When one thinks of government, what comes to mind are familiar general-purpose entities like states, counties, cities, and townships. But more than half of the 90,000 governments in the United States are strikingly different: They are “special-purpose” governments that do one thing, such as supply water, fight fire, or pick up the trash. These entities remain understudied, and they present at least two puzzles. First, special-purpose governments are difficult to distinguish from entities that are typically regarded as business organizations—such as consumer cooperatives—and thus underscore the nebulous border between “public” and “private” enterprise. Where does that border lie? Second, special-purpose governments typically provide only one service, in sharp contrast to general-purpose governments. There is little in between the two poles—such as two-, three-, or four-purpose governments. Why? This Article answers those questions—and, in so doing, offers a new framework for thinking about special-purpose government.
Volume 92.3
May
2025
The canonical test for Fourth Amendment searches looks to whether the government has violated a person’s reasonable expectation of privacy. Yet the Supreme Court has recently added a property-based test to address cases involving physical intrusions. Further, influential judges and scholars have proposed relying primarily on property in determining the Fourth Amendment’s scope. This Article exposes the overlooked flaws of a property-centered Fourth Amendment. It examines the complications of property law, explores the malleability of property rights, and reveals how governments can manipulate them. Normatively, Fourth Amendment regimes based on property are likely to be underinclusive and grounded in trivial physical contact while ignoring greater intrusions. Finally, because property is unequally distributed, its use as a determinant of Fourth Amendment protections risks leaving disadvantaged members of society with the least protection. While property concepts will sometimes be relevant, they should be used very carefully, and very little, in Fourth Amendment law.
For years, academic experts have championed the widespread adoption of the “Fama-French” factors in legal settings. Factor models are commonly used to perform valuations, performance evaluation and event studies across a wide variety of contexts, many of which rely on data provided by Professor Kenneth French. Yet these data are beset by a problem that the experts themselves did not understand: In a companion article, we document widespread retroactive changes to French’s factor data. These changes are the result of discretionary changes to the construction of the factors and materially affect a broad range of estimates. In this Article, we show how these retroactive changes can have enormous impacts in precisely the settings in which experts have pressed for their use. We provide examples of valuations, performance analysis, and event studies in which the retroactive changes have a large—and even dispositive—effect on an expert’s conclusions.
Contemporary regulation of new digital technologies by nation-states unfolds under a darkening shadow of geopolitical competition. Three recent monographs offer illuminating and complementary maps of these geopolitical conflicts. Folding together insights from all three books opens up a new, more perspicacious understanding of geopolitical dynamics. This perspective, informed by all three books under consideration here, suggests grounds for skepticism about the emergence of a deep regulatory equilibrium centered on the emerging slate of European laws. The area of overlap will be strictly limited to less important questions by growing bipolar geostrategic conflict between the United States and China. Ambitions for global regulatory convergence when it comes to new digital technology, therefore, should be modest.