Volume 89.7
November
2022

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Volume 89.7
The Improvised Implementation of Executive Agreements
Kathleen Claussen
Professor, University of Miami School of Law.

Thanks to Pam Bookman, Curt Bradley, Elena Chachko, Nathan Cortez, John Coyle, Evan Criddle, Rebecca Crootof, Bill Dodge, Michael Froomkin, Jean Galbraith, Harlan Cohen, Ben Johnson, Ron Levin, Tim Meyer, David Moore, Sean Murphy, Lisa Ouellette, Steve Ratner, Ryan Sakoda, Matthew Schaefer, Gabriel Scheffler, David Sloss, Brian Soucek, Jim Speta, Matt Spitzer, Paul Stephan, David Super, Ed Swaine, Pierre-Hugues Verdier, Dan Walters, and David Zaring for their feedback on this project. Thanks also to the participants in the ASIL International Law in Domestic Courts Interest Group Workshop, the BYU Law Faculty Workshop, the Columbia Law International Law Colloquium, the George Washington Law Faculty Workshop, the Georgetown Institute of International Economic Law Colloquium, the Junior International Law Scholars Association Annual Meeting, the Miami/FIU Law School Joint Workshop, the New Voices in Administrative Law Scholarship Workshop, and the Richmond Law Junior Scholars Workshop for their comments. I’m grateful to Bianca Anderson, Pam Lucken, and Zachary Tayler for their very helpful research assistance and to the several current and former government officials who spoke with me about this project.

Implementation is at the core of lawmaking in our divided government. A rich literature covers the waterfront with respect to agencies’ implementation of legislative mandates, and another equally robust line of scholarship considers Congress’s implementation of treaties. Missing from those discussions, however, is another area of implementation central to U.S. foreign relations: the implementation of transnational regulatory agreements. This Article examines how federal agencies have harnessed far-reaching discretion from Congress on whether and how to implement thousands of international agreements.

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Volume 89.7
Jurisdiction as Power
Ryan C. Williams
Assistant Professor, Boston College Law School.

My thanks to William Baude, Kevin Clermont, Scott Dodson, Benjamin Eidelson, and Evan Tsen Lee, and to partici- pants at workshops at Boston College Law School and the Seventh Annual Civil Procedure Workshop for helpful comments on earlier drafts.

For centuries, courts and legal commentators defined “jurisdiction” by reference to a court’s “power.” A court that lacked jurisdiction, under this conception, simply lacked the ability to bind the parties, and its resulting rulings could therefore be regarded by both litigants and later courts as void and of no legal effect. But in the middle decades of the twentieth century, the Supreme Court and other U.S. courts strongly embraced the so-called bootstrap doctrine—a distinctive branch of preclusion law that severely limits the ability to collaterally attack a judgment based on a claimed lack of jurisdiction. Because the bootstrap doctrine effectively allows courts to establish their own jurisdiction simply by concluding that they possess it, critics of the power-based conception contend that the definition no longer provides a descriptively plausible or conceptually coherent account of jurisdiction’s identity. This Article defends the traditional power-based conception of jurisdiction’s identity as both conceptually coherent and normatively desirable.

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Comment
Volume 89.7
Property Versus Antidiscrimination: Examining the Impacts of Cedar Point Nursery v. Hassid on the Fair Housing Act
Amy Liang
B.A. 2020, Northwestern University; J.D. Candidate 2023, The University of Chicago Law School.

The Fair Housing Act is a groundbreaking federal law enacted in 1968 during the civil rights movement. Reflecting a policy judgment that the public’s interest in eliminating housing discrimination outweighs a prejudicial landlord’s property right to exclude, it prohibits landlords from rejecting tenants on a discriminatory basis. However, as the Act’s promises remain in the process of fulfillment, the Supreme Court’s 2021 decision in Cedar Point Nursery v. Hassid has placed it into unprecedented danger: by holding that a regulation authorizing temporary occupations of private property constituted a per se taking that requires compensation under the Takings Clause, Cedar Point threatens the constitutionality of the Act, which grants tenants a similar temporary right to access rental properties. This Comment takes up the task of finding an escape valve for the Act within the current legal landscape.

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Volume 89.7
Toward a Centralized Hatch-Waxman Venue
Matthew Makowski
B.S. 2012, American University; Ph.D. 2018, Radboud University; J.D. Candidate 2023, The University of Chicago Law School.

I would like to thank, in particular, Professor Jonathan Masur for his consistently excellent supervision and Comments Editors Brian Bornhoft and Jaston Burri for improving this Comment at every stage of the editing process. I would also like to thank Professor William Hubbard and the editors and staff of the University of Chicago Law Review for their helpful advice, insight, and feedback.

Pharmaceutical litigation often begins when a generic drug company files an application to have its generic drug approved by the FDA. That application is received by the FDA in the District of Maryland. To “submit” it is a statutory act of patent infringement under the Hatch-Waxman Act. Establishing venue in subsequent Hatch-Waxman litigation can be complex because Hatch- Waxman litigation often involves simultaneous and independent lawsuits against many generic applicants. A Hatch-Waxman plaintiff might reasonably attempt to consolidate litigation in a single district court; Hatch-Waxman defendants might reasonably resist consolidation in the plaintiff’s preferred venue. Recent Supreme Court and Federal Circuit case law has narrowed venue options for Hatch-Waxman plaintiffs. This Comment argues for an interpretation of Hatch-Waxman’s statutory act of patent infringement and the patent venue rules that moves toward a centralized venue for Hatch-Waxman litigation in the District of Maryland.

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Volume 89.7
The Joint Venture Exception in the International Silver Platter Doctrine: Variability and Devaluation of Cooperation
Jacqueline Pecaro
B.A. 2018, Cornell University; J.D. Candidate 2023, The University of Chicago Law School.

I would like to thank Professor Eric Posner and the editors and staff of the University of Chicago Law Review for their thoughtful advice and insight on this Comment.

This Comment examines the joint venture exception in the international silver platter doctrine in the context of the use of wiretaps in federal narcotics cases. Under the international silver platter doctrine, evidence obtained through searches (like wiretaps) by foreign law enforcement on foreign soil and under foreign law is admissible in U.S. courts. The joint venture exception qualifies the international silver platter doctrine: if participation by U.S. law enforcement in a wiretap by foreign law enforcement on foreign soil constitutes a joint venture, then evidence obtained from the search is admissible only if the wiretap was reasonable under the Fourth Amendment.