Increased use of the cloud and its international scope raise significant challenges to traditional legal authorities that permit access to data stored outside the United States. The resulting stakes are high. This area of law affects a wide range of important matters concerning law enforcement, national security, and civil litigation.
Up until now, however, policymakers in this area have failed to fully appreciate the technological distinctions...
The #MeToo movement has shaken corporate America in recent months, leading to the departures of several high-profile executives as well as sharp stock price declines at a number of firms. Investors have taken notice and taken action: Shareholders at more than a half dozen publicly traded companies have filed lawsuits since the start of 2017 alleging that corporate fiduciaries breached state law duties or violated federal securities laws in connection...
The American criminal justice system is a system of pleas. Few who know it well think it is working. And yet, identifying plausible strategies for law reform proves challenging, given the widely held scholarly assumption that plea bargaining operates “beyond the shadow of the law.” That assumption holds true with respect to substantive and constitutional criminal law—the two most studied bodies of law in the criminal justice system—neither...
Decarbonization is the process of converting our economy from one that runs predominantly on energy derived from fossil fuels to one that runs almost exclusively on clean, carbon-free energy. If pursued on the scale that experts believe necessary to prevent dangerous climate change, the infrastructure changes required to decarbonize the United States will have significant social and cultural implications. States aggressively pursuing decarbonization...
The rise of arbitration has been one of the most significant developments in civil justice. Many scholars have criticized arbitration for, among other things, “privatizing” or “delegating” the state’s dispute-resolution powers and allowing private parties to abuse those powers with virtual impunity. An implicit assumption underlying this critique is that civil procedure, in contrast to arbitration, does not delegate significant state...
There is a war raging over the admissibility of the prior bad acts of criminal defendants in federal trials. While many circuits treat Federal Rule of Evidence 404(b) as a rule of “inclusion” and liberally admit such prior bad-acts evidence with predictably explosive effects on criminal juries, a few circuits are developing rigorous standards designed to foreclose prosecutorial use of such bad-acts evidence. This Article chronicles the...
Batson v. Kentucky is widely regarded as a failure. In the thirty-plus years since it was decided by the Supreme Court, the doctrine has been subjected to unrelenting criticism for its inability to stop the discriminatory use of peremptory challenges. The scholarly literature is nearly unanimous: Batson is broken. But this Article approaches Batson from a different perspective, focusing on Batson’s appellate...
Shortly after John Wilkes Booth assassinated Abraham Lincoln on April 14, 1865, President Andrew Johnson directed that Booth’s alleged coconspirators be tried in a makeshift military tribunal, rather than in the Article III court that was open for business just a few blocks from Ford’s Theatre. Johnson’s decision implicated a fundamental constitutional question that was heatedly debated throughout the Civil War: When, if ever, may the federal...
The 2016 presidential election was one of the most divisive in recent memory, but it produced a surprising bipartisan consensus. Donald Trump, Hillary Clinton, and Bernie Sanders all agreed that U.S. trade agreements should be, but are not, “fair.” Although it...
Dozens of multimember agencies across the federal government are subject to partisan balance requirements, which mandate that no more than a simple majority of agency members may hail from a single party. Administrative law scholars and political scientists have questioned whether these provisions meaningfully affect the ideological composition of federal agencies. In theory, Presidents can comply with these requirements by appointing ideologically...