Private Right of Inaction: The Decades-Long Struggle To Enforce the Church Amendments

By Sarah L. Betz.  The Supreme Court’s decision in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization has reinvigorated debates over the role of conscience in healthcare. Conscience plays a pivotal role in healthcare, as the Hippocratic Oath that physicians take upon graduating medical school instructs them to “do no harm.” Abortion and other controversial medical practices […]

Rethinking Accomplice Liability

By Charles F. Capps.  The basic premise of accomplice liability—so foundational that it has been described as true “[b]y definition”—is that the accomplice is liable for the conduct of the principal. Accordingly, scholars and lawmakers generally approach the project of fashioning liability rules for accomplices as a search for conditions under which the law is […]

Tribes and Trilateral Federalism: A Study of Criminal Jurisdiction

By Alexandra Fay.  In 1789, the people of thirteen young American states defined a new sovereign. By ratifying the Constitution, the citizens of the states formed a national government to reign supreme over the United States of America. The two preexisting sovereigns of this American territory—states and tribes— would ultimately bow before the supremacy of […]

The Second Coming of the Second Section: The Fourteenth Amendment and Presidential Elections

By David B. Froomkin & Eric Eisner. The Fourteenth Amendment is a gift that keeps on giving. In the aftermath of the January 6, 2021 attack on the U.S. Capitol, scholars were quick to observe that Section 3 of the Fourteenth Amendment offered potential remedies for a nation seeking to bar access to federal power […]

Multistate Failure: Advocating for an Affirmative Defense for Sex-Trafficking Victims in Line with Feminist Legal Reasoning

By Katharine Greer.  Chrystul Kizer entered Gary, Indiana’s junior high performing arts academy with a dream of becoming a violinist.  She practiced all hours of the day trying to master music by composers like Beethoven. She was a “burgeoning artist” and defined herself by her music. However, this dream began to unravel when her mom’s […]

The Canon of Natural Law Avoidance

By William Harren.  The relationship between natural law and positive law represents one of the oldest unresolved questions in American jurisprudence. When Thomas Jefferson wrote, “[w]e hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal,” he invoked natural law principles to establish the United States’ legitimacy. Yet the Constitution itself has little […]

Co-Authoring with an AI? Ethical Dilemmas and Artificial Intelligence

By Hadar Y. Jabotinsky & Roee Sarel.  Artificial Intelligence (“AI”) is rapidly advancing, particularly in the area of generative AI—a technology capable of producing new and rich content in response to human prompts. Generative AI systems have been causing quite a commotion in the legal sphere: systems that generate visual art, such as Stable Diffusion, […]

The Proactive Process: An Empirical Study of Disparities in Workplace Accommodations

By Heidi H. Liu.  Recent legislation and caselaw have imposed an affirmative obligation on employers to provide employees with workplace accommodations. Whether someone receives an accommodation, however, often first depends on whether they ask. And asking for accommodations can be fraught. Employees may fear stigma or be uncertain about navigating employer- specific unwritten rules and […]

American Exceptionalism And/In Affirmative Action

By Lucy Williams. In 2014, a nonprofit group called Students for Fair Admissions (“SFFA”) filed two lawsuits challenging the use of race in university admissions. In one suit, against Harvard College, SFFA alleged that Harvard’s admission policies violate Title VI of the Civil Rights Act by favoring white, Black, and Hispanic applicants over similarly qualified […]

Resolving Equity’s Erie Problem

By Andrea Olson. It is an open secret that equity has an Erie problem. In 1945, the Supreme Court insisted that federal courts sitting in diversity must apply certain general equitable principles when faced with suits seeking equitable relief, even for state law claims and even in the face of contradictory state law. At first […]