How do ordinary people understand the concept of consent? This Article documents that laypersons, unlike most legal theorists, believe consent is compatible with fraud. It uses this discovery to revisit the so-called “riddle of rape-by-deception” and to interrogate the relationship between public attitudes, normative theory, and law.
Just as private parties use contracts to facilitate joint projects and nation-states use treaties to organize joint undertakings, our domestic governments use written instruments to formally coordinate their activities. This Article analyzes these distinctive contract-like instruments in which both parties are governments and the mutual objective is public governance.
This Feature documents the creation of the Facebook Oversight Board, an independent external body that provides appellate review of Facebook’s content-moderation decisions and policy recommendations. Should the Oversight Board gain legitimacy, it has tremendous precedential potential for democratizing private platforms’ governance of global online speech.
Presidents-elect and presidential transition teams wield exceptional power, from nominating cabinet secretaries to drafting policies that often become law. This Note argues that, despite these powers, presidential transitions are essentially ungoverned. It highlights the governance and ethical risks created by lawless transitions and offers several solutions to resolve them.
This Comment problematizes the historical basis for the Supreme Court’s decision in Rice v. Cayetano. In deeming voting qualifications for the Office of Hawaiian Affairs racially discriminatory, the Rice Court evaded the more complex question whether Native Hawaiians constitute a political community entitled to self-governance.
The Court’s recent failure to overrule the Insular Cases represents a missed opportunity to move past the racially motivated doctrine of territorial incorporation. Three cases involving the denial of citizenship, warrantless searches, and unequal benefits in U.S. territories demonstrate the Insular Cases’ continuing harm while offering hope for their reconsideration.
How do bureaucratic incentives shape how an agency implements international law? This Collection provides a window into the agency decisionmaking process that occurs after international commitments have already been made. Agencies’ choices in the foreign distilled spirits and detainee interrogation context reveal the many considerations at play.
In this Collection, the 2019-20 Yale Law Journal Public-Interest Fellows draw on their work experiences. They present a novel approach to tackling inaccurate population data in malapportionment litigation; argue that criminal-defense attorneys and judges must convey the denaturalization consequences of plea deals; and explore New York City’s undercollection of fines.
Challengers are using false textualism to implode the ACA. They argue that a findings section is an “inseverability clause,” ignoring the text and location; the language is boilerplate not for severability but for the commerce power; and Congress’s actual inseverability clauses are unmistakably explicit, using language absent from the ACA.
This Essay criticizes Justice Sotomayor’s concurring opinion in Financial Oversight and Management Board for Puerto Rico v. Aurelius Investment, LLC. for offering a one-sided and misleading explanation of the island’s constitutional status, and thereby taking sides in Puerto Rico’s decolonization debate.
Recently, the FDA asserted authority to regulate a type of COVID-19 diagnostics known as laboratory-developed tests, which long have been a front line of response to emerging disease. FDA did not, and should not, have authority to regulate these tests. Its intervention added minimal value while contributing to deadly delays.
This Essay criticizes Justice Sotomayor’s concurring opinion in Financial Oversight and Management Board for Puerto Rico v. Aurelius Investment, LLC. for offering a one-sided and misleading explanation of the island’s constitutional status, and thereby taking sides in Puerto Rico’s decolonization debate.
In this Collection, the 2019-20 Yale Law Journal Public-Interest Fellows draw on their work experiences. They present a novel approach to tackling inaccurate population data in malapportionment litigation; argue that criminal-defense attorneys and judges must convey the denaturalization consequences of plea deals; and explore New York City’s undercollection of fines.
Challengers are using false textualism to implode the ACA. They argue that a findings section is an “inseverability clause,” ignoring the text and location; the language is boilerplate not for severability but for the commerce power; and Congress’s actual inseverability clauses are unmistakably explicit, using language absent from the ACA.