The key insight in Professor Miriam Seifter’s outstanding article Countermajoritarian Legislatures is that state legislatures are usually antidemocratic due to partisan gerrymandering, whereas state governors and judiciaries are insulated from gerrymandering by statewide elections (or selection), and thus they should have a more prominent role in framing election law and in enforcing the separation of powers.
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For many years, the executive branch has concluded foreign commercial agreements with trading partners pursuant to delegated authority from Congress. The deals govern the contours of a wide range of U.S. inbound and outbound trade: from food safety rules for imported products to procedures and specifications of exported goods, to name two. The problem is that often no one—apart from the executive branch negotiators—knows what these deals contain....
In Kelly v. United States, the Supreme Court vacated the federal corruption convictions of the three government officials behind “Bridgegate.” In the process of doing so, the Court flagged an interesting tool that states have in their anticorruption toolkits that might’ve applied to the conduct before the Court: official misconduct statutes. These dynamic statutes are on the books in twenty-three states and territories, and another...
During and after last year’s expansive Black Lives Matter protests, police departments nationwide publicly shared robust video surveillance of protestors. Much of this footage rendered individual protestors identifiable, sometimes in ways that seemed intentional. Such disclosures raise First Amendment concerns under NAACP v. Alabama ex rel. Patterson and its progeny, including the recent Americans for Prosperity v. Bonta decision....
In response to Black Lives Matter protests across the country in the summer of 2020, then-President Donald Trump sent federal agents into numerous American cities to “dominate” the protesters. These agents were largely unidentified, lacking both departmental insignia and badges displaying their personal identification information. As we have seen in the past, when law enforcement officers do not identify themselves, they can evade accountability...
In response to the national reckoning on race that began in the summer of 2020, Aunt Jemima resigns and issues a call to all corporations to address systemic racism. In this imagining of the letter that she, as a real Black woman, would send upon her resignation from PepsiCo, she tells her own story as a spokesperson based on racist tropes and suggests that the country is at a turning point. Corporations must do more than issue statements about...
As U.S. competition authorities ponder whether age-old antitrust laws should be modernized to apply to tech giants, a first-order question is: What existing antitrust laws apply to their conduct? A formerly formidable tool that has been defanged through lax enforcement is the Robinson–Patman Act (RPA). Passed by Congress in 1936, the RPA was drafted in response to a growing public concern that large chain stores were squeezing out small businesses....
Race and medicine scholarship is beset by a conundrum. On one hand, some racial justice scholars and advocates frame the harms that racial minorities experience through a medical lens. Poverty and homelessness are social determinants of health that medical frameworks should account for. Racism itself is a public health threat. On the other hand, other scholars treat medicine with skepticism. Medical frameworks, they argue, will reify racially...
“If I can be provocative, shouldn’t this study be done in Africa, where there are no masks, no treatment, no intensive care, a bit like some studies on AIDS or among prostitutes. We try things, because we know they . . . are highly exposed and they don’t protect themselves. What do you think about that?” Jean-Paul Mira, […]
Introduction When a Louisiana state court set Ronald Egana’s bail at $26,000, Egana’s mother and close friend did what hundreds of thousands of arrestees do each year: They sought the services of a commercial bail bondsman. Blair’s Bail Bonds agreed to post Egana’s bail in exchange for a twelve-percent nonrefundable premium, the state-approved rate in […]