academy of Sciences (NAS) report determined many areas of forensic science lack sufficient scientific foundation...
These are extraordinary times for antitrust law and enforcement policy. One would not be mistaken in thinking that antitrust is having more of a “moment” than at another time in recent decades. Government antitrust investigations of, and lawsuits against, Google, Facebook, Amazon, and Apple in the United States and Europe are proliferating. A major private antitrust lawsuit against Apple was recently tried...
This short essay addresses the following question: what test should courts use to identify actions by the federal government’s executive branch that are unlawfully legislative in nature? I will attempt to answer that question from an originalist perspective. And so I will begin by explaining the problem from an originalist perspective. Most originalists, I think, would agree with the following three propositions...
“The Shower’s Return” takes a close look at the litigation leading up to the U.S. Supreme Court’s landmark decision in Bostock v. Clayton County, Georgia, holding that lesbian women, gay men, and trans people are legally entitled to the sex discrimination protections afforded by Title VII of the 1964 Civil Rights Act.
In January 2003, Gerald Lynn Bostock was hired by Clayton County Georgia as a Child Welfare Services Coordinator for the Juvenile Court of Clayton County. Over the next ten years he received numerous commendations and was, in every respect, a model employee. In January 2013, Gerald joined a local...
Local public health measures were flashpoints from the very beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic. Some local governments passed restrictions that were more protective of public health than their respective state governments. And some state governments took the drastic step of prohibiting local public health action. Although these tiffs played out through a political lens...
Suppose an asylum seeker is denied asylum by an immigration judge and, on appeal, the Board of Immigration Appeals affirms that denial. The asylum seeker then raises multiple grounds for relief in a petition for review in federal court, and the court agrees on some but not all of those grounds, ultimately reversing…
Anna Offit, a law professor and legal anthropologist, has published Race-Conscious Jury Selection, a qualitative study of prosecutors’ views of jury selection, which makes an important contribution to the literature on Batson v. Kentucky. By observing prosecutors during jury selection and by interviewing them about the ways in which they believe Batson…
By any measure or screenwriter’s fantasy, 2020 is a disaster movie. Over 397,000 Americans are dead as the result of a global pandemic. The Atlantic hurricane season has been the most active ever recorded, and skies in San Francisco turned an otherworldly orange for multiple days due to wildfires. It seems that the…
Originalism has a problem. It grounds its legitimacy in being the method that most constrains judges from exercising arbitrary discretion. Yet, when faced with conflicting historical evidence favoring both broad and narrow readings of constitutional provisions, originalists have no principled way of choosing between the two. They must make an arbitrary decision.…
A woman takes the witness stand in a divorce proceeding. She works as a secretary in a government agency and testifies about the character of one of the higher-ups, a man named Bob. She doesn’t work for Bob directly and only encounters him infrequently in the workplace. After she gives testimony about…
The year is 2020 and chaos reigns. The year began with wildfires destroying millions of acres across Australia and proceeded to the worst viral pandemic in history. By December, more than 63 million people worldwide had contracted COVID-19, a respiratory virus, and 1.47 million had died. Shutdowns designed to stop the virus’s spread spawned business closures, job losses, and economic hardship. In the United States, the callous murder of George Floyd prompted months of protests and a long overdue reckoning with racial injustice. A hotly contested presidential race, combined with the incumbent’s refusal to concede, heaped still more anxiety on the public.
New York Times v. Sullivan (NYT) was not wrongly decided. In its time and context, it was a necessity. I do not understand Professor Logan to be saying otherwise; his point is that the time and context are very different now, and what may have been right in 1964 may be…
Professor Alexandra Klein’s excellent new article, Nondelegating Death, makes an important and original contribution. State method-of-execution statutes, she points out, afford very broad discretion to administrative agencies to craft and implement execution protocols. These statutes, she argues, raise questions under states’ nondelegation and separation of powers doctrines. Whereas the U.S. Supreme Court…
The government’s lies inflict injuries that differ in both degree and kind from those caused by nongovernmental parties’ lies. In other words, the government’s intentional and reckless falsehoods threaten distinct and especially serious harms—both to individual targets and to the public more broadly—precisely because of their governmental source. How, if at all…