UCLR Online
Judge Paul Matey's recent concurrence in Range v. Attorney General, decided en banc by the Third Circuit, stands out for its adoption of a “classical legal” approach to the Second Amendment based in natural law. Judge Matey goes beyond his colleagues’ focus on history to examine what he calls classical legal principles, gleaned from the ancient Roman statesman and philosopher Cicero, Roman law, and the writings of Aquinas.
This Essay is among the first to critically analyze a form of common good constitutionalism in judicial practice. It takes a critical view of the opinion and its method and argues that—regardless of whether one is persuaded by the concurrence's common-good theory as a substantive account of our constitutional law—the opinion's reliance on natural-law principles is unjustified and undesirable as a method of adjudication. Specifically, the Essay argues that the concurrence's method departs from precedent without justification; suffers from significant practical problems in attempting to use ancient sources; and produces highly abstract natural-law principles that fail to resolve close constitutional cases, leading to decision by ipse dixit.
More Americans are turning to AI to solve problems in their everyday lives. Recent studies show that healthcare is no exception. For the underinsured, the rural, the disabled, and anyone too stigmatized to ask a pharmacist about the drugs they are actually taking, AI chatbots are becoming an increasingly attractive source of drug information.
The crystallizing liability landscape, anchored by Garcia v. Character Technologies’ treatment of AI outputs as products, creates perverse incentives toward either surveillance-heavy monitoring or blanket refusal to engage with drug queries. This Essay proposes an alternate path grounded in harm reduction principles already embedded in pharmacist duty doctrine developed over four decades in state courts. These existing duties, mapped onto AI systems through targeted refusals, accurate pharmacological information, nonjudgmental risk warnings, data minimization, and crisis pathways, provide an actionable liability framework before more deaths force reactive regulatory responses.
The U.S. government exerts powerful pressure on parties around the world through its use of unilateral economic sanctions. Oftentimes, this involves prohibiting U.S. corporate and natural persons from doing business with certain foreign jurisdictions, entities and individuals, or industries. A less noticed way the U.S. regulates conduct abroad is by prohibiting all transactions with sanctioned parties that simply pass through the U.S. financial system. This Essay examines the role of currency-based jurisdiction in U.S. sanctions practice by introducing a novel data set of enforcement actions and reveals that a controversial but largely overlooked jurisdictional basis in fact represents a cornerstone of current practice.
Recently, the idea of self-negating prophecies has gained traction as a public choice problem. It might now be situated in behavioral economics as much as in sociology and psychology. In capital markets, small investors might be dissuaded from taking optimal precautions simply because it is difficult to evaluate risks. An investment manager is nonetheless rewarded for producing high rates of return and is often abandoned when underperforming other professional investors. Things are different for a recognized oracle with significant influence on the market. This Essay explores the phenomenon of self-negating prophecies in the business world and evaluates the likelihood that predictions by this oracle can be self-negating rather than self-fulfilling.
The push for more pretrial screening creates a tension between the Sixth Amendment’s dual guarantees of an impartial jury and a jury drawn from a fair cross-section of the defendant’s community. Because social media is disproportionately consumed among young adults, particularly ages eighteen to twenty-nine, heightened scrutiny of social media exposure during voir dire risks systemically excluding younger citizens from jury pools, thereby undermining a defendant’s right to a fair cross-section.
This Essay explores the future of legal prediction markets. Part I explains how markets work and what makes them hard to beat. Part II then turns to the largest legal prediction market to date: the outcome of Learning Resources. Finally, Part III considers whether markets are well-suited to forecasting legal outcomes, both in principle and in practice.
Each year, more than half of criminal defendants subject to the career offender sentencing enhancement are those with prior drug convictions. Because the goal of the Sentencing Guidelines is to “inject transparency, consistency, and fairness” into federal sentencing, clarity on how courts should assess decriminalized drug offenses as § 4B1.1 predicates is needed to restore uniformity to the system and satisfy the Guidelines’ original goals. This Essay calls upon the Sentencing Commission to clarify its intent, place time limits on decriminalized drug predicates for § 4B1.1, and restore greater uniformity to the system.
In 2024, Tennessee Governor Bill Lee signed the Ensuring Likeness, Voice, and Image Security Act (the ELVIS Act). The law offers expansive protections for a living or dead person’s name, image, likeness, and voice. Tennessee state courts have found an independent common law protection for the same right. While a federal district court held that the statutory protections offered by the Tennessee General Assembly supplanted the common law protections, this Case Note argues that Tennessee’s arrangement gives plaintiffs two distinct avenues to vindicate the right—giving litigants more opportunities to innovate in this area of law.
The goals of this Essay are threefold: (1) to chart the public trust doctrine’s history and evolution in the United States, (2) to map this evolution and framework onto culturally significant artwork, and (3) to reflect on the attempts of several foreign nations to accomplish similar objectives to get a sense for whether such an application is feasible.
Must employers bargain in good faith over a decision to replace union workers with AI? The context of AI-induced job loss is likely to blend motivations for reducing labor costs with motivations for changing business direction, creating interpretative ambiguities for courts. Such ambiguities should be resolved through a causal test that favors requiring the parties to bargain.
Because, unlike natural persons, a corporation does not have a single, unitary mind, the question of how to ascertain mens rea in a prosecution of a corporate entity presents an epistemological conundrum. The recent revival of the field of management cybernetics presents a new lens through which to examine those questions. This Essay draws on several of the central insights of management cybernetics to argue that a collective knowledge instruction is appropriate in cases where certain regulatory systems within the corporation have been attenuated to the point where they cannot operate with the complexity required by law.
The False Claims Act is powerful. It enables the government to deter, punish, and remedy fraud. But, to date, the full extent of the False Claims Act’s power has gone underappreciated. It can also be used to obtain equitable relief. And if scholars and government lawyers are serious about promoting civil rights (or other policy objectives), they should use False Claims Act injunctions as policy-advancing tools.