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Volume 92.6
The Splintering of American Public Law
Marco Basile
Assistant Professor, Boston College Law School.

For feedback and suggestions at various stages of this project, I thank David Barron, Mary Sarah Bilder, Nikolas Bowie, Richard Chen, Noah Feldman, Idriss Fofana, Barry Friedman, Jack Goldsmith, Daniel Hulsebosch, Mark Jia, Michael Klarman, Chris Mirasola, and Susannah Barton Tobin. This project also benefitted from workshops with faculty at Boston College Law School, University of Chicago Law School, Cornell Law School, Harvard Law School, Loyola Law School, New York University School of Law, Notre Dame Law School, University of San Diego School of Law, Seattle University School of Law, University of Texas School of Law, University of Southern California Gould School of Law, and Washington University School of Law. I am also grateful to Emma Svoboda and Elaine Tsui for research assistance and to the members of the University of Chicago Law Review for their hard work editing the manuscript.

This Article by Marco Basile argues that U.S. constitutional law and international law diverged after the Civil War when courts came to apply them differently against the state as the United States consolidated a continental nation-state. On one hand, the Supreme Court came to assert authority over constitutional law more aggressively in the context of gutting Reconstruction in the South. At the same time, the Court stepped back from international law in deference to Congress as the United States conquered territories and peoples in the West. The simultaneous rise of judicial supremacy as to constitutional law and of judicial deference as to international law recast constitutional law as more “legal” than political and international law as more “political” than legal. By recovering the earlier understanding of public law, this Article challenges how we construct constitutional traditions from the past. The Article ultimately invites us to reimagine a more integrated public law today.

International Law Legal History
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Volume 92.6
Disclosure Puzzles in Patent Law
Jonathan S. Masur
John P. Wilson Professor of Law, The University of Chicago Law School.

For helpful comments, thanks to Sarah Burstein, Bernard Chao, Kevin Collins, Laura Dolbow, Tabrez Ebrahim, Jeanne Fromer, Jordi Goodman, Paul Gugliuzza, Tim Holbrook, Mark Lemley, Oskar Liivak, Mike Meurer, Andrew Michaels, Lidiya Mishchenko, Nicholson Price, Arti Rai, Jason Rantanen, Jason Reinecke, Michael Risch, Andres Sawicki, Jake Sherkow, and participants at the Intellectual Property Scholars Conference and the Works-in-Progress Intellectual Property Colloquium. We thank Victoria Fang, Josh Leopold, Joseph Robinson, and Marissa Uri for excellent research assistance. Masur thanks the David and Celia Hilliard Fund and the Wachtell, Lipton, Rosen & Katz Program in Behavioral Law, Finance and Economics for support.

Lisa Larrimore Ouellette
Deane F. Johnson Professor of Law, Stanford Law School.

For helpful comments, thanks to Sarah Burstein, Bernard Chao, Kevin Collins, Laura Dolbow, Tabrez Ebrahim, Jeanne Fromer, Jordi Goodman, Paul Gugliuzza, Tim Holbrook, Mark Lemley, Oskar Liivak, Mike Meurer, Andrew Michaels, Lidiya Mishchenko, Nicholson Price, Arti Rai, Jason Rantanen, Jason Reinecke, Michael Risch, Andres Sawicki, Jake Sherkow, and participants at the Intellectual Property Scholars Conference and the Works-in-Progress Intellectual Property Colloquium. We thank Victoria Fang, Josh Leopold, Joseph Robinson, and Marissa Uri for excellent research assistance.

Since its inception, patent law has required that inventors publicly disclose information about their inventions in exchange for receiving patent rights. This foundational requirement is policed through multiple doctrines: patents fail “enablement” if “undue experimentation” is needed to practice the invention, and they lack adequate “written description” when they fail to establish the inventor’s “possession” of the invention. Despite disclosure doctrines’ centrality, fundamental puzzles about their application remain unresolved. In Amgen v. Sanofi , the Supreme Court recently took up one such puzzle: Must a patent enable the full scope of the claim or merely some number of working examples? But the Court failed to address long-standing puzzles surrounding this issue. In this Article, Jonathan S. Masur and Lisa Larrimore Ouellette tackle these questions and more. The Article attempts to bring conceptual order to the disclosure doctrines, reconciling them with one another and with the broader animating principles of patent law. These puzzles must be solved if patent law is to fulfill its promises; if they are not, the resulting doctrinal gaps will expose the patent system to strategic behavior by nefarious noninventors—including those aided by new generative artificial intelligence tools—who learn how to acquire the patent quo without paying their quid.

Patent
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Volume 92.5
Constitutional Rights as Protected Reasons
Stephanie Hall Barclay
Professor of Law at Georgetown University Law Center and Faculty Co-Director of the Georgetown Center for the Constitution.

For very helpful comments, conversations, and encouragement on this draft and earlier versions of this project, the author thanks Joel Alicea, Howard Anglin, Kristina Arriaga, Randy Barnett, William Baude, Rachel Bayefsky, Joseph Blocher, Samuel Bray, Christian Burset, Jud Campbell, Louis Capozzi, Piero Ríos Carrillo, Conor Casey, Nathan Chapman, Aimee Clesi, Nicholas Cole, Steve Collis, Caroline Mala Corbin, Katherine Mims Crocker, Marc DeGirolami, Michelle Dempsey, Alma Diamond, Hasan Dindjer, Richard Ekins, Timothy Endicott, David Enoch, Bridget Fahey, Richard Fallon, John Finnis, Frederick Gedicks, Nazila Ghanea, Sherif Girgis, Raphaël Grenier-Benoit, Simona Grossi, Jeremy Gunn, John Harrison, Michael Helfand, Richard Helmholz, Don Herzog, Steven Heyman, Kristin Hickman, Jessie Hill, Heidi Hurd, Michael Kang, Paul Kerry, Andrew Koppelman, Konrad Ksiazek, Genevieve Lakier, Lia Lawton, Douglas Laycock, Robert Leider, Tyler Lindley, Christopher Lund, Elinor Mason, Michael McConnell, Stefan McDaniel, Bradley Miller, Darrell Miller, Paul Miller, Robert Miller, Christina Mulligan, Jim Oleske, Filipa Paes, James Phillips, Richard Pildes, Jeffrey Pojanowski, Zachary Price, Haley Proctor, Eric Rassbach, Richard M. Re, Bradley Rebeiro, Veronica Rodriguez-Blanco, Zalman Rothschild, Angelo Ryu, Stephen Sachs, Josep Tirapu Sanuy, Micah Schwartzman, Amanda Shanor, Reva Siegel, Geoffrey Sigalet, Lawrence Solum, Anna Stelle, John Stinneford, Mark Storslee, Michael David Thomas, Rebecca Tushnet, Francisco Urbina, Pía Chible Villadangos, Eugene Volokh, Derek Webb, Grégoire Webber, Lael Weinberger, Andrew Willinger, John Witte, Kara Woodbury-Smith, Ilan Wurman, Paul Yowell, Mary Ziegler, the participants at the Women in Legal Philosophy Conference at Villanova Law School, the First Annual UChicago Constitutional Law Conference, the Oxford Public Law Discussion Group, the Oxford University Bonavero Institute of Human Rights Works-in-Progress session, Federalist Society Junior Scholar Panel at Association of American Law Schools, the Salmon P. Chase Colloquium, the Georgetown Law School Works-in-Progress session, the Minnesota Law School Works-in-Progress session, the Pepperdine Law School Nootbaar Fellows workshop, the Northwestern Law School Works-in-Progress session, the Northwestern Law School Public Law Colloquium, and the Stanford Law School Constitution Center Works-in-Progress workshop. For excellent research assistance, the author thanks Nat Deacon, Chris Ostertag, Jacob Feiser, Mathias Valenta, Anneliese Ostrom, and Athanasius Sirilla.

Professor Stephanie Hall Barclay proposes and defends a new theoretical model of constitutional rights. While virtually all the prevailing theories about constitutional rights envision, at some level, judges balancing the importance of various individual rights against the importance of other societal goods in tension with those rights and generally hold out the judiciary as the primary guardian of these rights, this Article explains why the existing accounts of constitutional rights are either incoherent or incomplete. It proposes and defends an alternative model that is more consistent with democratic principles and the institutional competencies of the various branches of government.

Constitutional Law
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Volume 92.5
The Amended Statute
Jesse M. Cross
Professor of Law, Joseph F. Rice School of Law, University of South Carolina.

The author wishes to thank Aaron Galbraith for his outstanding data analysis contributions. The author also wishes to thank William Eskridge, Abbe Gluck, Anita Krishnakumar, Nicholas Parrillo, Josh Chafetz, Alexander Zhang, and all the participants in the Legislation Roundtable at the Georgetown University Law Center, the Legislation Colloquium at the Georgetown University Law Center, and the works in progress workshop at the Joseph F. Rice School of Law.

We live in a republic of amended statutes. In each Congress, our laws are amended tens of thousands of times. Individual statutes make amendments that number in the thousands. As a result, the amended statute has become the central democratic text of our age—a remarkable development for a type of document unknown at the Founding. Yet the amended statute has been relegated to an afterthought in legal theory. This is incredible neglect for an essential source of modern law—one that anchors innumerable rights in U.S. society. In this Article, Jesse M. Cross demonstrates that, instead, the amended statute belongs at the center of public law. To that end, he undertakes three projects with respect to the amended statute: documenting, theorizing, and interpreting.

Judicial Review Statutory Interpretation
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Volume 92.4
Contract or Prison
S.R. Blanchard

For helpful comments, I am grateful to participants in the Contracts Section Works-in-Progress Panel at the 2023 AALS Annual Meeting; faculty workshops at George Mason Scalia Law School, Indiana University McKinney Law School, Notre Dame Law School, the University of Florida Law School, the University of Texas Law School, Vanderbilt Law School, and Washington University Law School; the Legal Scholarship Workshop at the University of Chicago; the Workshop on Law, Economics, and Justice at the University of Lucerne; CrimFest; the Decarceration Law Conference; the Junior Business Law Scholars Conference; Markelloquium; and to Ian Ayres, Lisa Bernstein, Sam Bray, Christian Burset, Eric Fish, Rick Garnett, Sherif Girgis, Nadelle Grossman, Daniel Markovits, Jide Nzelibe, J. Mark Ramseyer, Christopher Slobogin, Avishalom Tor, Francisco Urbina, and Julian Velasco. Noah Austin, Zack Beculheimer, Gwendolyn Loop, Savannah Shoffner, Tri Truong, and Steven Tu provided excellent research assistance. Any errors are mine.

Critics of the criminal enforcement system have condemned the expansion and privatization of electronic monitoring, criminal diversion, parole, and probation. But the astonishing perversion of contract involved in these new practices has gone unnoticed. Though incarceration-alternative (IA) contracting is sometimes framed as humane, historical and current context illuminates its coercive nature. IA contracting must be examined under classical contract theory and in light of the history of economic exploitation using criminal enforcement power harnessed to contract, including in the racial peonage system under Jim Crow. This Article documents this systematic underregulation through the first empirical study of legal regimes for IA contracts. To the extent that the theoretical limits of contract are not presently reflected in the common law of contract, regulatory reforms that better regulate seller and government practices might reduce the risk of exploitation.

Contracts Criminal Law Empirical Analysis
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Volume 92.4
Looking for the Public in Public Law
Nikhil Menezes
Ph.D. Candidate (Politics), Princeton University.

For helpful comments on earlier drafts, we thank Nick Bagley, Chuck Beitz, Jessica Bulman-Pozen, Josh Chafetz, Adam Davidson, Liz Emens, Bridget Fahey, Lee Fennell, Jon Gould, Aziz Huq, Jeremy Kessler, Genevieve Lakier, Daryl Levinson, Pratap Bhanu Mehta, Sam Moyn, Jan-Werner Müller, Rick Pildes, Jed Purdy, Max Ridge, and Tim Wu, as well as workshop participants at the University of Chicago Law School and Columbia Law School. For excellent research assistance, we thank Abigail George.

David E. Pozen
Charles Keller Beekman Professor of Law, Columbia Law School.

For helpful comments on earlier drafts, we thank Nick Bagley, Chuck Beitz, Jessica Bulman-Pozen, Josh Chafetz, Adam Davidson, Liz Emens, Bridget Fahey, Lee Fennell, Jon Gould, Aziz Huq, Jeremy Kessler, Genevieve Lakier, Daryl Levinson, Pratap Bhanu Mehta, Sam Moyn, Jan-Werner Müller, Rick Pildes, Jed Purdy, Max Ridge, and Tim Wu, as well as workshop participants at the University of Chicago Law School and Columbia Law School. For excellent research assistance, we thank Abigail George.

The “public” is everywhere and nowhere in contemporary public law. Everywhere, in that the term is constantly invoked to justify and explain existing arrangements. Nowhere, in that serious attempts to identify a relevant public and elicit its input are few and far between. Scholars and officials depict the American public as playing myriad roles in governance—checking, guiding, approving, repudiating—without offering an account of how public preferences are formed or how they exercise influence on the questions of interest. This Article seeks to identify and call attention to the foundational dilemmas underlying this disconnect, to clarify their normative contours and intellectual history, and to propose a pragmatic response—grounded in the recovery of the public’s role as an author and not just a monitor of public law.

Public Choice
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Volume 92.3
Special-Purpose Governments
Conor Clarke
Associate Professor of Law, Washington University in St. Louis School of Law.

We thank Bruce Ackerman, Lucian Bebchuk, Robert Ellickson, Daniel Epps, Edward Fox, Jens Frankenreiter, Clayton Gillette, Brian Highsmith, Noah Kazis, Reinier Kraakman, Zachary Liscow, Jon Michaels, Mariana Pargendler, and David Schleicher, as well as those who provided feedback from presentations at Yale Law School and the annual meeting of the American Law and Economics Association. We also thank Josh Kaufman, Daniella Apodaca, Jonah Klausner, and the other editors of the University of Chicago Law Review for their excellent feedback on both substance and style.

Henry Hansmann
Oscar M. Ruebhausen Professor Emeritus, Yale Law School.

We thank Bruce Ackerman, Lucian Bebchuk, Robert Ellickson, Daniel Epps, Edward Fox, Jens Frankenreiter, Clayton Gillette, Brian Highsmith, Noah Kazis, Reinier Kraakman, Zachary Liscow, Jon Michaels, Mariana Pargendler, and David Schleicher, as well as those who provided feedback from presentations at Yale Law School and the annual meeting of the American Law and Economics Association. We also thank Josh Kaufman, Daniella Apodaca, Jonah Klausner, and the other editors of the University of Chicago Law Review for their excellent feedback on both substance and style.

When one thinks of government, what comes to mind are familiar general-purpose entities like states, counties, cities, and townships. But more than half of the 90,000 governments in the United States are strikingly different: They are “special-purpose” governments that do one thing, such as supply water, fight fire, or pick up the trash. These entities remain understudied, and they present at least two puzzles. First, special-purpose governments are difficult to distinguish from entities that are typically regarded as business organizations—such as consumer cooperatives—and thus underscore the nebulous border between “public” and “private” enterprise. Where does that border lie? Second, special-purpose governments typically provide only one service, in sharp contrast to general-purpose governments. There is little in between the two poles—such as two-, three-, or four-purpose governments. Why? This Article answers those questions—and, in so doing, offers a new framework for thinking about special-purpose government.

Law and Economics Localism
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Volume 92.3
Decentering Property in Fourth Amendment Law
Michael C. Pollack
Professor of Law & Associate Dean for Faculty Development, Benjamin N. Cardozo School of Law.

The authors share credit and responsibility for this Article equally. The authors are grateful to Maureen Brady, Morgan Cloud, Mailyn Fidler, Barry Friedman, Ben Grunwald, Alma Magaña, and Stewart Sterk, along with participants in the Cardozo Junior Faculty Workshop for helpful conversations, suggestions, comments, and critiques. Michael Pollack thanks the Stephen B. Siegel Program in Real Estate Law for research support.

Matthew Tokson
Professor of Law, University of Utah, S.J. Quinney College of Law.

The authors share credit and responsibility for this Article equally. The authors are grateful to Maureen Brady, Morgan Cloud, Mailyn Fidler, Barry Friedman, Ben Grunwald, Alma Magaña, and Stewart Sterk, along with participants in the Cardozo Junior Faculty Workshop for helpful conversations, suggestions, comments, and critiques. Michael Pollack thanks the Stephen B. Siegel Program in Real Estate Law for research support.

The canonical test for Fourth Amendment searches looks to whether the government has violated a person’s reasonable expectation of privacy. Yet the Supreme Court has recently added a property-based test to address cases involving physical intrusions. Further, influential judges and scholars have proposed relying primarily on property in determining the Fourth Amendment’s scope. This Article exposes the overlooked flaws of a property-centered Fourth Amendment. It examines the complications of property law, explores the malleability of property rights, and reveals how governments can manipulate them. Normatively, Fourth Amendment regimes based on property are likely to be underinclusive and grounded in trivial physical contact while ignoring greater intrusions. Finally, because property is unequally distributed, its use as a determinant of Fourth Amendment protections risks leaving disadvantaged members of society with the least protection. While property concepts will sometimes be relevant, they should be used very carefully, and very little, in Fourth Amendment law.

Fourth Amendment Property Law
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Volume 92.3
Noisy Factors in Law
Adriana Z. Robertson
Donald N. Pritzker Professor of Business Law, The University of Chicago Law School.

We thank Lucian Bebchuk, Alon Brav, Ryan Bubb, Ed Cheng, Quinn Curtis, Elisabeth de Fontenay, Jared Ellias, Jill Fisch, Joe Grundfest, Cam Harvey, Scott Hirst, Colleen Honigsberg, Marcel Kahan, Louis Kaplow, Jonathan Klick, Brian Leiter, Saul Levmore, Dorothy Lund, John Morley, Mariana Pargendler, Elizabeth Pollman, Roberta Romano, Paolo Saguato, Holger Spamann, George Vojta, and Michael Weber for valuable suggestions and discussions. This Article has benefited from comments by workshop participants at Columbia Law School, George Mason University Antonin Scalia Law School, Georgetown University Law Center, Harvard Law School, Stanford Law School, UC Berkeley School of Law, the University of Chicago Law School, the University of Oxford Faculty of Law, the University of Pennsylvania Carey Law School, the University of Toronto Faculty of Law, the University of Virginia School of Law, and the Washington University School of Law, as well as at the American Law and Economics Association Annual Meeting, the Corporate & Securities Litigation Workshop, the Labex ReFi-NYU-SAFE/LawFin Law & Banking/Finance Conference, and the Utah Winter Deals Conference. Robertson gratefully acknowledges the support of the Douglas Clark and Ruth Ann McNeese Faculty Research Fund. Katy Beeson and Levi Haas provided exceptional research assistance. All errors are our own.

Pat Akey
Associate Professor of Finance, University of Toronto; Visiting Professor, INSEAD.

We thank Lucian Bebchuk, Alon Brav, Ryan Bubb, Ed Cheng, Quinn Curtis, Elisabeth de Fontenay, Jared Ellias, Jill Fisch, Joe Grundfest, Cam Harvey, Scott Hirst, Colleen Honigsberg, Marcel Kahan, Louis Kaplow, Jonathan Klick, Brian Leiter, Saul Levmore, Dorothy Lund, John Morley, Mariana Pargendler, Elizabeth Pollman, Roberta Romano, Paolo Saguato, Holger Spamann, George Vojta, and Michael Weber for valuable suggestions and discussions. This Article has benefited from comments by workshop participants at Columbia Law School, George Mason University Antonin Scalia Law School, Georgetown University Law Center, Harvard Law School, Stanford Law School, UC Berkeley School of Law, the University of Chicago Law School, the University of Oxford Faculty of Law, the University of Pennsylvania Carey Law School, the University of Toronto Faculty of Law, the University of Virginia School of Law, and the Washington University School of Law, as well as at the American Law and Economics Association Annual Meeting, the Corporate & Securities Litigation Workshop, the Labex ReFi-NYU-SAFE/LawFin Law & Banking/Finance Conference, and the Utah Winter Deals Conference. Robertson gratefully acknowledges the support of the Douglas Clark and Ruth Ann McNeese Faculty Research Fund. Katy Beeson and Levi Haas provided exceptional research assistance. All errors are our own.

Mikhail Simutin
Professor of Finance, University of Toronto.

We thank Lucian Bebchuk, Alon Brav, Ryan Bubb, Ed Cheng, Quinn Curtis, Elisabeth de Fontenay, Jared Ellias, Jill Fisch, Joe Grundfest, Cam Harvey, Scott Hirst, Colleen Honigsberg, Marcel Kahan, Louis Kaplow, Jonathan Klick, Brian Leiter, Saul Levmore, Dorothy Lund, John Morley, Mariana Pargendler, Elizabeth Pollman, Roberta Romano, Paolo Saguato, Holger Spamann, George Vojta, and Michael Weber for valuable suggestions and discussions. This Article has benefited from comments by workshop participants at Columbia Law School, George Mason University Antonin Scalia Law School, Georgetown University Law Center, Harvard Law School, Stanford Law School, UC Berkeley School of Law, the University of Chicago Law School, the University of Oxford Faculty of Law, the University of Pennsylvania Carey Law School, the University of Toronto Faculty of Law, the University of Virginia School of Law, and the Washington University School of Law, as well as at the American Law and Economics Association Annual Meeting, the Corporate & Securities Litigation Workshop, the Labex ReFi-NYU-SAFE/LawFin Law & Banking/Finance Conference, and the Utah Winter Deals Conference. Robertson gratefully acknowledges the support of the Douglas Clark and Ruth Ann McNeese Faculty Research Fund. Katy Beeson and Levi Haas provided exceptional research assistance. All errors are our own.

For years, academic experts have championed the widespread adoption of the “Fama-French” factors in legal settings. Factor models are commonly used to perform valuations, performance evaluation and event studies across a wide variety of contexts, many of which rely on data provided by Professor Kenneth French. Yet these data are beset by a problem that the experts themselves did not understand: In a companion article, we document widespread retroactive changes to French’s factor data. These changes are the result of discretionary changes to the construction of the factors and materially affect a broad range of estimates. In this Article, we show how these retroactive changes can have enormous impacts in precisely the settings in which experts have pressed for their use. We provide examples of valuations, performance analysis, and event studies in which the retroactive changes have a large—and even dispositive—effect on an expert’s conclusions.

Bankruptcy Corporations Law and Economics Securities Law
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Volume 92.1
Scrutinizing Sex
Jessica A. Clarke
Robert C. and Nanette T. Packard Professor of Law, University of Southern California Gould School of Law.

Thanks to Courtney Cahill, Mary Anne Case, David Cruz, Mike Dorf, Ben Eidelson, Katie Eyer, Aziz Huq, Courtney Joslin, Craig Konnoth, Laura Lane-Steele, Chan Tov McNamarah, Laura Portuondo, Camille Gear Rich, Naomi Schoenbaum, Ann Tweedy, Ezra Young, Adam Zimmerman, and workshop participants at the 2024 West Coast Sexuality & Gender Law Workshop, Cornell Law School, and Vanderbilt Law School for feedback, and to Molly Gray for research assistance.

Critics of the Supreme Court’s equal protection jurisprudence despair that the Court conceives of discrimination as the mere classification of individuals on forbidden grounds, such as race and sex, rather than systemic patterns of subordination. On the Court’s anticlassification theory, affirmative action, which relies on overt racial or gender classifications, is generally forbidden. Such context-insensitive anticlassification rules could, in principle, extend to individuals who are members of groups often regarded with hostility and suspicion, such as transgender people. Indeed, this is how most trial courts have approached recent laws that classify individuals based on sex to exclude transgender people. However, appellate courts have refused to take anticlassification rules seriously. This Article argues that all sex classifications, like all race-based ones, ought to trigger heightened constitutional scrutiny. It draws support from the principles undergirding anticlassification rules announced by the Roberts Court, most recently in its university affirmative action decisions.

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