Print Archive

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.

This Comment argues that existing doctrine supports recognizing a student right to be free from political orthodoxy in public education. It proposes a burden-shifting test for vindicating that right.

I argue for an economic approach to equal protection analysis that is grounded in the motivations of government actors but that addresses some of the longstanding concerns with intent-based tests. The examples of criminal deterrence and equal protection analysis are illustrative of an agenda for law and economics analysis that more incorporates other-regarding motives more generally.

This Article explores what it might mean in practice for agencies to incorporate distributive considerations into cost-benefit analysis. It uses, as a case study, a 2014 rule promulgated by the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) requiring new motor vehicles to have rearview cameras that reduce the risk of backover crashes.

This Article elaborates on and defends experimental jurisprudence. Experimental jurisprudence, appropriately understood, is not only consistent with traditional jurisprudence; it is an essential branch of it.

This Comment argues that this broad domestic application of the wire fraud statute shields courts from asking whether the statute applies extraterritorially. Further, this Comment argues that courts’ domestic application of the wire fraud statute is sufficiently broad as to begin to resemble extraterritoriality because courts can almost always find sufficient domestic activity to apply the wire fraud statute.