The Supreme Court is poised to consider whether the Constitution’s original meaning is compatible with numerous and longstanding congressional laws delegating power to the bureaucracy to enact regulations affecting private rights within the United States. New evidence presented in this Article indicates Congress in the 1790s found such delegations constitutional.
Law is a social practice that pursues a moral purpose. Analyzing Professor Julie Dickson’s Evaluation and Legal Theory, this Review brings the natural-law tradition into conversation with contemporary philosophy of social science to seek an approach to general jurisprudence that respects both the factual and ideal dimensions of law’s life.
Several current Supreme Court Justices have signaled a renewed interest in resurrecting the nondelegation doctrine, but numerous scholars have portrayed the doctrine as ahistorical and unoriginalist. This Feature systematically reviews the evidence and concludes there is much more historical support for a revived nondelegation doctrine than recent scholars have argued.
Over thirty states maintain laws that criminalize people living with HIV, exposing them to incarceration, fines, and social stigma. This Note argues that many such laws violate the ADA’s ban on public discrimination. While previous challenges to HIV-criminalization laws have failed, federal disability law offers a new pathway for reform.
The military’s approach to HIV was developed in the 1980s, at the height of the epidemic. Today, however, medical advances have transformed HIV from a deadly disease into a manageable chronic illness—but the military’s policies remain stuck in the past. This Comment makes the case for reform.
Gabriel Mendlow rightly argues that victims deserve larger roles in criminal justice, but mistakenly hints that they deserve exclusive control. Communities are also harmed by crimes and have standing to punish them. This Essay argues that criminal procedure should return to its roots as a communal morality play.
This Article interprets equity as law about law, or meta-law. Equity specializes in solving complex and uncertain problems, especially those involving multiple parties, conflicting rights, and opportunism. The Article reconstructs this function, diagnoses the ills of current equity, and charts a path forward for equity in our legal system.
In a legal system where criminal prosecution is the institutional analog of moral blame, a state that acts as exclusive prosecutor exceeds its moral standing and incurs a debt to the victim. The nature of this debt and how we might discharge it are the primary subjects of this Essay.
Daniel Immerwahr’s How to Hide an Empire rewrites U.S. history with empire at the core. Building on that accomplishment, this Review sketches a U.S. legal history of indigeneity, race, slavery, immigration, and empire in which legal “status manipulation” accomplished and hid the myriad wrongs done.
This Comment proposes the first comprehensive path forward for challenging prison malapportionment in state courts, a remedy largely unappreciated in the literature. These state-law claims make use of statutory provisions defining residency, state constitutional equal-population provisions, and distinct state court procedural advantages.
The Race-Blind Future of Voting Rights is a provocative proof of concept with an unstable empirical foundation. The Article delivers a baseline for minority electoral opportunity using the ensemble method of random district generation; this Response flags technical issues and questions the conceptual alignment of the methods with their application.
Over 120 years after YLJ published its first piece on the Insular Cases, these cases appeared again before the Supreme Court in Aurelius. This collection evaluates these cases’ continuing influence, and is dedicated to the memory of Judge Juan R. Torruella, a forceful scholar of these cases’ troubled legacy.
This Article proposes an innovative approach to addressing political inequality: using law to facilitate organizing by the poor and working class – as workers, tenants, debtors, and welfare beneficiaries. The Article offers a new direction for the literature on political inequality and critical lessons for government officials, organizers, and advocates.
This Note seeks to identify the causes of “public charge” confusion. Mapping the exclusion’s history reveals how Congress and the courts have left the administrative state a near-impossible task: reconciling public charge with evolving commitments to public welfare. Drawing on archived Clinton-era negotiations, I offer a path forward.