Although ADA protections are ensured in the federal legislative branch and in state courthouses, this pivotal disability rights statute does not cover the federal judiciary. ADA claims are consequently litigated in federal courthouses that may be inaccessible to disabled people, yet there is little scholarship on the topic. This Note aims to fill this gap by exploring the implications of the lack of accessibility in the federal judiciary. Without ADA protections, disabled people do not have recourse when faced with discrimination and inaccessible spaces. This lack of protection threatens disabled people’s access to justice, access to the workplace, and representation both on juries and within the federal judiciary.

California has a housing crisis. Despite the state government’s best efforts to build more homes, local governments and local voters are finding new ways to circumvent those requirements. One such loophole allows California voters to propose non-compliant housing plans through the ballot initiative process or effectively veto their local governments’ housing allocation decisions through a referendum. Although voters rarely use this loophole, the California Supreme Court should step in and prevent it from growing in popularity. The court can do so by simply making a small change to a legal test that determines when local initiatives and referenda are preempted by state law.

Environmental law has an animal problem. It lacks an account of whether and how animals’ interests matter. Case in point: The agencies tasked with protecting wild animals cannot stop killing them. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration slays sea lions to reduce predation on endangered salmon. The Fish and Wildlife Service shoots barred owls to curb competition with northern spotted owls. These widespread “removals” reflect a tension between safeguarding ecological collectives, such as species and ecosystems, and protecting individual animals.

“Social justice” is everywhere in public law. Scholars and activists are calling for racial justice, climate justice, and health justice, among other claims. When commentators speak about multiple different social justice claims, it is often through an intersectional lens that views these claims as co-constitutive with one another, such as, “There is no climate justice without racial justice.” These justice claims are important and long overdue. But conflicts between different social justice claims—what this Article calls “justice conflicts”—are inevitable in policymaking. Justice conflicts occur when the multiple social justice claims involved in a policy issue point to opposing outcomes.

Despite ongoing disagreement about how the Constitution allocates powers among the different branches, the two dominant schools of thought in American separation-of-powers debates—formalism and functionalism—agree on three premises: Certain powers inhere in certain government branches, some powers are vested exclusively in one or another branch, and the judiciary is the final arbiter of separation-of-powers disputes. Disagreement is largely about how powers should be parsed and which should be shared. Yet over the long lifespan of our constitutional tradition, momentous doctrinal upheavals are relatively commonplace. This Article describes four tectonic shifts in separation-of-powers doctrine: Founding-era debates about how to define and blend powers, nineteenth-century debates about the constitutionality of the nascent civil service, Lochner-era debates about legislatures’ authority to define and regulate public utilities, and mid-nineteenth-century debates about the sources of international law.

Amazon’s dominance as a platform is widely documented. But one aspect of that dominance has not received sufficient attention—the Amazon Brand Registry’s sweeping influence on firm behavior, particularly in relation to the formal trademark system. Amazon’s Brand Registry serves as a shadow trademark system that dramatically affects businesses’ incentives to seek legal registration of their marks. The result has been a surge in the number of applications to register, which has swamped the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office (PTO) and created delays for all applicants, even those that previously would have registered their marks. And the increased value of federal registration has drawn in bad actors who fraudulently register marks that are in use by others on the Amazon platform and use those registrations to extort the true owners.

In 2022, the Biden Administration finalized regulations that overhauled procedures for asylum claims for the first time since 1996. These regulations transferred the duty to decide asylum claims in expedited removal from immigration courts to the Asylum Office. While advocates criticized the proposal for its extreme procedural deficiencies, they supported its basic premise: Expanding the jurisdiction of the Asylum Office would be a positive development for asylum seekers. This Article argues the Asylum Office has failed policymakers’ original vision for the asylum system, asylum seekers, and its own asylum officers (AOs) and that any expansion of the office, in its current form, is unwise.