Volume 92.7
November
2025

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Article
Volume 92.7
The Contractualization of Disability Rights Law
Yaron Covo
Assistant Professor, Case Western Reserve University School of Law.

For helpful comments on earlier drafts, I thank Sania Anwar, Ian Ayres, Abbe Gluck, Adi Goldiner, Hanoch Dagan, Doron Dorfman, Klaas Eller, Elizabeth Emens, Jasmine Harris, Avery Katz, Craig Konnoth, Juliet Kostritsky, Shirley Lin, Daniel Markovits, Petros Mavroidis, Jamelia Morgan, Szymon Osmola, David Pozen, Jessica Roberts, Emily Rock, Elle Rothermich, Kate Sapirstein, Ani Satz, Michael Ashley Stein, Karen Tani, and Cristina Tilley, as well as participants in the Junior Scholars Conference at Northeastern School of Law (2024), the Junior Faculty Forum at Richmond School of Law (2024), the 47th Health Law Professors Conference (2024), and the Ninth Annual Health Law Works-in-Progress Retreat at Seton Hall Law School (2025). Lastly, I thank the editors of The University of Chicago Law Review for their insightful and helpful edits and suggestions.

In this Article, Yaron Covo argues that disability rights law in the United States is shaped not only by civil rights statutes but also by contract law doctrines.

Civil Rights Contract Law Disability Law
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Essay
Volume 92.7
Legal Realignment
Richard M. Re
Professor, Harvard Law School.

I am grateful to many thoughtful commentators, including workshop participants at Stanford University, the University of Virginia, Wayne State University, Harvard University, and Boston College, as well as attendees at a presentation at Boston University and a panel at the AALS annual conference. This essay borrows some text and ideas from my keynote address at the 2024 National Conference of Constitutional Law Scholars. See generally Richard M. Re, The One Big Question (Feb. 26, 2024) (Nat’l Conf. of Const. L. Scholars Keynote Address) (available on SSRN). Many thanks to the organizers and attendees at that event. Finally, I am indebted to the editors of this journal.

The widely understood alignment between political ideology and legal methodology—conservativism and constraint versus liberalism and discretion—explains judicial behavior with diminishing accuracy. In this Essay, Richard M.

Jurisprudence
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Comment
Volume 92.7
Complete Preemption via Historical Evolution
Ryan Jain-Liu
B.A. and B.S. 2023, The University of California, Berkeley; J.D. Candidate 2026, The University of Chicago Law School.

I would like to thank Professor Douglas Baird, Professor Jared Mayer, and members of The University of Chicago Law Review, including Margaret Schaack, Zoë Ewing, Miranda Coombe, Eric Haupt, and Jack Brake, for their invaluable assistance.

Complete preemption is a jurisdictional doctrine in which a federal statute so wholly envelops certain state law claims that those claims effectively cease to exist. Aside from an explicit complete preemption hook, the Supreme Court has recognized just one way for a federal statute to completely preempt state law claims: it must provide an exclusive federal remedy and also have a special nature that makes it extra federal. In this Comment, Ryan Jain-Liu tracks the historical evolution of U.S. bankruptcy to make this second showing. In doing so, this Comment observes two entwined trends in the history of U.S. bankruptcy: bankruptcy simultaneously became more remedial—and thus more voluntary—as the federal government asserted increased control over bankruptcy law. The dual developments toward bankruptcy-as-remedy and bankruptcy-as-federal combine to provide involuntary debtors special protection and to give involuntary bankruptcy a special federal nature. Finally, this Comment expands on the case study of involuntary bankruptcy to argue that historical evolution can form the basis for recognizing an area of law’s special federal nature and support application of the complete preemption doctrine to novel contexts.

Bankruptcy Federal Courts Legal History

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