When the police violate a person’s Fourth Amendment right, the Exclusionary Rule bars evidence resulting from that violation from being used against the person in trial. The rule is designed to deter police from engaging in illegal searches and seizures…

No one likes being told what to do. It’s the reason that philanthropists prefer to contribute to the charitable causes of their choosing, rather than paying more in taxes. It’s the reason that courts have equated enforcing a contract with imposing involuntary servitude. It’s the reason for viewing government as a “necessary evil,” rather than a fortuitous collective agreement…

The coronavirus pandemic has surfaced many new and interesting legal issues. Among them: What legal recourse is available to a business that lost significant profits after a governmental order forced it to close? In March 2020, for example, the Bay Area enacted a shelter in place mandate and ordered all non-essential businesses…

Uber, Lyft, DoorDash, and other gig companies who authored and advertised Proposition 22 spent a record $200 million on the ballot initiative to persuade Californians to vote it into law. In the weeks leading up to the 2020 general election, Uber and Lyft bombarded its riders and drivers with endless messaging through its apps and by saturating the television and digital ad space…

In a June 2016 interview, then-Vice President Joe Biden cast doubt on the utility of interventionist foreign policy. Citing the shortcomings of the 2011 NATO-led military intervention in Libya, Biden stated that he was “strongly” against the intervention. In reference to the ouster of Libyan leader Muammar Qadhafi…

While this nation is reeling and recovering from a tumultuous election cycle, voting rights remain at the forefront of the legal and political discourse. This year, the Supreme Court is deciding two cases regarding Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act (VRA), an act passed in 1965 to end White supremacist voting laws. These decisions…

Mandatory reporting laws for competent adult victims[1] of sexual assault and intimate partner violence, which require healthcare providers to submit a report to police when they have treated such patients, may seem beneficial at first glance, but can significantly harm survivors. Such laws can endanger survivors, retraumatize them, infringe upon their autonomy, violate patient confidentiality…

On January 8, the Citizen Power Initiatives for China (CPIFC), along with six anonymous plaintiffs, sued Tencent America LLC for its censorship practices on the social media app WeChat. The suit was filed as a class action in the Superior Court of California in Santa Clara County…

Despite the social and economic devastation wrought by the Covid-19 pandemic, the year 2020 has witnessed an initial public offering (IPO) boom in the U.S. capital market—494 IPOs were recorded for the entire year and $174 billion raised, more than twice the scale in 2019, making it literally the busiest year for IPOs since the…

From the time that European colonists set foot on American shores and made contact with Native peoples, they have sought to control the land and resources that first belonged to the tribes. One means of control was defining what it meant to be an “Indian.” The dominant White society in the United States has changed…

The federal antitrust laws—three statutes enacted over a century ago—are in the spotlight. The year 2020 brought a new reckoning with corporate power and a resurgent interest in using antitrust law as a force for populist change. The “hipster antitrust” movement argues that the focus of antitrust policy should not be limited to market power…

When I learned that my grandparents had gotten their first doses of the COVID vaccine, I cried with relief. After a year of unceasing trauma, loss, and fear, it felt like the first sign of a turning tide. Then I started to wonder about current and former clients, and people I had heard call into…

The federal antitrust laws—three statutes enacted over a century ago—are in the spotlight. The year 2020 brought a new reckoning with corporate power and a resurgent interest in using antitrust law as a force for populist change. The “hipster antitrust” movement argues that the focus of antitrust policy should not be limited to market power…

This piece is dedicated in honor of the lives lost in Atlanta, Georgia on March 16th, 2021 due to more senseless anti-Asian violence. All U.S. federal and state entities should disaggregate data on the Asian American and Pacific Islander (AAPI) community. Currently, reports divided by racial categories often conceal the major differences in the AAPI population…

While women have been running for elected office in the United States since 1866, the growth in female representation has been incremental at best. Despite the fact that women represent over 50 percent of the United States’s population, women only make up 25 percent of Congress. Furthermore, women occupy less than 30 percent of state…

With multidistrict litigation, innovation is the name of the game. Congress recognized and addressed this crux when, in the face of the soon-to-be crumbling federal judiciary caused by an exponentially increasing federal docket, it passed the Multidistrict Litigation (MDL) Statute, codified at 23 U.S.C. § 1407. The MDL Statute authorizes the consolidation and coordination of…

The United States, through its international development agency USAID, is the largest donor in international family planning in the world, with an annual programmatic budget exceeding $600 million. However, since 1984, USAID’s funding for essential reproductive and sexual health services has come with strings attached in the form of the Global Gag Rule. At its…

Multidistrict litigation (MDL) has been described both as a “just and efficient” method of consolidating lawsuits and a judicial hell-hole akin to “the third level of Dante’s inferno.” While its normative value likely falls somewhere in the middle, it is no secret that multidistrict litigation involves “unorthodox” civil procedure. Judges attempting to wrangle the “Wild…

Despite the grave injuries suffered by individuals during the Capitol Hill riot, the context in which the riot originated may actually render IIED an inviable cause of action under extant case law. Against the backdrop of weeks—if not years—of polemic political discourse and alt-right protests, was the violence of January 6th actually outrageous? It certainly wasn’t unexpected, at least to those who had been paying attention…

MarketWatch made a startling error when it reported last year that Amazon’s Climate Pledge, created as a corporate commitment to carbon neutrality, had secured signatories like Microsoft and Unilever. Amazon’s Climate Pledge is measured against (and competes with) the timeline of the Paris Climate Agreement, a treaty from which the United States notably began its…