Neither “Creatures of the State” nor “Accidents of Geography”: The Creation of American Public School Districts in the Twentieth Century
- Share The University of Chicago Law Review | Neither “Creatures of the State” nor “Accidents of Geography”: The Creation of American Public School Districts in the Twentieth Century on Facebook
- Share The University of Chicago Law Review | Neither “Creatures of the State” nor “Accidents of Geography”: The Creation of American Public School Districts in the Twentieth Century on Twitter
- Share The University of Chicago Law Review | Neither “Creatures of the State” nor “Accidents of Geography”: The Creation of American Public School Districts in the Twentieth Century on Email
- Share The University of Chicago Law Review | Neither “Creatures of the State” nor “Accidents of Geography”: The Creation of American Public School Districts in the Twentieth Century on LinkedIn
American public school districts numbered more than 200,000 in 1910. By 1970 there were fewer than 20,000. The decline was almost entirely accounted for by the consolidation of one-room, rural schools into larger school districts. Education leaders had long urged districts to consolidate, but local residents voted to do so, I argue, only after high school education became widespread. Graduates of one-room schools found it difficult to get into high school. Rural districts that were not “making the grade” were unattractive to home and farm buyers, and the threat of reduced property values induced voters to agree to consolidate.
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.
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.
I would like to thank Jack Brake, Anne Marie Hawley, and Jonah Klausner for their thoughtful edits and Jake Holland for his indispensable advice all throughout the drafting process.
Illinois’s Biometric Information Privacy Act (BIPA) is the country’s most powerful law governing biometric data—data generated from an individual’s biological characteristics, like fingerprints and voiceprints. Over the past decade, BIPA garnered a reputation as an exceptionally plaintiff-friendly statute. But from 2023–2024, the Illinois legislature, Illinois Supreme Court, and Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals all sided with BIPA defendants for the first time. Most significantly, in Zellmer v. Meta Platforms, Inc., the Ninth Circuit dismissed the plaintiff’s BIPA claim because the face scan collected by the defendant could not be used to identify him.
It is unclear whether these developments represent a trend or an exception to BIPA’s plaintiff-friendliness. Which path is charted will largely turn on how courts interpret Zellmer: While Zellmer established that a biometric identifier must be able to identify an individual, lower courts have construed its holding narrowly to require that the entity collecting biometric data must itself be capable of identifying, rather than it being sufficient for any entity to do so. Reading BIPA this narrowly would significantly weaken the statute’s protections.
After detailing how employer and consumer cases catalyzed this recent defendant-friendly shift, this Comment proposes a two-step framework to determine whether a biometric identifier is able to identify, falling under BIPA’s reach. Given BIPA’s broad influence, where courts ultimately land on this question will be crucial to the protection of biometric data nationwide."