Eliminating the FEC: The Best Hope for Campaign Finance Regulation?
The Federal Election Commission has an unenviable task. It regulates the financing of federal elections, pursuant to authority delegated by the very officials whose reelections depend in part on how...
View ArticleAct of Sept. 28, 2017
In 1975, the Illinois state legislature enacted the Illinois Abortion Act, which affirmed the state’s “longstanding policy” that an unborn child is considered a legal person from the moment of...
View ArticleIndigenous Environmental Network v. Department of State
With a new presidential administration comes a new wave of agency policy changes. Post-election agency reversals often attract legal challenges on a theory that the policy change was “arbitrary [or]...
View ArticleCategorical Mistakes: The Flawed Framework of the Armed Career Criminal Act...
Congress fundamentally changed the punishment of federal crimes in the 1980s and almost entirely for the worse. The Comprehensive Crime Control Act of 1984 (CCCA) cabined the discretion of judges,...
View ArticleMartin v. City of Boise
When should judges protect the people, and when should they defer to them? In countless contentious cases, courts have split: majorities invalidate laws to defend rights; dissents decry the decisions...
View ArticleTax Limits and the Future of Local Democracy
Property tax limits are state-level laws that place caps on local governments’ tax rates and revenue. These statutory limits, which put pressure on already strapped cities and counties in forty-six...
View ArticleKahler v. Kansas
Imagine two prosecutions for murder. In both, the defendant is mentally ill. In the first, the accused “thought the victim was a dog”; in the second, the accused “thought that a dog ordered him to...
View ArticleIntroduction
Yeniifer Alvarez arrived in the United States from San Luis Potosí, Mexico, in 1998, when she was three years old. Her family settled in Luling, Texas, about fifty miles south of Austin. After her...
View ArticleDistrict Court Reform: Nationwide Injunctions
On November 18, 2022, months after the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade, a group of antiabortion doctors and organizations brought suit in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of...
View ArticleVt. Stat. Ann. tit. 24 app., §§ 3-8 to -8a (2024)
The presumption that noncitizen immigrants cannot vote in elections is a historical anomaly. In fact, for most of United States history, immigrants without legal status could vote in local, state, and...
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