Note

Until recently, the Supreme Court interpreted the Federal Power Act (FPA) to draw an impermeable boundary between the jurisdiction of the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) and those of state public utility commissions. But the Court’s recent decisions in FERC v. Electric Power Supply Association (EPSA) and Hughes v. Talen Energy Marketing, LLC appear to relax the formalistic test tradi­tion­ally used to resolve...

This Note assesses First Amendment freedom of speech claims with regard to online civil rights testing. Transactions that have conventionally occurred in person are now more often completed online, and providers transacting online have been increasingly using algo­rithms that synthe­size users’ data. While these algorithms are helpful tools, they may also be yielding discriminatory results, whether inten­tionally or unintentionally.

In...

The opioid crisis in the United States has affected and continues to affect the lives of hundreds of thousands of people. Driven by opioids and fentanyl, overdose is a leading cause of death. It has claimed more lives than guns, breast cancer, and car accidents. While some potential solutions have sought to strengthen criminal laws and provide harsher sanctions to drug dealers to combat drug abuse, harm reduction practices continue to best address...

The SEC’s recent—and controversial—choice to make more frequent use of internal enforcement actions has raised several questions. Some have asked whether the SEC has attempted to advantage itself by prosecuting in-house; others have asked whether the SEC’s internal enforcement scheme is unconstitutional. This Note asks a largely over­looked threshold question: Do—and just as importantly, should—federal district courts have parallel...

Courts regularly consider a parent’s physical disability in child cus­tody disputes. At times, they go as far as to invoke physical disability as a minus factor that weighs against granting custody to that parent. This practice often reflects family court judges’ attitudinal biases, which are premised on ill-conceived notions of how physical disability actually af­fects one’s ability to parent. Because child custody adjudication af­fords...

Affordable housing residency preferences give residents of a specific geographic “preference area” prioritized access to affordable housing units within that geographic area. Historically, majority-white munici­palities have sometimes used affordable housing residency preferences to systematically exclude racial minorities who reside in sur­rounding com­munities. Courts have invalidated such residency pref­erences, usually on the grounds...

This Note examines the disparate treatment of greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions in the regulatory cost–benefit analysis and the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA) review contexts. In Zero Zone, Inc. v. United States Department of Energy, the Seventh Circuit upheld the use of the social cost of carbon (SCC) when agencies consider GHG emissions in their cost–benefit analyses. At the same time, courts have almost uniformly rejected...

Employers seeking to test job applicants for strength or speed while adhering to the mandates of Title VII often use gender-normed physical-ability tests. Gender-normed tests set different raw cutoffs for male and female applicants such that each class would be expected to have rough­ly equal pass rates. This practice has helped employers—especially law enforcement agencies—retain physical hiring standards while miti­gating their disparate...

Legislatures often instruct judges to impose harsher punishments on people who have prior criminal convictions—for example, a conviction for a “crime of violence” or for a “crime involving moral turpitude.” But how are judges to determine whether a person has such a conviction? In Mathis v. United States, the Supreme Court clarified that judges can rely on only the legal “elements” of prior convictions, not the factual “means”...

The All Writs Act, 28 U.S.C. § 1651, authorizes federal courts to “issue all writs necessary or appropriate in aid of their respective jurisdictions and agreeable to the usages and principles of law.” The Act has applications in a variety of contexts, including law enforcement investigations, the detention of military prisoners, and the management of complex multidistrict litigation. Another important but less studied area is the Act’s use...