Who Decides How to Decarbonize? Environmental Justice and Democratic...
Introduction In many U.S. states, climate laws and regulations were designed using distinct policy ideologies from those used in traditional environmental laws: Whereas traditional environmental laws...
View ArticleLong Lake Township v. Maxon
While technology advances, do Fourth Amendment rights keep pace to preserve privacy? Or do they get left behind? Regardless of the answer, it would be helpful to at least know how courts view the...
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...
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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 ArticleEliminating 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 ArticleUnprecedented? Judicial Confirmation Battles and the Search for a Usable Past
“Unprecedented” is a dirty word — at least in the context of constitutional politics. The claim that some behavior is unprecedented carries with it a distinct whiff of impermissibility: if it’s never...
View ArticleArizona State Legislature v. Arizona Independent Redistricting Commission
The Elections Clause of the U.S. Constitution provides that “[t]he Times, Places and Manner of holding Elections for Senators and Representatives, shall be prescribed in each State by the Legislature...
View ArticleFavors v. Cuomo
In Reynolds v. Sims, the Supreme Court held that, under the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment, state legislative districts must comport with a one person–one vote principle: that is,...
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 kill...
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 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 ArticleCategorical Mistakes: The Flawed Framework of the Armed Career Criminal Act...
The full text of this Comment may be found by clicking the PDF link to the left. Congress fundamentally changed the punishment of federal crimes in the 1980s and almost entirely for the worse. The...
View ArticleIndigenous Environmental Network v. Department of State
With a new presidential administration comes a new wave of agency policy changes.1×1. See, e.g., Organized Vill. of Kake v. USDA, 795 F.3d 956, 979–80 (9th Cir. 2015) (en banc) (Smith, J.,...
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