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The Constitution’s pardon power offers a direct path to protect an ally from federal criminal liability. However, another vehicle for absolution exists—one which simultaneously avoids public scrutiny while securing amnesty. By issuing a discreet, specific nonenforcement directive to the Department of Justice (DOJ), a politically vulnerable President can achieve the result of pardon without signing one. This phenomenon, which this Essay terms the “shadow pardon,” transforms prosecutorial discretion into a covert form of amnesty, invisible to the public and immune from reversal once the relevant crime’s statute of limitations expires.

The United States faces a housing shortage, and construction costs keep rising. Tax policy can ease those burdens. This Essay proposes that the U.S. Treasury issue guidance to classify assets for bonus depreciation under Section 168 of the Internal Revenue Code.

Since the Supreme Court's announcement of the Lindke test in Lindke v. Freed (2024), lower courts have begun to apply the test on their own. This Case Note analyzes how those courts have applied the first prong of the Lindke test to determine whether public actors possessed actual authority to post on social media and considers open questions regarding the finding of actual state authority to post on social media.

In 2021, Congress passed the Ending Forced Arbitration of Sexual Assault and Sexual Harassment Act (EFAA). Notably, the EFAA assigns courts, rather than an arbitrator, the responsibility for determining the sufficiency of a plaintiff’s allegations. This has led to disagreements between federal district courts over the appropriate pleading standard when determining whether the EFAA applies. This Essay argues that courts should adopt the “nonfrivolous” pleading standard because it better ensures access to justice for victims of sexual misconduct.

In the Supreme Court’s recent United States v. Skrmetti (2025) decision, Justice Amy Coney Barrett raised the novel question: Does the United States have a long-standing history of de jure discrimination against transgender people, perpetrated by state actors through the force of law? This Essay provides the beginnings of an answer to Justice Barrett’s inquiry, demonstrating that throughout the history and geography of the United States, government actors have used the law to discriminate against people who deviate from narrow, essentialist notions of sex and gender.

For better or worse, plagiarism norms have existed since time immemorial. This Essay responds to Professor Lemley and Ouellette's "Plagiarism, Copyright, and AI" and argues that academic plagiarism norms are not justified by efficiency and morality. Rather, authors should be free to decide for themselves whether and when attribution is necessary.

In the first days of his second administration, Donald Trump announced a series of steep tariffs on goods imported into the United States. In addition to angering America’s trading partners, the tariffs have frustrated American consumers already worried about inflation. Although importing firms may absorb some of the assessed levy, tariffs generally have an inflationary effect. This Essay explores a less appreciated mechanism by which tariffs increase prices: facilitating the creation and maintenance of illegal price-fixing conspiracies.

The flexibility to renegotiate can facilitate long-term contracting and thereby beneficial reliance investments and risk allocation. The prospect of modification can induce contracting parties who expect their bargaining power to improve to enter into contracts earlier and realize the advantages of longer-term relationships. Otherwise, those parties might decline to contract or delay until those opportunities realize, thereby foregoing the benefits of long-term risk allocation or reliance investments. The parties decide not only whether, but also when, to make legally binding commitments to each other. Courts should be more lenient in enforcing contract modifications that, prompted by a shift in bargaining power, may have only a redistributive effect. Parties can design under-compensatory damages that would provide a credible threat of breach ex post to facilitate ex post modification. Requiring good faith in modification (along with damages) can constrain possible holdup and protect reliance investments and risk allocation.

The central concern of structural constitutional law is the organization of governmental power, but power comes in many forms. This Article develops an original account of data’s structural law—the processes, institutional arrangements, transparency rules, and control mechanisms that, we argue, create distinctive structural dynamics for data’s acquisition and appropriation to public projects. Doing so requires us to reconsider how law treats the category of power to which data belongs. Data is an instrument of power. The Constitution facilitates popular control over material forms of power through distinctive strategies, ranging from defaults to accounting mechanisms. Assessing data’s structural ecosystem against that backdrop allows us to both map the structural law of data and provide an initial diagnosis of its deficits. Drawing on our respective fields—law and computer science—we conclude by suggesting legal and technical pathways to asserting greater procedural, institutional, and popular control over the government’s data.

Eviction cases make up over a quarter of all cases filed in the federal and state civil courts and have enormous consequences for tenants, who are nearly always unrepresented by counsel. These cases overwhelmingly settle, yet settlement scholars have entirely overlooked eviction both empirically and theoretically. The Article presents results from the first empirical study of eviction settlement negotiations. The study involved rigorous analysis of an original dataset of over one thousand hand-coded settlements, observations of settlement negotiations in the hallways of housing court, and dozens of interviews. The findings demonstrate that unrepresented tenants—who make up the vast majority of tenants in the eviction system—have no meaningful influence over settlement terms. Rather, the terms are set by landlords and their attorneys. Drawing on the empirical findings and scholarship about contracts of adhesion, the Article develops the theoretical concept of “settlements of adhesion.”