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…

The British constitutional lawyer A.V. Dicey argued in the nineteenth century that the common law, as administered by superior courts, better ensured government accountability than did written constitutions. Dicey taught us to focus less on constitutional promises and more on the practical effectiveness of judicial remedies. This Article builds on Dicey by offering a comparative…

In the ongoing litigation of Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard College, Harvard faces allegations that its once-heralded admissions process discriminates against Asian Americans. Public discourse has revealed a dominant narrative: affirmative action is viewed as the presumptive cause of Harvard’s alleged “Asian penalty.” Yet this narrative misrepresents the plaintiff’s own theory…

There is a disturbing connection between mass shootings and violence against women. This connection is one which the Lautenberg Amendment to the Gun Control Act, which prohibits any person convicted of a misdemeanor crime of domestic violence from possessing guns, seeks to disrupt. This Note argues that the Lautenberg Amendment, while an invaluable tool in…

That the judge’s task is to find the law, not to make it, was once a commonplace of our legal culture. Today, decades after Erie, the idea of a common law discovered by judges is commonly dismissed—as a “fallacy,” an “illusion,” a “brooding omnipresence in the sky.” That dismissive view is wrong. Expecting judges to…

There are two paradigms through which to view trade law and policy within the American constitutional system. One paradigm sees trade law and policy as quintessentially about domestic economic policy. Institutionally, under the domestic economics paradigm, trade law falls within the province of Congress, which has legion Article I powers over commercial matters. The second…

What would happen if the City of Chicago, the Chicago Public Schools, and Cook County all became insolvent at the same time? How should policy-makers and courts respond? This Article argues that the pension and budget crises that have left so many local governments deeply in debt have generated another looming problem: the prospect of…

A high-stakes debate has emerged around the legislative expansion of forensic DNA databases, a move that would assist thousands of criminal investigations but also raise profound privacy issues. In Maryland v. King, where the Court upheld the constitutionality of forced DNA sampling of arrestees, Justice Alito described the Court’s 2013 decision as “perhaps the most…