Comment

Court reporters have long been a fixture of American jurisprudence, but tightening state budgets and a nationwide shortage of certified reporters have left many civil proceedings without any form of verbatim transcription at state expense. This hinders access to justice for impoverished parties: The absence of a transcript is often deadly to one’s chances of prevailing on appeal, no matter how meritorious the claim. This Comment draws on precedent regarding appellate transcript fees to argue that the Due Process and Equal Protection Clauses establish a right to verbatim transcript creation for some indigent civil litigants.

ERISA’s civil enforcement provisions protect workers whose plan administrators mishandle their benefits. In many cases, a beneficiary’s only path to relief is through § 502(a)(3)’s authorization of “appropriate equitable relief”; yet the Supreme Court has not been clear about when monetary compensation is available under this provision, and circuit courts have split as a result. This Comment proposes a workable judicial framework to resolve the split: Courts should award equitable monetary compensation when a fiduciary causes harm with clearly identifiable financial value and the beneficiary lacks the sophistication to protect themselves through alternative means.

When an agency declines to defend the constitutionality of its structure, the court must determine whether it can decide the issue despite the parties’ agreement. Building on case law and scholarship about the adversity requirement, this Comment proposes a multifactor framework for courts to use when making this decision. Pursuant to this framework, if a court finds that separation of powers concerns and pragmatic considerations related to judicial economy and the protection of affected nonparty interests counsel in favor of proceeding to the merits, it should appoint an amicus curiae to raise adverse arguments before deciding the issue.

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.

In Woodford v. Ngo, the Supreme Court cemented the judicial assumption that most prisons have effective and navigable internal grievance procedures within the doctrinal rules surrounding the Prison Litigation Reform Act's (PLRA) exhaustion requirement. Reliance on the assumption has contributed to a body of PLRA exhaustion doctrine that maps poorly onto the factual realities of the prison context and requires constant clarification by the Supreme Court. Indeed, the Supreme Court has been called upon twice in the past decade to sort out the mess of doctrinal rules governing PLRA exhaustion, first in Ross v. Blake and just this year in Perttu v. Richards. Examining the Court's path to Ross and Perttu, this Comment argues that the Court's reliance on the assumption mandated in Woodford blinded it to the potential constitutional problems generated by Ross, which led to the circuit split at issue in Perttu. Thus, the Court must clarify the boundaries of PLRA exhaustion for the second time in fewer than ten years. Efficiency is one of the core purposes of PLRA exhaustion, and the Supreme Court’s perpetual cycle of clarifying (and reclarifying, and reclarifying again) its construction of a single statutory provision fails to serve that end.

In Snyder v. United States, the Supreme Court held that a federal criminal statute covers only bribes, not gratuities. The key issue in factually similar cases is whether a quid pro quo agreement occurred. The Snyder Court provided no guidance on this issue. This Comment responds by turning to antitrust law. Antitrust faces the same problem as bribery law: determining whether an illegal agreement occurred when both parties benefit from it. Antitrust has developed several “plus factors” to explain what circumstantial evidence suffices to prove an illegal agreement. This Comment uses that antitrust framework to propose ten bribery plus factors.

In 1977, a company convicted of conspiring with the mob asked President Carter for a pardon. The government speculated that the President could so exercise the pardon power, but ultimately no pardon ever issued. Nearly fifty years later, President Trump has pardoned a company convicted of violating the Bank Secrecy Act. People are again speculating that the pardon power covers companies, but few can offer evidence either way. History shows that the pardon power covers companies. Before the Founding, the King would often pardon corporations. Both the city of London and the Massachusetts Bay Company were pardoned before the Founders were even born. This tradition was the background against which the Pardon Clause and many of its state analogs were drafted. That the President can pardon companies might feel surprising or even unsettling. But the prerogative fits comfortably into the nation's separation of powers. Congress can make exercising the power less attractive by withholding refunded fines or shifting crimes to civil infractions. These checks come with more tradeoffs when exercised int he context of human beings, which might explain why Congress has not exercised them so far.

When prisoner officials burden the free exercise rights of prisoners, prisoners can seek recourse under 42 U.S.C. § 1983. However, due to the specialized and restrictive nature of prisons, courts adjudicate these claims under a reasonableness test set out in the case Turner v. Sadfley instead of a strict scrutiny standard. While circuits agree on using the Turner test for prisoner free exercise claims, there is a deep circuit split on the proper threshold test for these types of claims. While some circuits hold that inmates need to show that their religious practice was substantially burdened, other circuits hold that inmates just need to show that their religious practice was sincere. These threshold tests produce significant differences in how prisoner free exercise claims are litigated in court. After exploring the relevant Supreme Court guidance, this Comment aims to settle the split by examining each threshold test on its respective merits, considering neutral criteria such as screening ability, adherence to judicial capacity, and workability.