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Invoking Federal Common Law Defenses in Immigration Cases

This article argues that we should take a deeper look at the applicability of federal common law defenses in immigration cases. In the rare cases where noncitizens attempt to raise common law defenses, such arguments tend to be dismissed by immigration judges because removal proceedings are civil, not criminal. Yet many common-law defenses may be raised in civil cases. This article proposes three...

Private Accountability in the Age of Artificial Intelligence

This article explores the impending conflict between the protection of civil rights and trade secrecy in an age of big data, as exemplified by a number of recent cases involving algorithmic bias and discrimination. In a world where the activities of private corporations are raising concerns about privacy, due process, and discrimination, we must focus on the role of corporations in addressing the...

Open Records, Shuttered Labs: Ending Political Harassment of Public University Researchers

This article confronts a dangerous contemporary trend: the escalating political harassment of public university scholars through the use of public records requests. This phenomenon impedes academic enterprises as diverse as climate change research and biomedical experiments. The article argues that most of professors’ records should not be subject to laws that exist to promote democratic...

How Constitutional Norms Break Down

The article calls attention to the latent instability of constitutional norms and theorizes the structure of constitutional norm change. It argues that, under certain conditions, it will be more worrisome when norms are subtly revised than when they are openly flouted. Thus, President Trump’s flagrant defiance of norms may not be as big a threat to our constitutional democracy as the more complex...

From Doctrine to Safeguards in American Constitutional Democracy

Scholars, judges, and policymakers have observed that American constitutional democracy depends on far more than the constraints imposed by judicially-interpreted formal legal arrangements. Drawing on judicial doctrine, political science, and the history of American institutions since the end of World War II, this article explores what it means to take seriously a more expansive, less court...

The Constitution of Our Tribal Republic

Long before there was a U.S. Constitution for the American republic, there were treaties among Indian Nations and between Indian Nations and colonial governments reflecting ideals of consultation and negotiation among self-determining peoples. Using negotiations between the United States and the states a point of comparison, this article works through what it might mean to think about...

Unbundling Populism

Populism is primarily defined in our public discussions by the loudest self-identifying populists active in democratic politics at the moment. Populism has therefore often been treated as a concept merging not just antiestablishment sentiments, but also authoritarian and xenophobic sentiments. The article argues the antiestablishment part of populism can be empirically and logically unbundled...

Accountability in the Deep State

The story behind the resignation of Joel Clement—the head of the U.S. Interior Department’s Office of Policy Analysis—provides a window into the relationship between the political leadership and the civil service at the Interior Department in the first year of the Trump administration. It also serves as a jumping-off point to revisit the value in having a civil service with some independence from...

(Re)Constructing Democracy in Crisis

This article complements academic discourse about democratic backsliding by focusing on two questions: In what ways has democracy been chronically or systemically weakened and prevented, and what kinds of new institutional and organizational forms do we need to realize democratic aspirations in the twenty-first century.

America's Conscience: The Rise of Civil Society Groups Under President Trump

The article explores the role and transformation of civil society groups under the presidency of Donald Trump. It observes such groups face the risk of overlooking injustices that do not involve President Trump, the urge to sharpen tactics against the administration’s lawyers, and the temptation to forget that the country will be better off when, once more, the work of civil society groups is not...

Administrative Law Without Courts

This article argues that it is a mistake to fixate on courts as the core safeguard in the modern administrative state. The article surveys federal agencies that regulate us in many ways that either evade judicial review entirely or are at least substantially insulated from such review.

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