The federal government has a well-documented history of discrimination against women in American agriculture. And the government now has many compelling reasons—from remedying past discrimination to shoring up food security—to provide targeted support to women farmers. But the Biden Administration’s attempts to provide targeted financial support to Black farmers through the American Rescue Plan Act were halted by federal courts that view affirmative action with increasing suspicion, as evidenced by the Supreme Court’s 2023 decision in Students for Fair Admissions v. President and Fellows of Harvard College (SFFA). Does the Supreme Court’s upending of decades of precedent governing race-based affirmative action in SFFA also spell the end for gender-based programs in agriculture?

What duties do Americans owe the state? Today, this question seems almost incomprehensible. Compulsions in the common interest are received coolly in our rights-obsessed culture, and the Supreme Court has never announced a framework for identifying the burdens of citizenship. This Article corrects the historical record by documenting how civic duties have developed over time. The evidence reveals that these obligations are constantly in motion; society has constructed, reshaped, and discarded them in decades-long struggles over the meaning of freedom. Put simply, the duties of citizenship are not fixed features of our constitutional order.

Most people agree that the institution of contract serves autonomy—or that it should. But how? Philosophical theories of contract link contract and autonomy by way of an appealing intermediate principle, such as the authority of the individual will, promissory morality, or conventions of agreement. However, each of these theories is focused on the mental and verbal acts surrounding contract and is thus at odds with both contract as a social practice and contract law. The theories fail to account for basic features of modern contracting such as anonymity, mass scale, and market determination of contract terms—facts to which both the common law and statutory regulation have long adjusted. This Article proposes a different approach to contract theory.

This Article employs recent philosophical advances in action theory and moral responsibility to critically examine the traditional purpose-knowledge-recklessness-negligence (PKRN) mens rea hierarchy of the Model Penal Code. It is a foundational assumption of the traditional mens rea hierarchy that the commission of intentional harm ought to be subject to greater criminal liability than actions that foreseeably result in risk of those same harms. The Article critically rethinks the standard mens rea hierarchy and show how we might amend current homicide doctrine (and the PKRN mens rea regime more generally) to allow more criminal liability for non-intentional police homicides like Derek Chauvin’s killing of George Floyd, relative to reluctant purposeful defendants.

Artificial intelligence (AI) systems depend on massive quantities of data, often gathered by “scraping”—the automated extraction of large amounts of data from the internet. A great deal of scraped data contains people’s personal information. Although scraping enables web searching, archiving of records, and meaningful scientific research, scraping for AI can also be objectionable and even harmful to individuals and society. This Article explores the fundamental tension between scraping and privacy law. With the zealous pursuit and astronomical growth of AI, we are in the midst of what we call the “great scrape.” There must now be a great reconciliation.