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...
Congress will not enact meaningful campaign finance reform. Under the nation’s current legislative, regulatory, and judicial regimes, remedies to the problem of money in politics appear unattainable. This Comment provides an entirely novel approach toward reducing the corrosive influence of outside money on the U.S political system. Aided by the power of the profit motive, this Comment proposes...
This Article argues that because of its historical and ongoing investments in settler colonialism, the Canadian state has long been complicit and continues to be complicit in the human trafficking of indigenous women and girls in Canada. In addition to providing indigenous bodies for labour and sexual exploitation, Canada’s trafficking of indigenous people has been essential not only to securing...
This Article explores the role of race in the prostitution and sex trafficking of people of color, particularly minority youth, and the evolving legal and social responses in the United States. Child sex trafficking has become a vital topic of discussion among scholars and advocates, and public outcry has led to safe harbor legislation aimed at shifting the legal paradigm away punishing...
This Essay examines the potential influence of a new breed of actor in the global antitrafficking arena: the venture philanthropist, or “philanthrocapitalist.” Philanthrocapitalists have already helped rebrand “trafficking” as “modern-day slavery,” and have expressed their ambitions to lead global efforts to eradicate the problem. With their deep financial resources and access to powerful...
Many immigrants’ rights advocates and scholars have recognized the undocumented worker exploitation that takes place when immigration restrictions enter the workplace, which create incentives for employer misconduct and increase the vulnerability of workers without status. However, little has been discussed about the broader implications of the currently expansive immigration enforcement regime...