This Note presents the first empirical study of the implications of the repeal of Civil Rights Law section 50-a (50-a), which made public New York Police Department (NYPD) personnel records, including disciplinary investigations. These data demonstrate the limited potential of transparency reforms, which are lauded as an important step toward increasing police accountability but do little to impact the actual behavior of police officers. Using...
Note
New York City’s coastline is transforming. Its waterfront zoning requirements have drastically expanded public waterfront access by trading building permits and similar discretionary property benefits to developers in exchange for publicly accessible parks, paths, and plazas. This process is almost certainly unconstitutional: Under the searching review of the Supreme Court’s “exactions tetralogy,” these mutually beneficial transactions...
Often, private organizations composed of subject matter experts draft technical standards that describe safety recommendations or “best practices” for certain industries. Legislators and regulators on the federal, state, and local levels will, on occasion, provide legal weight to these privately created standards by incorporating them by reference into the law. Following these standards thus becomes mandatory, but the American people frequently...
Summary reversals have a long history at the U.S. Supreme Court. These short, unsigned opinions reverse lower court decisions on the merits without briefing and oral argument on the theory that the decisions below were plainly wrong. Summary reversals used to be a regular occurrence, most often reserved by the Roberts Court for decisions granting post-conviction relief to people who are incarcerated and denying qualified immunity to police and...
The growth of private companies in the realm of carceral healthcare services has significant implications for plaintiffs seeking to challenge disability discrimination perpetrated during their incarceration. As the face of disability discrimination changes in carceral facilities, so should the legal remedies that hold them to account. This Note outlines the cur-rent scope of disability antidiscrimination litigation in prisons, jails, and detention...
The Supreme Court has long emphasized state and local supremacy over public schooling. This theory of education federalism has been at the heart of the Court’s decisions pulling back on school desegregation and refusing to find a federal fundamental right to education. Today, America’s schools are as segregated as they were in the 1970s and often fail to prepare Americans for democratic participation. Despite the national impact of school failures,...
Platform manipulation is a growing phenomenon affecting billions of internet users globally. Malicious actors leverage the functions and features of online platforms to deceive users, secure financial gain, inflict material harms, and erode the public’s trust. Although social media companies benefit from a safe harbor for their content policies, no state or federal law clearly ascribes liability to platforms complicit in deception by their designs....
Most states have laws prohibiting corporations from owning healthcare practices or employing physicians, collectively forming the corporate practice of medicine doctrine (CPOM). CPOM laws were designed to ensure that licensed professionals, not corporate laymen, decide patient treatment.
Large corporations and private equity firms routinely circumvent CPOM laws by creating subsidiary companies that ostensibly “manage” healthcare practices....
In spring 2023, the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC) resolved three of the four largest bank failures in U.S. history. When the FDIC resolves failed banks, this Note argues, it (unselfconsciously) allocates coordination rights—that is, the right to legally permitted economic coordination. Specifically, by reflexively merging failed banks into larger banks, the FDIC adopts antitrust law’s preference for hierarchical firm-based coordination....
Throughout the twentieth century, several states adopted a new type of laws: Anti-Corporate Farming (ACF) laws. These laws generally prohibit corporations from owning farmland or engaging in the business of farming. They were originally intended to “encourage and protect the family farm as a basic economic unit” and “insure it as the most socially desirable mode of agricultural production.” While subject to criticism, these laws generally...