The Fifteenth Amendment is usually an afterthought compared to the Fourteenth Amendment. This oversight is perplexing: the Fifteenth Amendment ushered in a brief period of multiracial democracy and laid the constitutional foundation for the VRA. This Article completes the historical record, providing an unabridged accounting of the Fifteenth Amendment’s adoption.
This Essay seeks to recover the deeply rooted connection between U.S. banking law and antitrust. It reconceptualizes banking law as a sector-specific antimonopoly regime that imposes multiple structural constraints on publicly subsidized banks’ ability to abuse their power over the supply and allocation of financial resources in a democratic economy.
Faith communities across the United States are creating affordable housing on church property. Where sincerely held religious belief inspires their efforts, faith communities can assert religious liberty protections against land-use decisions that obstruct denser, multifamily developments. Legislative reforms can help them overcome the regulatory and financial hurdles of adaptive reuse.
This Essay defends statutes creating public nuisance and consumer protection causes of action against firearms industry actors for their failure to take reasonable measures to control the flow of their products to criminal users. Such laws are predicate statutes under PLCAA and do not infringe the Second Amendment.
Thanks to an ambiguity in civil-rights statutes passed under Congress’s spending power, many programs enjoy ample financial benefits while avoiding the requirements of federal antidiscrimination laws. This Essay argues that the remedy lies in a statutory reading that aligns with the expansive nature of the civil-rights statutes themselves.
For the first time in years, in the Purdue Pharma opioids litigation, the Court is reviewing an unorthodox bankruptcy maneuver aimed at securing global settlement. This Essay critiques corporate defendants’ increasingly common turn to bankruptcy to shut down, or avoid altogether, complex civil litigation and the public goods it generates.
In the increasingly globalized modern economy, large corporate actors have long operated with relative impunity for transnational human-rights abuses committed in the name of profit maximization. This Collection explores perspectives from a range of voices engaged in the fight for corporate accountability in both the United States and abroad.
Administrative law faces a critical juncture. Settled doctrines ranging from deference to agency interpretations of statutes to delegations of executive power have been destabilized. And earlier this year, Justice Breyer—himself an administrative-law scholar—retired from the Supreme Court. We publish this Collection as a tribute to his judicial legacy.
As law-school clinics assume a growing role in legal education, instructors, students, and community partners have used clinics to test novel, sometimes radical lawyering approaches. This Collection draws from those experiments, using case studies from family defense, immigration, and worker rights to explore the relationship between law and social movements.