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This Article seeks to reconstruct the public nuisance climate change cases Connecticut v. AEP and California v. General Motors to show that, while hardly perfect, nuisance litigation could form a reasonable basis for climate change regulation, at least as much as some of the other imperfect alternatives so far proposed. This nuisance system has promise because, as outlined here, it essentially...

Life without economic subordination is recognized around the world as a fundamental human right. When individuals are economically impoverished, they are more likely to not only offend, but also repeatedly offend, because poverty compounded with the imposed civil disabilities of a criminal conviction further socially isolate and minimize their life options. This factual inference is not only...

Expelled students have intense educational needs, yet few states protect their rights to alternative education during the period of expulsion or reinstatement to mainstream education following the period of expulsion. Instead of strengthening those rights, the No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB) creates an incentive structure that encourages the exclusion of expelled students from all access to...

Specialty license plates are commonly seen displayed on cars across the United States. Certain states permit motorists to purchase a specialty license plate for an extra fee in order to allow the driver to affiliate with a particular cause while simultaneously raising money for nonprofit organizations associated with the plates. The introduction of specialty license plates bearing messages either...

Are county governments capable stewards of urban life? Across the country, millions of low-income households live in urban enclaves that rely on county government for their most proximate tier of general purpose local government. Material conditions in many of these neighborhoods are reminiscent of early twentieth-century rural poverty, while others are a dystopic vision of twenty-first century...

This Article advances a new approach to understanding the relationship between work and citizenship that comes out of research on African American and Latino immigrant low-wage workers. Media accounts typically portray African Americans and Latino immigrants as engaged in a pitched battle for jobs. Conventional wisdom suggests that the source of tension between these groups is labor competition...

Does the First Amendment protect a speaker’s interest in reaching a particular audience if the expressive activity occurs in a traditional public forum? The intuitive answer to this question might be “yes” or “usually,” but the federal courts have taken a decidedly different approach—at least when the intended speech is political protest and the intended audience includes high-ranking government...

Merchants pay banks a fee on every credit card transaction. These credit card transactions cost American merchants an average of six times the total cost of cash transactions. The variation in fees among credit cards is also large, with some cards, such as rewards cards, costing merchants twice as much as others. The largest component of the fee merchants pay goes to finance rewards programs...

Uniformed lawyers—judge advocates—are uniquely situated at the heart of the American civil-military relationship. A recent article published in this law review argued that this placement has hindered military operations and disrupted civilian control over the military; left unaddressed, it will negatively affect the nation’s ability to fight and win future wars. This Essay takes issue with such...

After years of petitioning by artists and art enthusiasts, the passage of the Visual Artists Rights Act of 1990 finally conferred upon U.S. artists certain moral rights long enjoyed by their European counterparts: the personal, noneconomic rights that artists hold in their works. Specifically, the Act forbids the destruction of works that are “of recognized stature” and modifications of works if...

Over the past two decades, drug treatment courts have gained traction as popular alternatives to the conventional war on drugs and to its one-dimensional focus on incarceration. Specifically, the courts are meant to divert addicts from jails and prisons and into coerced treatment. Under the typical model, a drug offender enters a guilty plea and is enrolled in a long-term outpatient treatment...

Despite decades of effort, the international community has stumbled in attempts to craft tort remedies for victims of transboundary environmental damage. More than a dozen civil liability treaties have been negotiated that create causes of action and prescribe liability rules, but few have entered into force, and most remain unadopted orphans in international environmental law. In this Article, I...

This Article explores the relationship between medical malpractice tort reforms and death rates. Investigating this relationship is important both because of the frequent political conflict over such reforms and because medical malpractice causes tens of thousands of deaths each year. I first develop predictions from law and economics theory about medical malpractice tort reforms’ carelevel and...

How far below the earth’s surface do property rights extend? The conventional wisdom is that a landowner holds title to everything between the surface and the center of the earth. This Article is the first legal scholarship to challenge the traditional view. It demonstrates that the “center of the earth” theory is poetic hyperbole, not binding law. Broadly speaking, the deeper the disputed...