Print Archive
This dynamic echoes a central theme in Vice Patrol: Cops, Courts, and the Struggle over Urban Gay Life before Stonewall, an important new work of legal history by Professor Anna Lvovsky. Vice Patrol is a study of antihomosexual policing in U.S. cities between the fall of Prohibition and the Stonewall Rebellion. It expands historical understanding by following antihomosexual enforcement through the rungs of the legal system—from municipal police tactics to appellate review at the Supreme Court. Beyond these contributions to the history of sexuality, however, the book reveals how public discourse filters into and through the judiciary.
In recent years, public universities have promulgated pronoun policies designed to encourage professors and students to respect the pronouns that others use to identify themselves. A professor who does not follow the pronoun policy and instead misgenders a student—or uses gendered words or pronouns that do not match that student’s gender identity—may be disciplined by their university for violating the pronoun policy. This Comment argues that professorial speech misgendering students in the classroom should not be protected by a professor’s First Amendment right to academic freedom, which traditionally covers teaching and scholarship.
This Comment argues that minors possess a qualified autonomy right to consent to recommended vaccines. It outlines the legal background of this autonomy right by discussing the history of vaccination laws, parental rights, and children’s rights in the United States.
tandard economic analysis views strict liability as preferable to negligence because it is easier to administer and leads to better risk reduction: strict liability induces injurers not only to optimally invest in precaution but also to optimally adjust their activity levels. Standard analysis thus views the prevalence of negligence as unjustifiable on efficiency grounds. This Article challenges the conventional wisdom and clarifies an efficiency rationale for negligence by spotlighting the information-production function of tort law.
Public education is “the most important function of state and local government” and yet not a “fundamental right or liberty.” This Article engages one of constitutional law’s most intractable problems by introducing “the public right to education” as a doctrinal pathway to a constitutional right to education process in three steps.
This Comment contends that the preponderance standard for flight risk is unconstitutional and interpretively incorrect. In cases involving similar government restrictions on physical liberty, the Supreme Court has generally required at least a “clear and convincing evidence” standard to comport with due process.
This Comment argues that the rule of lenity is improper in the context of the aggravated identity theft provision because a variety of interpretive tools are available and operative. For that reason, courts should apply the statute in accordance with its broad plain meaning by construing “uses” as requiring only general misuse of another person’s identifying information.
Focusing particularly on the Court’s instructions about when courts should apply a prison mailbox rule, this Comment provides a solution to each of those three issues and then combines those answers into a simple, easy-to-apply framework.
Inspired by the Supreme Court’s embrace of developmental science in a series of Eighth Amendment cases, “kids are different” has become the rallying cry, leading to dramatic reforms in our response to juvenile crime designed to eliminate the incarceration of children and support their successful transition to adulthood. The success of these reforms represents a promising start, but the “kids are different” approach is built upon two flaws in the Court’s developmental analysis that constrain the reach of its decisions and hide the true implications of a developmental approach.
Conventional wisdom portrays contracts as static distillations of parties’ shared intent at some discrete point in time. In reality, however, contract terms evolve in response to their environments, including new laws, legal interpretations, and economic shocks. While several legal scholars have offered stylized accounts of this evolutionary process, we still lack a coherent, general theory that broadly captures the dynamics of real-world contracting practice. This paper advances such a theory, in which the evolution of contract terms is a byproduct of several key features, including efficiency concerns, information, and sequential learning by attorneys who negotiate several deals over time.
This Comment explores the history of Rule 12(d), describes courts’ varying uses of the exception, and proposes a unifying method of interpretation for the future. Drawing on other procedural rules and an analogous doctrine in contract law, it argues that only unmistakably referenced written instruments may be incorporated.
How far may a school district deviate from the services specified in an IEP and remain in compliance with the IDEA? In other words, how much of the adequate written plan is the student in fact entitled to receive? There are two existing approaches to failure-to-implement cases: the materiality approach and the per se test. This Comment argues that both approaches are flawed.