Robinhood and similar investment apps bear a disturbing resemblance to video slot machines. This kind of “gamified” product design drives investors to lose money by overtrading. But if regulators try to cure the problem by de-gamifying the software, they will pick a First Amendment fight that securities law cannot afford. 

Courts have upheld laws conditioning felon re-enfranchisement on financial repayment by reasoning that disenfranchised citizens lack the rights and protections of political equality. Drawing on legal and democratic theory, this Essay challenges that view. Because disenfranchised citizens retain cognizable interests in political participation, financial-repayment conditions are unconstitutional poll

This Essay analyzes ARPA’s major provisions to determine their potential impact on racial equity. It argues that the Biden Administration should do more to tackle racial wealth inequality and the structural issues in the tax code that allow the rich to benefit disproportionately from tax subsidies.

Nonlawyers, including court personnel, are typically prohibited from providing legal advice. But definitions of “legal advice” are unnecessarily broad, creating confusion, disadvantaging self-represented litigants, and possibly raising due-process concerns. This Essay argues for a narrower, more explicit definition of legal advice that advances, rather than undercuts, access to justice.

Rethinking Police Expertise reveals how litigators can use police officers’ assertions of expertise against them. This Response questions the value, however, of urging judges to treat police expertise as a “professional technology” as opposed to a “professional virtue.” Insisting on this conceptual distinction may weaken the article’s considerable normative potential.  

Does administrative law have a racial blind spot? Ceballos, Engstrom, and Ho examine “disparate limbo”: how claims that agencies caused racial disparities have come to evade review under both antidiscrimination and administrative law, and how ignoring race may have helped build modern administrative law’s empire.  

Judicial reasoning about police expertise has toggled between two distinct conceptions of expertise itself: as a professional virtue or a professional technology. Taking stock of both views offers new strategies in a range of disputes about police misconduct. It also illuminates debates about expertise and deference beyond the criminal law.    

Data practices of powerful technology companies are aimed primarily at deriving population-level, relational insights, not individual insights specific to a data subject. To apprehend and adjudicate among the supra-individual legal interests that result from data relations necessitates far more public and collective (i.e., democratic) forms of governing data production.  

Judicial review of the Federal Reserve is uncommon. But this may soon change: a Court skeptical of administrative governance is poised to collide with an increasingly interventionist Fed. This Note argues that any path forward must take seriously the Fed’s role in our economic system while acknowledging its democratic deficiencies.   

The Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court’s ex parte, in camera proceedings are in tension with the Article III values of transparency and adversarialism. This Note assesses the limited participation of outside amici curiae at the court and proposes a special advocate to serve as a permanent, independent adversary to the government.

The American Rescue Plan Act temporarily altered refundable tax credits in 2021 to include previously excluded families and workers. These changes protect millions of households from being pushed into poverty by taxes. This Essay argues that Congress should build on these reforms to make refundable tax credits more protective.

This Essay considers the lessons of the American Rescue Plan for design of the safety net, using unemployment insurance as a case study. It shows why UI failed and how to fix it, including how to provide benefits to part-time workers.  

Our current approach to state debt overcorrects for the problem that states might borrow too much. We can do better and aspects of the federal response to the pandemic illustrate how. The federal government should make forgiveable low-cost loans available to the states, but within limits to prevent moral hazard. 

Texas’s patently unconstitutional Senate Bill 8, which effectively bans abortions and assigns enforcement to private individuals, has forced the question whether states can insulate their laws from pre-enforcement review. This piece offers a roadmap for the Court to hold that states may not engage in such procedural trickery.  

To create online spaces that do not merely replicate existing hierarchies and reinforce unequal distributions of social, economic, cultural, and political power, we must move beyond the simplistic cliché of the unregulated public square and commit to the hard work of designing for democracy.  

Privacy protections play a vital role in disrupting surveillance-caused subordination and should be at the forefront of efforts to reform digital and physical public space. Robust privacy protections empower marginalized groups to safely participate, while increasing heterogeneity within the public sphere and enabling the healthy contestation of ideas. 

Online companies bear few duties under law to tend to the discrimination that they facilitate or the disinformation that they deliver. Consumers and members of historically marginalized groups are accordingly the likeliest to be harmed. These companies should bear the same, if not more, responsibility to guard against such inequalities.

The pandemic revealed that the increasing complexity of debtors’ capital structure could supply much-needed competition in the Chapter 11 financing market, as other inside lenders increasingly challenge a debtor’s favored inside lenders. After discussing the benefits of this surprising development, the Essay identifies several impediments and offers strategies for removing them.  

The COVID induced debt spike on corporate balance sheets portends a wave of future bankruptcy cases. Congress should act now to build up a bankruptcy infrastructure by requiring that every circuit create a “business bankruptcy panel” designed to administer the Chapter 11 filing of large companies. Recent Delaware caselaw would likely enforce a corporation’s precommitment to file in one of these venues

To assist small businesses in the wake of an exogenous shock, Congress should consider implementing a system of lending that models the financing provided to small business debtors in a bankruptcy proceeding. Such a system would be more targeted, effective, and fair than traditional government loans, but less stigmatizing than bankruptcy.  

The intersection of major crises and financial distress generates no shortage of stock stories. This Essay offers one more: how shocks can be used opportunistically in big Chapter 11 cases to unravel bankruptcy law, and to shift the system further away from the objective of responding to overindebtedness.  

The law-and-economics literature assumes that omnisciently rational “sophisticated parties” write optimal contracts, making bankruptcy law unnecessary. Two case studies, J. Crew and Nine West, illustrate the limitations of this idealized model. We argue for a theory of debt contracting based in bounded rationality that recognizes bankruptcy’s inherent complexity.

Although federal law offers, at best, unpaid time off work to care for family members with medical needs, recently enacted state laws guarantee paid leave. This Essay argues the laws are groundbreaking in their inclusion of nonmarital partners, extended family, and other chosen family, and it proposes strategies for effective implementation.   

Religious and secular beliefs about marriage and sexuality are often in tension. Partisans on both sides commonly insist that public policy entirely reflect their views, which leads to perpetual conflict. This Essay advocates for pluralistic solutions to such conflicts, using an example from the context of adoption and foster care.   

This Essay highlights the threat claims for religious exemptions to antidiscrimination laws pose to the diverse family arrangements that now populate our society. It argues we should not abide efforts to thwart, undermine, and ultimately overturn advances in equality norms in the family based on religious belief.

The prohibition on contingency fee arrangements with divorce lawyers is a relic of the coverture regime. It cannot withstand Due Process scrutiny because the supposed governmental interests it purports to advance—burdening access to the divorce process for economically vulnerable persons—are not legitimate governmental interests under modern constitutional jurisprudence.   

This Article “unpacks” the doctrine of third-party standing. First, it identifies true third-party standing problems by distinguishing them from first-party claims, largely by reference to the “zone of interests” concept. Second, it distinguishes among three types of parties invoking third-party standing: directly regulated parties, collaterally injured parties, and representative parties.  

Liberty, accountability, and other values advanced by separation-of-powers tools such as the “power of the purse” come with real-world costs targeted at marginalized groups. Scholars and courts should account for such skewed impacts by including antisubordination among the values they consider in analyzing separation-of-powers questions.   

This Feature grounds a core prescription for antitrust law—to disperse economic coordination rights—in its “moral economy” origins, tracing a thread through the common law, nineteenth-century antimonopoly politics, and the legislative history of the Sherman Act. The normative thread traced here is interwoven with an argument about institutional roles.  

This Note argues that the CEDAW Committee should embrace and expand on its admissibility decision in M.W. v. Denmark, in which the Committee granted victim standing to a male child, by allowing any individual to allege CEDAW violations without restriction on the basis of sex, gender, or gender identity.  

The Bankruptcy Clause delimits Congress’s bankruptcy power, but its limits changed after ratification of the Thirteenth Amendment. Before, it enabled collective creditor remedies against merchant debtors; after, it provided relief to insolvent debtors threatened by economic oppression. Recognizing this development supplies new constitutional grounds for bankruptcy law’s “fresh start” policy.  

Scholars and critics of the legal profession often call on lawyers to represent clients in the public interest or with due regard for justice. However, in a climate of intense political polarization, rule-of-law values are of paramount significance for legal ethics.   

Lawyer lies designed to sabotage valid election results are not protected political speech under the First Amendment. Ethics rules governing candor and frivolous litigation require sanctions, if not disbarment. Moreover, the duty of candor should be extended from the courthouse to the public square when lawyer lies threaten our democracy.

This Essay explores how amicus briefs became a tool for coordinated judicial lobbying by dark-money interests. I show how current funding-disclosure rules for amici fail to provide genuine transparency—undermining fairness—and discuss reforms that could improve the judiciary’s amicus-disclosure regime and restore faith in the courts.  

Chief Justice Bridget McCormack argues there is no ethical obstacle to judges working to improve the justice system. To the contrary: although ethical constraints limit the form of their advocacy, effective law reform depends on judges’ contributions and they are ethically obligated to improve the judicial system over which they preside.  

This Essay explores the ethics and politics of extrajudicial activities from a distinctly historical perspective. While others have written about judges and their political and extrajudicial endeavors, this Essay situates its discussion within the evolution of judicial ethics codes, beginning in antiquity and proceeding to the present.

This Essay examines how states’ initial COVID-19 vaccine-distribution strategies tended to disadvantage populations of color, including Black, Latinx, and Native American communities. These dynamics resonate with “inverse equity” effects of other public-health innovations. We argue for a federal regulatory framework to reduce inequity-forcing effects during initial vaccine rollout.  

This Essay argues that Congress can and should replace the existing state-law defamation regime with a federal defamation law. Doctrinally, a federal regime would better fit the modern, boundaryless digital-communications paradigm. Practically, it would benefit press organizations by ensuring their access to the federal courts in defamation cases.

Intersectionality surfaces the experiences of disabled people of color, but it tells us less about the malleability of this type of discrimination. This Essay contends that aesthetic theories of structural subordination can supplement emerging discussions on intersectionality by underscoring the visual and emotional roots of racial and disability discrimination.  

Large digital platforms often are not winner-take-all markets. As a result, antitrust has a role but breakup is rarely the right solution. Better options include incentivizing competition within the platform or forcing interoperability or information sharing. Current merger policy, however, is poorly designed to address platform acquisitions of small firms.  

This Review examines the significance of Henry Louis Gates, Jr.’s new book, Stony the Road: Reconstruction, White Supremacy, and the Rise of Jim Crow, for the study of racism in our nation’s legal system and for the regulation of race in the legal profession.

Even as Congress has gradually improved the military justice system, its members have unjustly interfered with individual cases. This Note surveys the complex history of Congress’s involvement with military justice and proposes reforms to preserve productive oversight and reduce destructive interference.

In southeastern Louisiana, plantations still line the Mississippi River, surrounded by Black communities who experience these estates as sites of racialized harm. This Note explores the use of eminent domain to achieve land-based reparations for these descendants and draws lessons for reparations at other sites of historical and continued subjugation.

This ten-year retrospective on the Mental Health Parity and Addiction Equity Act (MHPAEA) traces the law’s ambivalent track record to its merely partial adoption of a cooperative-federalist framework. Drawing from enforcement data, state settlement documents, and other cooperative-federalist statutes, this Note suggests policy interventions tailored to improve enforcement.

For decades firms have asserted their support for diversity efforts but struggled to achieve increased demographic diversity. This Essay argues that institutional investors should require firms to disclose information regarding the current demographic diversity of their workforces and supply chains, as well as measurable, specific plans to improve racial equity.   

Federal law currently provides for direct Supreme Court review of criminal convictions from almost all American jurisdictions, but not of most court-martial convictions. For them, an Article I court can veto access to the Supreme Court. This Essay argues for elimination of that veto.

Securities regulation is a poor host for insider trading doctrine. This Note advances an alternative: the law of federal criminal fraud. It argues that a standalone model of Title 18 insider trading can resolve stubborn doctrinal puzzles, stamp out judge-made securities crimes, and reanchor the offense to its conceptual foundations.

Redboxing is the term used by campaign operatives to describe when candidates and political parties post public, online messages to share campaign strategy with super PACs. This Note provides the first descriptive account of the practice, and assesses its legality under the Federal Election Commission’s test for coordination.