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Anti-fat bias has been described as the last socially acceptable form of prejudice. Despite the discrimination that fat people face, there is no federal protection against weight discrimination. One potential solution to the lack of existing legal protections is the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA). Claims challenging weight discrimination under the ADA argue that weight discrimination is a form of disability discrimination that is based on the medical condition of obesity. Yet, courts have resisted granting the ADA’s protections to obese plaintiffs. This Comment argues that courts should recognize obesity as an ADA-protected disability, even in circuits that have restricted obesity-as-a-disability ADA claims to cases where a plaintiff can show that their obesity is related to a physiological disorder. The author draws parallels between obesity and gender dysphoria to highlight courts’ recent willingness to extend the ADA’s protection to highly stigmatized clinical conditions when a diagnosis has gained credibility in the medical community and evidence suggests that the condition has a physiological cause.

When a municipality takes property, the former owners can allege a violation of the Takings Clause and try to recover just compensation. But what should happen when the municipality goes broke and enters municipal bankruptcy? Can the municipal bankruptcy code empower judges to release municipalities from their obligation to pay just compensation through a discharge? Or does the Takings Clause provide special constitutional protection to claims for just compensation from a municipality that immunizes the claims from discharge? This issue has played out in municipal bankruptcies in Detroit, Michigan; Stockton, California; and Puerto Rico—where courts are deeply divided on the right approach, resulting in a live circuit split. This Comment provides the first comprehensive analysis that shows takings claims are constitutionally dischargeable. As a threshold matter, the Comment shows that formalist considerations do not require immunizing takings claims from discharge. The Comment then shows that making takings claims dischargeable follows best from the original design of the Takings Clause given the host of procedural and political safeguards within municipal bankruptcy that would protect takings claimants against abuse. Lastly, the Comment shows that making takings claims dischargeable is normatively good.

This Comment analyzes the entrance of institutional investors into the single-family rental market after the Great Recession of 2008. The collapse of the housing market during the Great Recession fundamentally changed the ownership structure of U.S. single-family homes. This post-recession reality has introduced a housing puzzle: the pricing trends of single-family rentals in the decade after the Great Recession suggest that institutional investors have captured monopolistic power over the single-family rental market despite owning a relatively small market share. Thus, this Comment evaluates the housing puzzle through the lens of antitrust law. While a potential antitrust case appears to suffer from the critical weaknesses of low entry barriers and market shares, analyzing the institutional entrance into the single-family rental market under antitrust merger doctrine reveals that the case is stronger than it may initially seem. After evaluating the antitrust case, this Comment considers how the housing market can instruct antitrust doctrine’s further evolution, since commentators across academia, the media, and politics all criticize institutional entrance. By highlighting how unique market facts in housing obfuscate market power, this Comment suggests expanding the merger analysis to include not just levels and changes in concentration, but also orders of magnitude.

A recurrent problem in adapting law to artificial intelligence (AI) programs is how the law should regulate the use of entities that lack intentions. Many areas of the law, including freedom of speech, copyright, and criminal law, make liability turn on whether the actor who causes harm (or creates a risk of harm) has a certain intention or mens rea. But AI agents—at least the ones we currently have—do not have intentions in the way that humans do. If liability turns on intention, that might immunize the use of AI programs from liability. We think that the best solution is to employ objective standards that are familiar in many different parts of the law. These legal standards either ascribe intention to actors or hold them to objective standards of conduct.

This Essay explores whether the use of AI to enhance decision-making brings about radical change in legal doctrine or, by contrast, is just another new tool. It focuses on decision-making by board members. This provides an especially relevant example because corporate law has laid out explicit expectations for how board members must go about decision-making.

AI applications will put an end to negotiation processes as we know them. The typical back-and-forth communication and haggling in a state of information insecurity could soon be a thing of the past. AI applications will increase the information level of the parties and drastically reduce transaction costs. A quick and predictable agreement in the middle of a visible bargaining range could become the new normal. But, sophisticated negotiators will shift this bargaining range to their advantage. They will automate negotiation moves and execute value-claiming strategies with precision, exploiting remaining information asymmetries to their advantage. Negotiations will no longer be open-ended communication processes. They will become machine-driven chess endgames. Large businesses will have the upper hand in these endgames.

This paper examines the distinct features of artificial intelligence (AI) and reaches a broader conclusion as to the availability and applicability of first-order tort rules. It evaluates the accuracy of the argument that AI is similar in essence to other emerging technologies that have entered our lives since the First Industrial Revolution and, therefore, does not require special legal treatment. The paper will explore whether our current tort doctrines can serve us well even when addressing AI liability.

Changing technologies render tax law’s intricacy legible in new ways. Advances in large language models, natural language processing, and programming languages designed for the domain of tax law make formalizations, or “representation[s] of [ ] legislation in symbols[ ] using logical connectives,” of tax law that capture much of its substance and structure both possible and realistic. These new formalizations can be used for many different purposes—what one might call flexible formalizations. Flexible formalizations will make law subject to computational analysis, including creating automated explanations of the analysis and testing statutes for consistency and unintended outcomes. This Essay builds upon existing work in computational law and digitalizing legislation.

This Article examines over 500 nationwide-injunction cases and shows that a surprising participant is influencing the result: an outsider who has joined as an intervenor. Judicial discretion over intervention functionally gives courts control over how nationwide-injunction cases proceed, or whether they proceed at all. With few principles guiding that discretion, procedural rulings can appear to be influenced by the court’s own political leanings, undermining public confidence in the court’s decision on the merits. This Article represents the first scholarly examination of the significant role that intervention plays in nationwide-injunction suits. More broadly, this Article uses intervention to explore the function of procedural rules and the federal courts in a democratic system. Finally, this Article offers two reforms that would promote procedural values and cabin the role of the federal courts in ideological litigation.

Judicial reform aimed at rectifying historical inequalities understandably focus on increasing the number of women and people of color on the bench. This Article sheds light on another aspect of the representation problem, which will not necessarily be resolved through greater diversity in judicial appointments: the understudied and opaque practices of judicial administration. Through an empirical study of federal appellate decisions, we find systematic gender and racial imbalances across decision panels. These imbalances are most likely a product of disparities in decision reporting; some decisions, which we call judicial dark matter, go unreported, distorting the representation of judges in reported cases. Our findings suggest that assessing the distribution of legal power across gender and racial groups based on the numbers of judges from these groups may create an inflated sense of the influence of judges from underrepresented groups. We propose reforms to protect against the demographic biases that we uncover.