In this Article, I identify and critique a phenomenon I call Free Exercise Lochnerism. In promoting corporate religious exemptions from employment and consumer protections, litigants, scholars, and courts are resurrecting Lochner v. New York—a case symbolic of the courts’ widely criticized use of freedom of contract to strike down economic regulation at the turn of the last century. Today, in their interpretations of the First Amendment...
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Every year, fee awards enable millions of people to obtain access to justice and strengthen the deterrent effect of the law by motivating lawyers to handle class actions. But little research exists on why judges award the amounts they do or whether they size fee awards correctly. The process remains a black box. Through a detailed study of 431 securities class actions that settled in federal district courts from 2007 through 2012, this Article...
The law fails to accommodate the inconvenient fact that an individual’s identifiable genetic information is involuntarily and immutably shared with her close genetic relatives. Legal institutions have established that individuals have a cognizable interest in controlling genetic information that is identifying to them. The Supreme Court recognized in Maryland v. King that the Fourth Amendment is implicated when arrestees’ DNA is analyzed,...
Scholars and activists have long been interested in conscientious law-breaking as a means of dissent. The civil disobedient violates the law in a bid to highlight its illegitimacy and motivate reform. A less heralded form of social action, however, involves nearly the opposite approach. As a wide range of examples attest, dissenters may also seek to disrupt legal regimes through hyperbolic, literalistic, or otherwise unanticipated adherence to...
By “pooling” legal and other resources allocated to different agencies, the executive creates joint structures capable of ends that no single agency could otherwise achieve. Pooling destabilizes core conceptions of administrative law. According to one influential account, for example, Congress exercises control over the bureaucracy through agency design. Pooling,...
The past decade has witnessed dramatic changes in public attitudes about and legal status for same-sex couples who wish to marry. These changes demonstrate that the legal conception of the family is no longer limited to traditional marriage. They also raise the possibility that other relationships—cohabiting couples and their children, voluntary kin groups, multigenerational...
Criminal discovery reform has accelerated in recent years, triggered in part by the prosecution’s widely perceived failure to abide by its constitutional obligation, articulated in Brady v. Maryland, to disclose exculpatory evidence. Practitioners and academics, disillusioned by the Supreme Court’s hands-off approach, have sought reform along three axes:...
How does making law through private lawsuits differ from making law by other means? That question is especially important where legislators deputize “private attorneys general” as statutory enforcers, from antitrust and securities to civil rights and consumer protection. Yet legal scholars have not offered sustained theoretical or empirical analysis of how private...
The Constitution allocates entitlements not only to individuals, but also to institutions such as states and branches of the federal government. It is familiar fare that individuals’ entitlements are routinely deployed both as shields against unconstitutional action and as bargaining chips when striking deals with the state. By contrast, the paradigmatic models of...
Law has been trapped in a stylistic straitjacket. The Internet has revolutionized media and communications, replacing text with a dizzying array of multimedia graphics and images. Facebook hosts more than 150 billion photos. Courts spend millions on trial technology. But those innovations have barely trickled into the black-and-white world of written law. Legal treatises...