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The recent surge of interest in renewable energy and sustainable land use has made the airspace above land more valuable than ever before. Unfortunately, a growing number of policies aimed at promoting sustainability disregard landowners’ airspace rights in ways that can cause airspace to be underutilized. This Article analyzes several land use conflicts emerging in the context of renewable...

Increasingly finding themselves in fiscal straightjackets, states have been turning to austerity measures, tax increases, privatization of services, and renegotiation of collective bargaining agreements. Absent a federal government bailout, however, states will also need debt relief if their debt burden becomes so crushing that reasonable efforts at fiscal reform will fail to avoid default. Some...

As the financial crisis draws U.S. business overseas and developing countries rise in influence, the regulation of international business has never figured so prominently in federal law. But the dominant paradigm through which academics and policymakers continue to view that law—the so-called Washington Consensus—proves deeply misleading. A more accurate account of the components, origins, and...

Newspaper executives have been struggling for the past decade to slow the sharp and unprecedented decline of their industry. While no effort has worked, one promising business model would be to charge for access to online content. But only the rarest industry leaders have felt comfortable making the move to a paid-content model without industry-wide agreement, and such an agreement would be a per...

In Pearson v. Callahan, the U.S. Supreme Court altered the contours of the qualified immunity defense with the intention of changing when and how federal courts make constitutional law. Qualified immunity is the primary defense to constitutional torts against government officials. Before Pearson, courts were required to determine if an official had violated a constitutional right even when that...

This Article seeks to transform how we think about affirmative action. The U.S. Supreme Court’s jurisprudence on the subject may appear to be a seamless whole, but closer examination reveals crucial differences between the cases broadly characterized as involving affirmative action. The government sometimes acts in a race-conscious manner by granting a tangible benefit to members of a minority...

Founders of a start-up usually take common stock as a large portion of their compensation for current and future labor efforts. By electing to pay a nominal amount of ordinary income tax on the speculative value of the stock when it is received, founders pay tax on any appreciation at the long-term capital gains rate. This Article argues that the preferential tax treatment of founders’ stock is...

For nearly three decades, the U.S. Supreme Court has struggled with the proper treatment of administrative action that departs from agency precedent. Moving toward a stronger theoretical account of administrative change requires exploring an underappreciated feature of all administrative action: the agency’s chosen mode of reasoning. Agencies sometimes execute their regulatory mandates by...

The U.S. Constitution provides a criminal defendant with a right to trial by jury, and most states and the federal government require criminal juries to agree unanimously before a defendant may be convicted. But what exactly must a jury agree upon unanimously? Well-established doctrine, pursuant to In re Winship, provides that the jury must agree that the prosecution has proven every element of...

Arbitration has changed dramatically since Congress enacted the Federal Arbitration Act in 1925. Increasingly, unsophisticated parties are asked to enter into binding arbitration agreements before any dispute has arisen. As a result, mandatory laws are frequently interpreted and enforced by arbitrators rather than judges. Nonetheless, judicial review of arbitration awards is still largely limited...

Each year, the UCLA Law Review hosts a Symposium featuring cutting-edge scholarship by leading specialists in an emerging legal field. On January 28, 2011, thirteen scholars engaged in a stimulating and productive conversation on contemporary interplay of criminal law and immigration law. Dean Moran opened the Symposium by welcoming the participants and highlighting the key issues and challenges...

The U.S. Supreme Court’s decision in Padilla v. Kentucky heralds a formal breakthrough in the representation provided to immigrants charged with crimes that trigger deportation, and the decision may signal as well the Court’s recognition of plea bargaining’s dominant role in criminal adjudication. There are good reasons to worry, however, that Padilla’s practical impact will be modest, and for...

In Padilla v. Kentucky, the U.S. Supreme Court held that the Sixth Amendment required counsel to advise clients pleading guilty that conviction might result in deportation. The Court rested its decision on the idea that this information was important to the client’s decisionmaking process. However, the Court did not explore a stronger reason for developing a more precise understanding of a...