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Judge Paul Matey's recent concurrence in Range v. Attorney General, decided en banc by the Third Circuit, stands out for its adoption of a “classical legal” approach to the Second Amendment based in natural law. Judge Matey goes beyond his colleagues’ focus on history to examine what he calls classical legal principles, gleaned from the ancient Roman statesman and philosopher Cicero, Roman law, and the writings of Aquinas. This Essay is among the first to critically analyze a form of common good constitutionalism in judicial practice. It takes a critical view of the opinion and its method and argues that—regardless of whether one is persuaded by the concurrence's common-good theory as a substantive account of our constitutional law—the opinion's reliance on natural-law principles is unjustified and undesirable as a method of adjudication. Specifically, the Essay argues that the concurrence's method departs from precedent without justification; suffers from significant practical problems in attempting to use ancient sources; and produces highly abstract natural-law principles that fail to resolve close constitutional cases, leading to decision by ipse dixit.

More Americans are turning to AI to solve problems in their everyday lives. Recent studies show that healthcare is no exception. For the underinsured, the rural, the disabled, and anyone too stigmatized to ask a pharmacist about the drugs they are actually taking, AI chatbots are becoming an increasingly attractive source of drug information. The crystallizing liability landscape, anchored by Garcia v. Character Technologies’ treatment of AI outputs as products, creates perverse incentives toward either surveillance-heavy monitoring or blanket refusal to engage with drug queries. This Essay proposes an alternate path grounded in harm reduction principles already embedded in pharmacist duty doctrine developed over four decades in state courts. These existing duties, mapped onto AI systems through targeted refusals, accurate pharmacological information, nonjudgmental risk warnings, data minimization, and crisis pathways, provide an actionable liability framework before more deaths force reactive regulatory responses.

For decades, it has been black letter law that the informal exercise of government power can violate the First Amendment when it creates an “informal system of censorship.” Lower courts have been deeply divided about what kinds of government actions create this kind of informal system. The Court’s recent NRA v. Vullo decision holds that officials engage in informal censorship whenever they intentionally use informal power to evade First Amendment constraints on their formal powers. Vullo clarified that the rule against informal censorship is categorical: officials may never evade constitutional constraints by threatening harm or promising benefits to private parties, no matter how they attempt to do so. This Article argues that the Court's reaffirmation of the categorical nature of the First Amendment rule against informal censorship is very good and comes at a critical time. The Article examines the doctrine prior to the decision, the significance of Vullo’s intervention, and its implications.

The risk of deal breakage is central to merger and acquisition (M&A) dealmaking. Yet neither the finance nor corporate law literatures have systematically explored how and why deals fall apart. This Article rectifies this deficiency, making three principal contributions. First, it develops a comprehensive typology of eight M&A outcomes: completed-as-announced deals and seven types of deal breakage. Second, it unveils a novel dataset of 5,058 mergers and acquisitions involving U.S. public company targets signed between 1996 and 2020. Finally, it demonstrates how the Article's typology and data yield important implications for M&A practice and doctrine by casting new light on key debates over deal protection devices, the power of controlling shareholders, and “merger arbitrage” investors.

This Comment creates the first comprehensive taxonomy of state eminent domain regimes’ treatment of private-to-private takings for the purpose of preventing future blight. Following the Supreme Court’s expansion of the Public Use Clause, many states moved to limit takings justified solely by economic development, yet maintained broad blight statutes that continued to authorize the condemnation of property to eliminate or prevent blight. The Comment exposes the indeterminate contours of the future-blight takings landscape, urging legislatures and courts seeking to cabin sweeping public use determinations to find the prevention of future blight an invalid public use.

This Comment argues “reverse acquihires”—deals in which a Big Tech firm poaches an AI startup’s team and then paysits shell hundreds of millions—constitute asset acquisitions subject to Hart-Scott-Rodino (HSR) Act review. While regulators typically review only tangible asset acquisitions under the Act, this Comment argues that regulators can mandate review of certain intangible asset transfers as well. Drawing on regulatory treatment of intellectual property licensing agreements, language from divestiture orders, and guidance from foreign competition authorities, this Comment demonstrates that reverse acquihires are acquisitions of AI startups’ most valuable assets: their business information and know-how.

Multiple circuits have extended quasi-judicial immunity to sheriffs, marshals, and bailiffs when they execute judicial orders, including—in some circuits—when they use excessive force. This Comment argues that the extension of quasi-judicial immunity to enforcement officers is inconsistent with the Supreme Court’s absolute immunity doctrine. A survey of the Court’s absolute immunity cases reveals four considerations guiding those determinations. Enforcement officers do not meet any of those considerations. This Comment proposes a simple rule to correct for this doctrinal inconsistency: absolute immunity for deliberative functions and qualified immunity for enforcement functions.

The U.S. government exerts powerful pressure on parties around the world through its use of unilateral economic sanctions. Oftentimes, this involves prohibiting U.S. corporate and natural persons from doing business with certain foreign jurisdictions, entities and individuals, or industries. A less noticed way the U.S. regulates conduct abroad is by prohibiting all transactions with sanctioned parties that simply pass through the U.S. financial system. This Essay examines the role of currency-based jurisdiction in U.S. sanctions practice by introducing a novel data set of enforcement actions and reveals that a controversial but largely overlooked jurisdictional basis in fact represents a cornerstone of current practice.

Standard theories of precedent limit the legal effect of a precedent to cases within the scope of its holding. Yet the widespread use of analogies to precedent in legal reasoning presupposes that precedents have legal implications for cases outside the scope of their holdings. This Article suggests that arguments from analogy to precedent have the currency they do in our legal system because respect for a precedent requires more than treating the precedent’s holding as true: It also requires the judge to update her other beliefs around the assumption that the precedent’s holding is true.

This Article considers how and under what circumstances the “general law,” a species of unwritten law grounded in legal customs and practices shared across different legal jurisdictions, might be used in modern constitutional interpretation. Constitutional originalists have increasingly argued that central provisions of the Constitution incorporate various bodies of general law. This Article argues that, even if the Constitution did incorporate various bodies of general law, most of those bodies of law have now been emptied of content, and must remain empty without profound changes in the practice of federal judicial review. Because the general law requires that nonfederal judicial actors such as state courts, governors, legislatures, the President, and perhaps foreign legal systems participate in the development of public law norms and customs, a general law revival would involve eliminating, or at least curtailing, federal judicial supremacy and would therefore impliedly reject nearly a hundred years of public law precedent.