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.
Congress has given the Federal Reserve broad statutory mandates over the U.S. economy. This Feature articulates a framework, “technocratic pragmatism,” to evaluate how the Fed should structure experiments at the boundaries of its authority to combat complex problems (e.g., global climate change) consistent with demands of legality and accountability.
Presidents often engage in what this Note calls selective declassification: the practice of declassifying documents that help advance a presidential agenda while keeping conflicting documents secret. This Note shows how selective declassification distorts public perceptions and policy choices, and offers reforms to mitigate these harms.
The Essays that won the third annual Yale Law Journal Student-Essay Competition each address current issues in First Amendment law. They are Justin W. Aimonetti & M. Christian Talley’s How Two Rights Made a Wrong: Sullivan, Anti-SLAPP, and the Underenforcement of Public-Figure Defamation Torts and Meenakshi Krishnan’s The Foreign Intelligence
Drawing on the law that supported labor movement’s exercise of countervailing power against 1930s plutocracy, progressive social movements can use law to create a new political economy. But, as a condition of granting labor power, law channeled unions away from radicalism. Powerful class-based movement organizations find law an unreliable ally.
A fierce debate is raging over the proper level of antitrust enforcement against big tech companies like Google, Facebook, and Amazon. This Collection offers fresh perspectives on the history, implications, and challenges of applying antitrust law to digital platforms.
Last July marked the 150th anniversary of the establishment of the Department of Justice. The Department is perhaps as politicized as it’s ever been, and its relationship with the American public is fraught. In this Collection, alumni from the Department analyze what happened and what the future looks like.
One hundred years ago, Warren Harding’s election heralded the end of the Progressive Era. Harding promised a “return to normalcy,” but neither his administration nor subsequent changes have erased the progressives’ reforms. This collection evaluates the Progressive Era echoes in modern debates about race, labor, and the bureaucracy.
This Article defends the inherent retroactivity of judicial lawmaking. It argues that there is no principled foundation for the Supreme Court’s non-retroactivity doctrine, and it provides an alternative framework: courts should always apply “new law” to old cases, and constrain its effects instead through well-recognized limitations on rights of action.
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 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.
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.