Print Archive
The Foreign Sovereign Immunities Act, the court-created “act of state” doctrine, and other common-law immunities shield foreign officials and governments from most lawsuits. For instance, courts have dismissed claims against China, Cuba, Venezuela, and Russia over allegations of torture, detentions, and election interference. Yet foreign governments have unfettered access to U.S. courts as plaintiffs. And foreign dictatorships—including Russia, China, Turkey, and Venezuela—have leveraged this access to harass political dissidents, critics, and even newspapers in the United States. These doctrines create an asymmetry at the heart of this Article: foreign dictators and their proxies can access our courts as plaintiffs to harass their opponents, but their regimes are, in turn, immune from lawsuits here. This Article exposes that asymmetry and argues that U.S. courts and Congress should make it harder for foreign dictators to abuse our legal system.
This Comment responds to the equal protection challenge to merit selection. It argues that merit selection is constitutional by way of multiple exceptions, both recognized and implicit, to the “one person, one vote” principle. And though critics of merit selection often couch their arguments in prodemocratic terms, this Comment argues that merit selection—like the “one person, one vote” principle—promotes rather than thwarts the will of the people.
From 2017 to 2019, two U.S. technology giants, Apple and Qualcomm, engaged in a war of patent suits across the world. One battle took place at the International Trade Commission (ITC), a federal agency that prevents patent-infringing products from entering the United States.
In the fall of 2019, John Bolton left his position as national security advisor to President Donald Trump after about seventeen months in the role.
Professor Robert Ellickson has proposed that a close-knit community will develop rules, customs, and traditions addressing property that maximize the group’s welfare—independent of government intervention.
In August 2017, Hurricane Harvey hit Harris County, Texas, causing $125 billion in damages and flooding 150,000 homes.
In response to the COVID-19 pandemic, several state legislatures and executives limited the circumstances in which landlords could evict their tenants. Predictably, many of these moratoria were met with challenges under the Fifth Amendment’s Takings Clause, which prohibits the government from taking private property for public use without just compensation.
Twenty years ago, Professor William Stuntz wrote an arti-cle, The Pathological Politics of Criminal Law, that has become a classic of the field. His thesis was that criminal law is beset by political problems (mostly collusive incentives) that cause it to steadily expand, with ever more statutes criminalizing ever more conduct, and punishing more harshly as well.
Professor Rachel Barkow has established herself as an indispensable voice in public and academic discourse on criminal justice reform.
For four decades, Harold Koh has been a pivotal figure in the evolving human rights movement.
Jeffrey John Rachlinski was born June 22, 1966, in Buffalo, New York. He graduated from Frontier Central High School in Hamburg, New York, in 1983, where he participated in such activities as band, Chess Club, French Club, Math Club, Mock Trial Group, and Quiz Club.
I’m not sure I’ll ever live it down. I actually said—out loud, to his face, a full ten minutes into our very first conversation—“Holy smokes, you’re Larry Tribe!”