In an era of declining labor power, police unions stand as a success story for worker organizing—they exert political clout and negotiate favorable terms for their members. Yet, despite support for unionization on the political left, police unions have become public enemy number one for commentators concerned about race and police violence. Much criticism of police unions focuses on their obstructionism and their prioritization of members’...
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As the courts continue to restrict and further restrict the availability of Bivens remedies, one category of claims has been left behind—medical-care claims brought by people detained pretrial. Because of the way the Supreme Court structured the Bivens analysis in Ziglar v. Abbasi, people incarcerated postconviction can, and do, bring claims under the Eighth Amendment for damages resulting from constitutionally defective...
To determine whether there has been a violation of the Fourth Amendment, courts must first analyze whether there has been a “search” or “seizure.” Current doctrine offers two methods of identifying a “search”: the trespassory test and the Katz test. Scholars have criticized the Katz test, which asks whether an individual has a reasonable expectation of privacy, as being difficult to apply. In Carpenter v. United States, Justice Gorsuch...
The California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA) is the first-of-its-kind law in the United States providing Californians (and effectively citizens nationwide) with comprehensive protection of their online data. The CCPA provides consumers with four meaningful rights: (1) a right to access the data companies collect from and about them; (2) a right to have said data deleted; (3) a right to know which categories of third parties these companies are sharing...
For twenty-five years, the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) has brought enforcement actions against companies for data breaches using its statutory authority under Section 5 of the FTC Act to police “unfair or deceptive acts or practices.” While the Commission originally brought cases under the “deceptive” prong of Section 5, more recent cases have been brought under the vague “unfairness” prong. These cases allege that a company that...
In early 2018, North Korea’s Supreme Leader Kim Jong-un and U.S. President Donald Trump were not on the best of terms, publicly lashing out at each other and threatening the destruction of the other’s state. And yet, within the year they were smiling and handshaking in Singapore, followed not long after by a second summit in Vietnam. These summits, focused on the prospect of North Korea’s denuclearization, have in fact raised important...
As James Madison famously wrote, the power of the purse is “the most complete and effectual weapon with which any constitution can arm the immediate representatives of the people.” But the Constitution does not outline specific procedures for how Congress should use that weapon. Over time, Congress has developed a set of norms—the two-step authorization-appropriations process—to effectively execute its power under the Appropriations Clause....
In 1858, the United States Attorney General issued an opinion, Invention of a Slave, declaring inventions by African Americans, enslaved and free, unpatentable. Within a few years, legal changes that abolished the law of slavery rendered the opinion obsolete, and it became forgotten, dropped from legal memory. Combining history and Critical Race Theory, this Essay repositions the opinion as a remembered legal story and argues that law’s selective...
Companies with a dual-class structure have increasingly been involved in high-profile battles over the reallocation of control rights. Google, for instance, sought to entrench its founders’ control by recapitalizing from a dual-class into a triple-class structure. The CBS board, in contrast, attempted to dilute its controlling shareholder by distributing a voting stock dividend that would empower minority shareholders to block a merger it perceived...
Courts and commentators have long struggled to reconcile prominent federalism doctrines with the text of the Constitution. These doctrines include state sovereign immunity, the anticommandeering doctrine, and the equal sovereignty of the States. Supporters of such doctrines have generally relied on the history, structure, and purpose of the Constitution rather than its text. Critics have charged that the doctrines lack adequate support in...