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...
Eminent domain receives enormous amounts of scholarly and popular attention, and for good reason—it is a powerful form of government coercion that cuts to the heart of ownership. But a mirror-image form of government coercion has been almost entirely ignored: forced ownership, or “forcings.” While legal compulsion to begin or continue ownership is neither entirely...
States have traditionally offered support to their fiscally distressed municipalities. When less intrusive forms of assistance fail to bring stability, some states employ supervisory institutions that exercise approval authority over local budgets or, more intrusively, displace locally elected officials. These “takeover boards” are frequently accused of representing...
Tort law is often seen as a tool for protecting privacy. But tort law can also diminish privacy, by pressuring defendants to gather sensitive information about people, to install comprehensive surveillance, and to disclose information. And the pressure is growing, as technology makes surveillance and other information gathering more cost effective and thus more likely...
What obligations does a state have after it forcibly overthrows the regime of another state or territory? The Hague Regulations and the Fourth Geneva Convention provide some answers, but their prohibition on interfering with the governing structure of the targeted territory is outmoded. Based on a careful examination of subsequent practice of the parties to the conventions,...
One of the great ironies about information privacy law is that the primary regulation of privacy in the United States has barely been studied in a scholarly way. Since the late 1990s, the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) has been enforcing companies’ privacy policies through its authority to police unfair and deceptive trade practices. Despite over fifteen years of...
This Article offers a new explanation for the puzzling origin of modern civil liberties law. Legal scholars have long sought to explain how Progressive lawyers and intellectuals skeptical of individual rights and committed to a strong, activist state came to advocate for robust First Amendment protections after World War I. Most attempts to solve this puzzle focus on...