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Volume 91.6
Against Associational Standing
Michael T. Morley
Sheila M. McDevitt Professor, Florida State University (FSU) College of Law.

The authors are grateful for helpful feedback and suggestions from Aaron Bruhl, John C. Harrison, Carissa Hessick, Doug Laycock, Jake Linford, Darrell Miller, Caprice Roberts, and the participants in the Notre Dame Remedies Roundtable, the Standing Doctrine Conference at the Constitutional Law Institute at the University of Chicago, the Florida State University (FSU) College of Law Faculty Workshop, and the Remedies Works-in-Progress Session at the 2024 Annual Meeting of the Association of American Law Schools (AALS).

F. Andrew Hessick
Judge John J. Parker Distinguished Professor of Law and Associate Dean, University of North Carolina School of Law.

The authors are grateful for helpful feedback and suggestions from Aaron Bruhl, John C. Harrison, Carissa Hessick, Doug Laycock, Jake Linford, Darrell Miller, Caprice Roberts, and the participants in the Notre Dame Remedies Roundtable, the Standing Doctrine Conference at the Constitutional Law Institute at the University of Chicago, the Florida State University (FSU) College of Law Faculty Workshop, and the Remedies Works-in-Progress Session at the 2024 Annual Meeting of the Association of American Law Schools (AALS).

Associational standing is a widely used doctrine that has never been subject to serious academic scrutiny. This Article calls for the abandonment, or at least serious modification, of associational standing. Even without associational standing, groups may still sue to enforce their own rights. And they could continue to help vindicate their members’ rights by providing legal representation for member plaintiffs in individual or class action suits (filed anonymously, if necessary), covering members’ litigation costs, and providing expert witnesses and other guidance. In short, associational standing is a largely unnecessary deviation from both Article III’s injury-in-fact requirement and the fundamental principles underlying our justice system. Eliminating associational standing would not limit public law and other important collective litigation, but rather ensure that such cases proceed through the proper channels (i.e., Rule 23) while preventing a range of unnecessary procedural, preclusive, remedial, and other complications.

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Volume 91.6
Administrative Subordination
Bijal Shah
Professor of Law and Provost Faculty Fellow, Boston College Law School.

I am grateful to Nick Almendares, Sahar Aziz, Monica Bell, Anya Bernstein, Emily Bremer, Emily Chertoff, Charlton Copeland, Blake Emerson, Sheila Foster, Andrew Hammond, Emily Hammond, Chris Havasy, Lisa Heinzerling, Sharon Jacobs, Amy Kapczynski, Joy Milligan, Athena Mutua, Eang Ngov, David Noll, Anne Joseph O’Connell, Nick Parrillo, Eloise Pasachoff, Aziz Rana, Ed Rubin, Fred Smith, David Zaring, and participants in the Yale Law School Administering a Democratic Political Economy Conference; Duke University School of Law Critical Legal Collective Convening; University of Minnesota Administrative Law New Scholarship Roundtable; American Constitution Society Junior Scholars Public Law Workshop; National People of Color Legal Scholarship Conference on Undoing Democracy; Association of American Law Schools Critical Leadership, Accountability, and Justice Within Organizations Panel; Power in the Administrate State Workshop; Critical Approaches to Public Law Workshop; George Washington University Law School Constitutional Law Colloquium; and the Indiana Maurer School of Law Workshop on Administrative Justice. Many thanks to Maxine Hart and Madeleine Kausel for their research assistance. All errors are my own.

Much of the scholarship on immigration enforcement and environmental justice assumes that agencies negatively impact vulnerable and marginalized people as a result of individualized bias or arbitrariness. This Article argues that, beyond idiosyncrasies or flaws in administrators themselves, the poor impact of administration on minorities emanates from institutional systems. In doing so, this Article introduces a framework of institutional oppression into the study of administration. This Article’s prescription is for institutional redesign. First, from the top down, Congress could utilize appropriations and pointed procedural interventions to influence how agencies exercise discretion. Second, from the bottom up, the President or agencies themselves could instigate efforts to use more accurate information and more meaningful process. Third, a focus on reviving a government of small, discrete agencies could constrain administrative discretion in ways that encourage agencies to rebalance their priorities.

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Volume 91.6
Vacancy Taxes: A Possible Taking?
Christine Dong
B.A. 2017, University of Chicago; J.D. Candidate 2025, The University of Chicago Law School.

Vacancy taxes are an increasingly popular solution to the paradoxical problem of high housing demand coupled with high vacancy. Soon after San Francisco adopted a vacancy tax with one of the broadest definitions of vacancy, property owners lobbed a constitutional challenge under the Takings Clause, taking advantage of a moment of doctrinal instability. This Comment seeks to make sense of how this and similar potential challenges would fare. Using the San Francisco vacancy tax as a concrete example, this Comment evaluates possible arguments that the tax effects a regulatory or physical taking. It contends that even this stringent vacancy tax would not be a taking, and highlights elements of a different vacancy tax or regulation that may tip the scales of this analysis. It explores original understandings of land use (and nonuse) regulations to argue that fines levied on the nonproductive use of property are a background principle of property law that generally precludes the conclusion that vacancy taxes are takings.

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Volume 91.6
TikTok the Tortfeasor: A Framework to Discuss Social-Platform Externalities and Arguments Favoring Ex Ante Mitigations
Karan Lala
B.S. 2018, University of California, San Diego; J.D. Candidate 2025, The University of Chicago Law School.

I would like to thank Professor Omri Ben-Shahar and the editors and staff of the University of Chicago Law Review for their thoughtful advice and support.

This Comment reviews Section 230 jurisprudence to develop a novel taxonomy for claims against social media platforms. It divides claims against platforms into three categories—content specific, content dependent, and content agnostic—based on the proximity of the alleged injury to user-generated content and the degree of the platform’s participation. This Comment also formalizes a remedies test that courts can use to distinguish legitimate content-agnostic claims from those in name only. Armed with this vocabulary, this Comment turns its attention to a number of cases pending against social platforms. Applying the remedies test, it determines that a handful of pending allegations give rise to legitimate content-agnostic claims. Noting that content-agnostic injuries are material but not yet fully understood, this Comment ultimately argues that an ex ante regulatory regime operationalized by an expert agency is better suited to address social-platform externalities than an ex post liability regime.

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Volume 91.6
Rogue AI Patents and the USPTO's Rejection of Alice
Joshua A. Zuchniarz
B.S. 2017, University of Miami; Ph.D. 2023, University of Chicago; J.D. Candidate 2025, The University of Chicago Law School.

I would like to thank Professor Jonathan S. Masur, Tanvi Antoo, and all of the University of Chicago Law Review editors and staff for productive comments and feedback.

AI inventions have taken the world by storm. Many of these inventions are protected by patents. Yet a large number of AI patents are flawed, prone to invalidation in court. This Comment asks which AI inventions ought to receive patents. It concludes that AI methods and models should be patent eligible because they are likely to be incentivized by patents and unlikely to chill follow-on innovation. This Comment further argues that both the USPTO’s guidance and much of the Federal Circuit’s recent eligibility case law are inconsistent with finding these inventions patent eligible. However, the Federal Circuit demonstrated an understanding of eligibility that would allow patents for many AI methods and models in its 2016 McRO, Inc. v. Bandai Namco Games America Inc. decision. This Comment concludes by advocating that the Federal Circuit explicitly apply the holding of this case to hold that an AI invention is patent eligible at the first opportunity.

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The Perils of Poor Penmanship: A D.C. Circuit Fight Demonstrates the Urgency of Electronic Union Elections
Noah Levine
J.D. Candidate at the University of Chicago Law School, Class of 2025.

He thanks the University of Chicago Law Review Online team for their careful feedback.

The legibility of handwriting is on the decline. Thankfully, calligraphy carries low stakes in a digital age. Why write something down when it can be typed instead? Yet, there is still one near-universal fragment of writing that must often be done by hand: the signature. While usually a formality, so long as signatures are done by hand, they can be second-guessed, threatening a generation untrained in cursive. This Essay highlights a recent incident in which a union representation election hinged on the legibility of one employee’s signature.

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The Objective Observer Test and Racial Bias in Civil Jury Trials: The Washington State Approach
Derek Willie
J.D. Candidate at the University of Chicago Law School, Class of 2025.

He thanks the University of Chicago Law Review Online team.

Is it OK for courts to think about race when they decide whether to bar certain arguments from being made, because they think those arguments could rely on stereotypes or otherwise play on the jury’s racial biases? For the Washington Supreme Court, the answer is yes—in fact, courts have a duty to consider race in making these evidentiary decisions. Rather than statements or arguments that are made with a clearly racist intent, the Washington Supreme Court’s idea of “racially biased arguments” is far more capacious: it includes “dog whistles,” or superficially harmless comments that have the effect of operating on a jury’s implicit biases.

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Textualism and Progressive Social Movements
Katie Eyer
Professor of Law, Rutgers Law School.

Many thanks to Tara Leigh Grove, Eric Fish, and Logan Everett Sawyer for helpful feedback on this project. Maya Lorey, Alexandra Webb, and Erin Yonchak of the University of Chicago Law Review Online provided excellent editorial suggestions and assistance.

Should progressive movement lawyers avoid making textualist arguments? This Essay suggests that the answer is no. While there may be good reasons for movement lawyers to eschew arguments associated with their ideological opponents, none of those reasons apply to the embrace of textualist arguments by progressive movements today. Indeed, the time may be especially ripe for progressive social movements to make increased use of textualist legal arguments.

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Liberalism, Dependence, and . . . Admiralty
Edward A. Hartnett
Richard J. Hughes Professor of Constitutional and Public Law and Service, Seton Hall University School of Law.

Liberal political and legal theory posit a world of autonomous individuals, each pursuing their own chosen ends, linked to each other by one or more agreements. But this is not how most of us experience most of our lives. This Essay seeks to open a conversation about resources in our legal history and culture that work from different assumptions—and might perhaps be a source of inspiration—by pointing to one such resource: admiralty.