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Essay
United States v. Harris: A Hard Sell for Involuntary Medication of Defendants
Rachel Caldwell
Rachel Caldwell is a J.D. candidate at the University of Chicago Law School, Class of 2025.

This Case Note offers some direction for handling competing interests in this developing body of law and other complex cases weighing intersecting constitutional rights against governmental interests. Parts I and II provide background information, describing the Sell test and the current state of constitutional and statutory religious protections. Part III critically analyzes how courts, including the Fifth Circuit, have considered religious objections in Sell determinations so far. Because such analysis remains underdeveloped in the courts, Part IV suggests frameworks for coherently integrating Free Exercise doctrine into Sell inquiries based on the “hybrid theory” of constitutional rights.

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Essay
Search Strategy, Sampling, and Competition Law
Saul Levmore
Saul Levmore is the William B. Graham Distinguished Service Professor of Law at the University of Chicago Law School.

Search costs matter and are reflected in many areas of law. For example, most disclosure requirements economize on search costs. A homeowner who must disclose the presence of termites saves a potential buyer, and perhaps many such buyers, from spending money to search, or inspect, the property. Similarly, requirements to reveal expected miles per gallon, or risks posed by a drug, economize on search costs. But these examples point to simple strategies and costs that can be minimized or entirely avoided with some legal intervention. Law can do better and take account of more subtle things once sophisticated search strategies are understood. This Essay introduces such search strategies and their implications for law.

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Essay
College Athletes As Employees: Implications for Title IX and (Un)Equal Pay
Hana Ferrero
Hana Ferrero is a J.D. Candidate at The University of Chicago Law School, Class of 2026.

This Case Note argues that categorizing college athletes as employees would, under a faithful application of Title IX and the court’s reasoning in Johnson, take wage payments outside the purview of Title IX’s equal opportunity requirement for athletes. Instead, Title IX as applied to college employees would govern, along with the other relevant employment discrimination laws. Under these statutes, it would likely be permissible for colleges to pay athletes in revenue-generating sports more than those athletes in nonrevenue sports.

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Essay
Digital Authoritarianism
Danielle Keats Citron
Danielle Keats Citron is a Jefferson Scholars Foundation Schenck Distinguished Professor in Law, University of Virginia School of Law; Vice President, Cyber Civil Rights Initiative; 2019 MacArthur Fellow.

Special thanks to Mario Barnes, Courtney Douglas, Paul Gowder, Deborah Turkheimer, to the audience at Northwestern Law’s Julian Rosenthal Lecture, and to Miranda Coombe, Sam Hallam, Caroline Kassir, and Danielle O’Connell for superb editing. Adeleine Lee and Alex Wilfert provided excellent research assistance. The authors contributed equally to this essay.

Ari Ezra Waldman
Ari Ezra Waldman is a Professor of Law and, by courtesy, Professor of Sociology, University of California, Irvine School of Law; Member and Compliance Officer, Board of Directors, Cyber Civil Rights Initiative.

Antidemocratic forces rely on intimidation tactics to silence criticism and opposition. Today’s intimidation playbook follows a two-step pattern. We surface these tactics so their costs to public discourse and civic engagement can be fully understood. We show how the misappropriation of the concept of online abuse has parallels in other efforts at conceptual diversion that dampen democratic guarantees. Democracy’s survival requires creative solutions. Politicians and government workers must be able to operate free from intimidation. Journalists and researchers must be able to freely investigate governmental overreach and foreign malign influence campaigns that threaten the democratic process. Surfacing the two-step strategy is a critical start to combating it.

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Essay
Constitutional Limits to Regulations on Foreign-Influenced Corporate Contributions
John Cooper
John Cooper is a J.D. candidate at the University of Chicago Law School, Class of 2026.

He thanks Professor Genevieve Lakier, Elizabeth Walsh, and the entire UCLR Online team for their suggestions.

This Case Note starts by summarizing current federal law and existing litigation surrounding state legislation in the context of foreign campaign contributions. It then turns to the parallels between state and federal proposals and concludes with the potential avenues policymakers may use to avoid future constitutional challenges.

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Essay
Tiktok Bans: A Takings Clause Blunder?
Bridget Gilchrist
Bridget Gilchrist is a J.D. Candidate at the University of Chicago Law School, Class of 2025.

She thanks Henry Gilchrist, Timothy Burke, Kimberly Burke, and Alexis Berg for their support, and the University of Chicago Law Review Online team for all their hard work.

This Case Note explores the possibility that, in a world where TikTok is banned or heavily regulated, individual TikTok users could sue states under a Takings Clause theory. Any such cases would have to wrestle with two core questions (1) whether the account holders hold an actionable property interest in their accounts; and (2) if so, whether permanently and totally depriving users of access to their accounts constitutes a taking.

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Essay
Venue Transfers of Administrative Litigation and the Neglected Percolation Argument
Andrew Meyer
Andrew Meyer is a J.D. Candidate at The University of Chicago Law School, Class of 2026.

He thanks Russ Ryan, Will Horvath, and the University of Chicago Law Review Online team.

District courts should consider the value of percolation in a given case as part of their analysis in deciding whether to grant a § 1404(a) motion. The value of doing so is even more pronounced in cases with a clear pattern of repeat-player defendants moving for transfer for no apparent reason other than convenience—and perhaps a more amenable court. In such cases, district courts should directly weigh the benefits of percolation against those of judicial economy.

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Essay
The Specter of a Circuit Split: Isaacson, Bankshot, and § 1983
Quinten J. Rimolde
Quinten J. Rimolde is a J.D. Candidate at The University of Chicago Law School, Class of 2026.

He thanks Will Horvath, Brandon Stras, Graham Kingwill, Professor William Baude, and the entire University of Chicago Law Review Online team.

At first glance, the Ninth Circuit’s decision in Isaacson v. Mayes (2023) set the stage for the perfect law review student comment. It called out the Eleventh Circuit’s decision in Bankshot Billiards, Inc. v. City of Ocala (2011) by name. And the Congressional Research Service listed Bankshot and Isaacson among 2023’s circuit splits. By all accounts, the two circuits had split over a significant issue. They disagreed over whether a party needs to connect its injury to a constitutional right in order to establish standing for claims under 42 U.S.C. § 1983. Only one problem remained: the courts were on the same page. What emerged was the specter of a circuit split.

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Essay
Who Are They to Judge? The Scope of Absolute Immunity as Applied to Parole Psychologists
Zoë Lewis Ewing
Zoë Lewis Ewing is a J.D. Candidate at the University of Chicago Law School, Class of 2026.

She thanks the University of Chicago Law Review Online team for their helpful feedback.

This Case Note first provides a background on the doctrine of absolute immunity. It then evaluates the court’s analysis in Gay and compares Gay with the Third Circuit’s decision in Williams v. Consovoy (3d Cir. 2006). Finally, this Case Note argues that Gay is more consistent with Supreme Court precedent on absolute immunity and more in line with historical understandings of the doctrine. This issue has particularly high stakes, as psychologists’ medical role can create a “guise of objectivity.” As a result, even a biased psychologist might still receive strong deference from a judge and could then be the reason a person spends the rest of their life in prison.

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Snow, Rain, and Theft: The Limits of U.S. Postal Service Liability Under the Federal Tort Claims Act
Margaret Schaack
Margaret Schaack is a J.D. Candidate at the University of Chicago Law School, Class of 2026.

The author thanks the University of Chicago Law Review Online team for their helpful feedback.

This Case Note first reviews the origins of the postal-matter exception and the FTCA. Then, it analyzes the Fifth Circuit’s holding in Konan and explores contrasting precedent in other circuits, most notably in the First and Second Circuits. Finally, this Note discusses the difficulty of balancing USPS’s interests against enabling suits under the FTCA and considers the implications of providing a tort remedy.

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Essay
AI & the Business Judgment Rule: Heightened Information Duty
Geneviève Helleringer
Professor Geneviève Helleringer, ESSEC Business School-Paris & Oxford University, and research member of ECGI. She is Visiting Professor of Law at Columbia Law School and Paris-Panthéon-Assas University. Her research focuses on comparative Commercial and Corporate Law.

We would like to thank the participants of the How AI Will Change the Law Symposium, cohosted by the Coase-Sandor Institute, the University of Chicago Law Review Online, and Oxford Business Law Blog, for their helpful comments.

Florian Möslein
Florian Möslein is the Director of the Institute for Law and Regulation of Digitalisation and Professor of Law at the Philipps-University Marburg, where he teaches Contract Law, Corporate Law and Securities Regulation.

We would like to thank the participants of the How AI Will Change the Law Symposium, cohosted by the Coase-Sandor Institute, the University of Chicago Law Review Online, and Oxford Business Law Blog, for their helpful comments.

Artificial intelligence (AI) has the potential to alter the interpretation of the duties of care, skill, and diligence. As these duties form the foundation for the BJR and equivalent provisions, the development of AI is also expected to impact the BJR. There is a broadening importance, in an increasingly data-driven business environment, of the requirement to gather sufficient information before making a decision and to use information in a valid manner. Changes are both quantitative (how much information to collect) and qualitative (which types of information to collect). The changes also relate to the methods of decision-making, including the role of measures and statistics over intuition.

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Essay
How Artificial Intelligence Will Shape Securities Regulation
Gabriel V. Rauterberg
Professor of Law, University of Michigan

My views on these subjects owe much to my collaborators, especially Michael Barr, Megan Shearer, and Michael Wellman, with whom I have been studying the behavior of algorithmic traders in financial markets, and Howell Jackson, with whom I have been presenting on social media and capital markets at PIFS-IOSCO’s trainings for securities regulators. All errors are my own. Thanks to the participants at the University of Chicago’s Symposium on “How AI Will Change the Law” for helpful comments, and to the editors of the University of Chicago Law Review for their helpful insights.

This Essay argues that the increasing prevalence and sophistication of artificial intelligence (AI) will push securities regulation toward a more systems-oriented approach. This approach will replace securities law’s emphasis, in areas like manipulation, on forms of enforcement targeted at specific individuals and accompanied by punitive sanctions with a greater focus on ex ante rules designed to shape an ecology of actors and information.