With the emergence of mass arbitration, companies that once promoted arbitration now seek to block employees from arbitrating claims. This Essay argues that employees have a right to mass arbitrate their claims because mass arbitration is a concerted activity protected by the National Labor Relations Act.

The Yale Law Journal is thrilled to present a Special Issue on the Law of the Territories, w…

The U.S. acquired its first overseas territory—the island of Navassa, near Haiti—by conceptualizing it as property, rather than a piece of sovereign territory. The story of Navassa shows how the concept of property is central to the law of the territories—and, perhaps, a useful tool going forward.

This Article calls on the Supreme Court to overrule—rather than repurpose—the Insular Cases, and it points to constitutional doctrines beyond their reach that can preserve cultural practices without spawning a crisis of political illegitimacy in the unincorporated territories.  

The Article questions the wisdom of urging judicial overthrow of the Insular Cases without a rubric for the many doctrinal universes that might emerge from such an intervention. Ill-considered judicial intervention will pose a grave threat to procedurally legitimate self-determination and to path-dependent interests with roots in that troubled framework.  

Centering on the wide-ranging implications of the Supreme Court’s decision in Rice v. Cayetano, this Article argues that the Court’s race jurisprudence threatens Indigenous self-determination and land rights in the territories. It concludes by offering several strategies that litigants can use to protect Indigenous rights within the existing doctrinal landscape.  

The Ending Forced Arbitration of Sexual Assault and Sexual Harassment Act was supposed to eliminate forced arbitration of cases involving sexual misconduct. This Essay explains why the Act fails to do so. In addition, it outlines what lawmakers and courts can do to fix this problem.

The Article traces modern separation-of-powers jurisprudence to the Court’s reaction to Reconstruction. Converting Lost Cause dogma into the language of constitutional law, the Court sparked a counterrevolution that obscures, and eclipses, a more normatively compelling conception—one that locates in representative institutions authority to constitute the separation of powers by statute.  

In The Collapse of Constitutional Remedies, Aziz Huq contends federal courts exacerbate societal inequities by overzealously enforcing constitutional limits on government regulation while neglecting individual-rights violations. Though some of Huq’s criticisms are spot-on, others are overstated, and his confessed “redistributive goals” —exalting certain constitutional protections over others—imperil

Many states claim to own their water. How to understand such claims is a perennially muddied question which the Supreme Court recently failed to clarify. This Note demonstrates why states can have literal ownership of their water, and why a contrary conclusion could imperil groundwater management in the climate-changed future.

McGirt’s insistence on unambiguous proof of Congress’s intent created an opening for aboriginal-title suits against the United States. By enforcing the congressional-intent requirement, McGirt cleared the sovereign immunity and preclusion bars that have stymied such suits. An overlooked Tenth Circuit decision unknowingly demonstrated how courts can implement McGirt.  

Benefit programs for families rely on rules to determine which individuals can claim which children. These rules shape who qualifies for a program and who does not. This Article critically assesses the design of child-claiming rules, using as case studies the Child Tax Credit and the Earned Income Tax Credit.  

Interior immigration enforcement reaches well beyond deportation. In practice, it also offers a rationale for policing U.S. residents stereotyped as foreign. This Essay shows how a “deportation-centric” approach limits the ability of courts to recognize and redress unjustified surveillance, and it argues for a different framework.  

Gabriel Winant’s The Next Shift charts the transformation of Pittsburgh’s political economy from World War II through 2008. This Review suggests that the long-term process of capitalist development—which is central to Winant’s account—also helped to reshape our labor law over the same period.   

This Note proposes a new dimension for student-speech jurisprudence: procedure. How schools punish speech drives the lessons students learn, and the lessons students learn should drive judicial determinations of whether the educational value of a restriction is worth the First Amendment infringement.   

Existing Eighth Amendment protections force judges to sort children into pseudoscientific categories. An analysis of sentencing transcripts reveals that sentencers routinely rely on unfounded assumptions when sentencing juveniles to life in prison. Following efforts led by formerly incarcerated youth, an age-based ban is necessary to protect youth from irreversible punishment.   

This empirical analysis of merger agreements indicates an evolution in market practice since the COVID-19 pandemic toward providing additional flexibility to targets to respond to extraordinary events that may occur pending closing. This Essay argues that relying on the buyer’s providing consent for such responses is inadequate, and proposes a new framework for ordinary course covenants and MAE provisions

In the “free world,” we look to regulatory rather than constitutional law to keep us healthy, safe, and connected. But inside prison walls, regulatory law recedes. This Article considers its failure to protect prisoners; its substantive, procedural, and normative advantages over constitutional law; and how to strengthen it behind bars.  

Tech platforms are often accused of refusing to deal with their competitors. But courts have largely killed off antitrust liability for such behavior, citing concerns that it would chill investment in new technologies. This Article argues that antitrust can protect investment without needlessly stifling enforcement in meritorious cases. 

In a new book, Douglas Baird argues that the values of reorganization professionals, more than statute or case law, define the norms of corporate bankruptcy. This Book Review shows how rule-by-reorganizers can explain Chapter 11's troubling tendency to disregard the interests of legacy creditors. 

The Stored Communications Act poses an increasing threat to criminal defendants’ ability to access evidence. This Note analyzes pathways criminal defendants can pursue to access evidence within the current statutory framework and argues that the statute is unconstitutional as applied to cases where such pathways to exculpatory evidence are blocked. 

Since the Supreme Court’s 1975 decision that students enjoy constitutionally protected property interests in education, most states have passed laws and regulations requiring schools to provide meals and health services to students. These services arguably constitute entitlements, requiring schools to afford heightened procedural protections to students subject to exclusionary discipline. 

The version of American history we adopt matters for our understanding of law. In property law, we overlook how the land system underpinning the American real estate market developed, and how that market grew through racial inequality, if we do not examine conquest and slavery as foundational to the field. 

Bankruptcy grifters infiltrate the Chapter 11 process, seeking bankruptcy’s benefits for mass-tort defendants without incurring many of its costs. This Article concludes that bankruptcy should not be a procedural panacea for companies facing litigation exposure, and offers a number of potential solutions to deter non-debtor defendants from becoming bankruptcy grifters.  

Promoting sustainable corporate governance will require reforming features of the corporation that incentivize excessive risk-taking and cost externalization. This Feature critiques how prevailing theories cabin the debate and presents an alternative approach more conducive to reform, evaluating disclosure-based strategies and assessing initiatives that re-envision board composition and underlying

Modern applications of the binding-norm test suggest that agencies cannot bind even low-level officials to internal guidance. This Note, however, finds that internal binding norms are common tools of bureaucratic supervision. In response, it proposes a new approach to judicial review of guidance that separates its internal and external effects. 

This Note compares the MPC’s mens rea regime with the “reasons-responsiveness” conception of culpability widespread among criminal law theorists. It argues that if the reasons-responsiveness account is correct, the MPC will often fail to track offenders’ relative culpability, resulting in disproportionate punishments both within and across grades of crimes. 

Nondebtor releases are the rotten core of the “bankruptcy grifter” phenomenon that Lindsey Simon’s article critiques. Such releases are an unconstitutional exercise of substantive common lawmaking by the federal courts, and they are not necessary for the bankruptcy process to facilitate efficient and fair aggregate settlements of mass tort litigation.  

In this Forum Response, Dorothy Lund considers whether the “corporate governance gap” between large and small public companies is the product of harmful or beneficial forces, and in so doing, rejects the idea that there is a single governance framework that is optimal for all public companies.

In The Emergence of Neutrality, Jud Campbell provocatively argues that courts only recently recognized the importance of neutrality to First Amendment law. In this Response I argue that this claim is wrong: that neutrality has always been important to free speech law, even if its meaning has shifted over time.

This Article offers an empirical account of the differences in governance practices between large- and small-cap companies, resulting in what this Article terms the “Corporate Governance Gap.” Recognizing a disparity in the operation of driving forces that promote governance practices, the Article proposes policy reforms aimed at bridging this gap.  

This Article traces the origins of the content and viewpoint neutrality principles in First Amendment law. It argues that these ideas emerged later than scholars have previously appreciated and that their development was tied to a broader Twentieth Century transformation in constitutional rights jurisprudence.  

This Review assesses the arguments made in Akhil Amar’s The Words That Made Us about the impoverished nature of our current discourse on our constitutional system of government.  

Despite their differences, consumer and business Chapter 7 cases are administered by the same trustees under the same rules. We advance normative arguments against this one-size-fits-all approach, buttressed by novel empirical research. Two policy changes are appropriate: (1) trustee compensation should differ by case type, and (2) trustees should specialize.  

What would it take for a state to eliminate racial bias in policing? This Comment explores one intervention set forth in California’s new Racial Justice Act: a guarantee of charging or sentencing relief for anyone subjected to police racism during arrest or investigation.  

Historically, U.S. unemployment insurance has excluded workers lying outside the conventional employer/employee binary. That should change. This Essay argues for extending benefits to gig-economy workers, via structures fashioned after states’ existing unemployment programs. It grounds its argument in two philosophical traditions foundational to tax-law scholarship: liberal egalitarianism and utilitarianism

Janus’s failure to recognize a state interest in labor organizing contained a twofold mistake. Organizing develops a culture of civic trust. In turn, civic trust is necessary for citizens to accept the sorts of accommodations raised by conscience-based exemptions claims—like Janus’s—that the state must legitimize.

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.