“Blocking statutes” are foreign laws that prohibit the transfer of information to the United States for purposes of litigation. Though many countries have adopted blocking statutes in recent decades, these statutes have met an ignoble fate in the U.S. courts. Today, U.S. judges routinely order foreign litigants to produce discovery in violation of blocking statutes, […]
Much of the literature on women prisoners’ inadequate access to healthcare has focused on the relative rarity of women in prison before the age of mass incarceration. This may explain why prisons initially were poorly equipped to provide healthcare to women, but the gendered nature of Eighth Amendment jurisprudence has allowed prisons to remain so. […]
In the 2010 case Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission, the US Supreme Court caught the nation’s attention by declaring that corporations have a First Amendment right to spend unlimited amounts of money independently in political campaigns. The Court rested its five-to-four decision in large part on a concept of speaker-based discrimination. In the Court’s […]
The doctrine of qualified immunity operates as an unwritten defense to civil rights lawsuits brought under 42 U.S.C. § 1983. It prevents plaintiffs from recovering damages for violations of their constitutional rights unless a government official violated “clearly established law,” which usually requires specific precedent on point. This Article argues that the qualified immunity doctrine […]
There are consequences to theories in a world questioning the power of the President. For decades, some originalists, including Justice Scalia, maintained that the President enjoys “all” executive power. Of course, this is not the Constitution’s actual text (which refers to “the” executive power, not “all” executive power)—but a highly contestable, and potentially dangerous, addition […]