U.S. legislators are taking aim at technology companies for their role in the nation’s fentanyl crisis. Members of Congress recently introduced the Cooper Davis Act, which would require electronic communications service providers to report evidence of illicit fentanyl, methamphetamine, and counterfeit drug crimes on their platforms to the Drug Enforcement Administration. For the first time, such companies would be obligated to report suspected...
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Police departments often adopt new surveillance technologies that make mistakes, produce unintended effects, or harbor unforeseen problems. Sometimes the police try a new surveillance technology and later abandon it due to a lack of success, community resistance, or both. Critics have identified many problems with these tools: racial bias, privacy violations, opacity, secrecy, and undue corporate influence, to name a few. A different framework...
Most jurisdictions that permit expungement draw the line at certain crimes—usually those implicating one or more victims, serious risks to public safety, corruption, or breach of the public trust. This is unsurprising given how these crimes relate to the moral underpinnings of the criminal law in a democratic society. This Essay explores, given the overall direction of expungement reform, whether expungement should reach more offenses and by...
The visa application process is laden with discretion and reinforced by consular nonreviewability—an extensive form of judicial deference. Until recently, courts recognized a small exception to consular nonreviewability. Under this exception, courts engaged in limited review of a consular officer’s decision when visa denials implicated the fundamental rights of U.S. citizens.
The Court curtailed this exception in United States Department...
Most lawyers know that the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure merged the divergent trial procedures of the common law and of equity, but fewer are familiar with the development of federal appellate procedure. Here too there is a story of the merger of two distinct systems. At common law, a reviewing court examined the record for errors of law after the final trial judgment. In the equity tradition, an appeal was a rehearing of the law and the facts...
In the United States, Europe, and elsewhere, museums are in possession of cultural objects that were unethically taken from their countries and communities of origin under the auspices of colonialism. For many years, the art world considered such holdings unexceptional. Now, a longstanding movement to decolonize museums is gaining momentum, and some museums are reconsidering their collections. Presently, whether to return such looted cultural heritage...
Legislatures, courts, and media outlets have manufactured legal and scientific uncertainty around gender-affirming care. This is the result of a phobic frame that vanishes the perspectives of minors and reduces decisionmakers’ confidence. This Note identifies that gender-affirming care bans should not be understood primarily as forms of sex discrimination, but instead as a form of unjustified impairment of minors’ self-determination. The solution,...
Since 1898, Puerto Rico has been a territory of the United States, meaning that Congress wields plenary power over the Island. Although scholars have highlighted the history and some modern manifestations of this power, conversations about how plenary power affects the territories have largely ignored constitutional criminal procedure.
This Article is the first to center the territory’s criminal legal system within the broader debate over...
In March 2024, police killed Ryan Gainer, a Black teenager with autism, in his California home after his family sought help during a behavioral crisis. Several months later, police killed Sonya Massey, a Black woman experiencing a mental health crisis, in her Illinois home. This Comment examines the failure of U.S. privacy law to protect disabled people of color in their homes, using the deaths of Ryan Gainer and Sonya Massey as case studies. Through...
The African Court on Human and Peoples’ Rights, the continental human rights court in Africa, is struggling. Many African states have yet to ratify the protocol that established the Court; and those that have, have begun to withdraw their declarations to allow individuals and nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) to bring cases against them before the Court. The Court’s expanding jurisdiction is part of the problem. Despite being an international...