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This Comment uses a recent prisoners’ rights class action that challenges solitary confinement to demonstrate the way in which class action mootness procedure disadvantages inmates. With courts divided on how they should evaluate plaintiffs’ claims that are mooted before the court reaches a class certification decision, this unsettled area leaves prisons with creative ways to moot named...

Young people locked up in juvenile prisons have an enormous need for mental healthcare, one which juvenile prisons have consistently found themselves unable to meet. As a result, many incarcerated young people end up being denied the care they deserve. Yet for years, courts have implemented a confused, haphazard doctrine to evaluate youth right to mental healthcare claims—likely because the quasi...

A generation of Indian law scholars has roundly, and rightly, criticized the Supreme Court’s invocation of the political question and plenary power doctrines to deprive tribes of meaningful judicial review when Congress has acted to the tribes’ detriment. Courts have applied these doctrines in tandem so as to frequently leave tribes without meaningful judicial recourse against breaches of the...

Deportation of so-called “criminal aliens” has become the driving force in U.S. immigration enforcement. The Immigration Accountability Executive Actions of late 2014 provide the most recent example of this trend. Even for immigrants’ rights advocates, conventional wisdom holds that if deportations must occur, “criminal aliens” should be the first to go. A voluminous “crimmigration” scholarship...

The conventional wisdom is that the distinction between legal and equitable remedies is outmoded and serves no purpose. This Article challenges that view. It argues that the equitable remedies and remedy-related doctrines that presently exist in American law can be understood as a system. The components of the system fall into three categories: (1) the equitable remedies themselves, (2) equitable...

Business entities play important and underappreciated roles in the production of international treaties. At the same time, international treaty law is hobbled by state- centric presumptions that render its response to business ad hoc and unprincipled. This Article makes three principal contributions. First, it draws from case studies to demonstrate the significance of business participation in...

When a judge finds that a statute violates the Constitution, the statute must give way. But in many cases, there is more than one way for a judge to remedy the conflict between a statute and the Constitution. And in choosing which remedy to impose, there is usually no external source of law telling the judge what to do. They alone must decide which remedy is best. How should judges exercise this...

Third-party funding is an arrangement whereby an outside entity finances the legal representation of a party involved in litigation or arbitration. The outside entity—called a “third-party funder”—could be a bank, hedge fund, insurance company, or some other entity or individual that finances the party’s legal representation in return for a profit. Third-party funding is a controversial, dynamic...

Central to critical race theory (CRT) is the notion that law is constitutive (and not merely reflective) of race. This Comment operates within the CRT tradition to point to the development of the courtroom as white space and the construction of legal narrative and legal truth as distinctly white. It traces the exclusion of people of color from the courtroom to create a courtroom comprised of only...

The practical application of international humanitarian law to a potential non- international armed conflict is unclear in case law and other literature. This Comment fills this lacuna by clarifying existing legal standards, reconciling the inconsistent application of these standards, and honing the law of non-international armed conflict. Specifically, this Comment focuses on the two essential...

Over the last six years, courts have struggled with the challenge of calculating criminal restitution in child pornography cases. At the heart of this struggle has been the statute mandating restitution, 18 U.S.C. § 2259, which requires courts to simultaneously grant restitution for the “full amount” of a victim’s losses and limit this award to those losses “proximately caused” by the defendant...

Conventional accounts of federalism and administrative law generally assume that the federal government is highly centralized in Washington, D.C. Judges, politicians, and academic commentators often speak of “bureaucrats in Washington,” and they often contrast the poor governance supposedly provided by those bureaucrats with more responsive, innovative, and democratically legitimate governance...

A bedrock principle of patent law—patent exhaustion—proclaims that an authorized sale of a patented article exhausts the patentee’s rights with respect to the article sold. Over one hundred and fifty years of case law, however, has produced two conflicting notions of patent exhaustion, one considering exhaustion to be mandatory regardless of whether the patentee subjects the sale to express...

Since 1996, the Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA) defined marriage for federal purposes as the union between a man and a woman. As same-sex marriage became legal across the United States, DOMA created a situation in which same-sex married couples could not access federal immigration benefits based on their married status. In some cases, this meant that noncitizens were removed from the United States...