The Housing Choice Voucher (“HCV”) program is a government program that subsidizes the rent of low-income individuals or families, allowing them to afford housing in the private market. Families pay 30 percent of their income towards rent, and the voucher covers the remainder. Congress created the program with the goal of enabling low-income families to…

The federal courts have long struggled to articulate a set of coherent standards for who may assert rights under a federal statute. Apart from the constitutional limitations of the judicial power under Article III, courts have until recently addressed this question under a series of freestanding “prudential” rules governing standing to sue. The Supreme Court’s…

This Article challenges existing narratives about the future of American Indian land tenure. The current highly-federalized system for reservation property is deeply problematic. In particular, the trust status of many reservation lands is expensive, bureaucratic, oppressive, and linked to persistent poverty in many reservation communities. Yet, for complex reasons, trust property has proven…

When we think about people seeking relief for infringement of their intellectual property rights under copyright and trademark laws, we typically assume they will operate within an overtly legal scheme. By contrast, creators of works that lie outside the subject matter, or at least outside the heartland, of intellectual property law often remedy copying of…

Money motivates and regulates criminal process. Conscious of adjudication costs, prosecutors incentivize guilty pleas with the prospect of a “trial penalty”: harsher post-trial sentences. Budgetary considerations motivate revenue-generating enforcement policies and asset forfeitures by law enforcement. States also charge defendants directly for nearly every criminal justice expense…

The possibility of a subprime auto finance bubble gives financial regulators an opportunity to navigate a burgeoning crisis in real time. Lessons learned from the 2008 financial crisis and the implementation of the Dodd-Frank Act prompt the question whether financial regulators should adopt an ability-to-repay rule for auto lending similar to the Consumer Financial Protection…

In the wake of the Bernard Madoff Ponzi scheme, the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) adjusted its rules to prevent future fraud. Despite blindsiding the SEC and many in the financial industry, the culprit was all too familiar: a bad adviser fleecing his trusting clients. The problem goes back millennia. In 1754 B.C…

Low-wage workers experience wage theft—that is, employers’ failure to pay earned wages—at alarmingly high rates. Indeed, the number of wage and hour cases filed in federal and state courts and administrative agencies steadily increases every year. While much of the scholarly assessment of wage and hour litigation focuses on large collective and class actions involving…

There are millions of Americans who are systematically forgotten and mistreated by our government. They have been described by the Supreme Court as “alien races” and “utterly unfit for American citizenship,” but they continue to fight and die defending our Constitution. They survive catastrophic storms, but do not receive the assistance that is freely given…

A safe food supply is essential for a healthy society. Our food system is replete with different types of risk, yet food safety is often narrowly understood as encompassing only foodborne illness and other risks related directly to food ingestion. This Article argues for a more comprehensive definition of food safety, one that includes not…

Does the party that provides the first draft of a merger agreement get better terms as a result? There is considerable lore among transactional lawyers on this question, yet it has never been examined empirically. In this Article, we develop a novel dataset of drafting practices in large M&A transactions involving US public-company targets. First…

“[F]ollowing our decision in Erie R. Co. v. Tompkins, 304 U.S. 64 (1938), federal courts are generally no longer permitted to promulgate new federal common law causes of action . . . .” “When a party seeks to assert an implied cause of action under the Constitution itself . . . separation-of-powers principles are or should be central to the analysis. The…

The Constitution declares that the “Privilege of the Writ of Habeas Corpus” can be suspended by the federal government only “in Cases of Rebellion or Invasion [when] the public Safety may require it.” Because some regard this Habeas Clause as the Constitution’s only “emergency” provision, the Clause looms large in treatments of the Constitution’s…

In her book, Habeas Corpus in Wartime: From the Tower of London to Guantanamo Bay, Professor Amanda Tyler has written a definitive constitutional history of the habeas privilege in the United States. Rather than rehearsing the book’s many virtues, I propose to devote this short Essay to the familiar yet intractable problem of historical translation…

I am honored to write an introduction to the Symposium on Professor Amanda Tyler’s brilliant historical study, Habeas Corpus in Wartime: From the Tower of London to Guantanamo Bay. Professor Tyler has unearthed and examined the details of an important but only partially understood aspect of the British and American experience. She scrupulously traces the evolution of the writ of…

This Note explores potential admissibility challenges that may arise when European courts use evidence of Syrian crimes collected by the newly-established International, Impartial and Independent Mechanism for Syria (“the IIIM”). The Note examines the evidentiary rules of four European countries—France, Germany, the Netherlands, and Sweden––where Syrian cases are currently…

The libertarian regulatory environment of online political advertising has come under scrutiny again, as news reports continue to come out describing the extent of Russian interference with the 2016 presidential election. For years, Silicon Valley has resisted Washington, D.C.’s efforts to regulate online political advertising. Tech companies feared regulation would threaten not only their…

The Supreme Court displays increasing hostility to constitutional tort claims. Although the Justices sometimes cast their stance as deferential to Congress, recent cases exhibit aggressive judicial lawmaking with respect to official immunity. Among the causes of turbulence in constitutional tort doctrine and the surrounding literature is a failure—not only among the Justices, but also among…

This Article compares and contrasts the legal and political treatment of the detention of citizens during World War II in Great Britain and the United States. Specifically, it explores the detentions as they unfolded, the very different positions that President Franklin D. Roosevelt and Prime Minister Winston Churchill took with respect to the detention of…

Four months into the convulsive aftermath of the September 11 attacks, the first George W. Bush Administration began to detain “enemy combatant” designees at the American military base in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba (GTMO). With the exception of Yaser Hamdi, a man born in Louisiana but raised in Saudi Arabia, GTMO received only noncitizens…