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Five years ago, in Zelman v. Simmons-Harris, the U.S. Supreme Court upheld the constitutionality of a Cleveland program that provided school vouchers to low-income parents seeking private school alternatives for their children. Zelman was heralded as of great historical significance when it was decided. Yet, in the years since Zelman, school vouchers have made little political headway—only three...

The common law and federal regulations create overlapping legal regimes that require researchers to obtain the informed consent of most human subjects of medical research. The fast-growing field of biomedical research generally, and stem cell research in particular, gives rise to a range of unresolved and contested legal issues concerning the extent and implementation of the informed consent...

This Article's central argument is that the law needs to do a better job of recognizing, protecting, respecting, and promoting friendships. The law gives pride of place to other statuses—family and special professional relationships are obvious ones—but the status of the friend is rarely relevant to legal decisionmaking and public policymaking in a consistent way. After defining the concept of...

The issue of pharmacists refusing to dispense birth control or emergency contraception recently has become a major debate in the battle over reproductive rights. Several states have enacted legislation to protect refusing pharmacists, and many more are considering such laws. I explore these new laws against the backdrop of the existing legal landscape governing the actions of pharmacists...

Virtual worlds, and the subset known as massively multiplayer online games, have grown in popularity to encompass tens of millions of participants and billions of dollars in revenues per year. Participants make sizable investments of social, human, and economic capital in these virtual worlds, often with the questionable expectation that the items they have collected and creations they have...

n two recent opinions, Blakely v. Washington and United States v. Booker, the U.S. Supreme Court effectively invalidated the binding nature of sentencing guidelines used by many states and the federal government over the past thirty years. Not surprisingly, numerous commentators have asserted that Blakely and Booker profoundly altered the nature of sentencing in the United States. But these...

This Article analyzes the claimed power of the president to create federal law on the foundation of the executive’s status as the constitutional representative of the United States in foreign affairs. Executive branch advocates have claimed such a power throughout constitutional history. In the most recent act of this historical drama, President Bush last year issued a surprise “Determination,”...

Work is central to much of life and to many areas of law, including recent transformations in the American welfare state. Despite this pervasive importance, work is notoriously difficult to define. Yet doing so is essential to the design and functioning of a work-based welfare system. This Article provides the first comprehensive analysis of how to define work for the purpose of satisfying...

Hepatitis C (HCV) in prisons is a public health crisis tied to current drug policy's emphasis on the mass incarceration of drug users. Prison policy acts as a barrier to HCV care by limiting medical care for the infected, especially drug users, and by inhibiting public health measures addressing the epidemic. This Comment argues that courts mistakenly limit prisoners’ Eighth Amendment right to...

In its recent and highly anticipated decision in MGM Studios, Inc. v. Grokster, Ltd., the U.S. Supreme Court appeared reluctant to make any significant changes to copyright law. The Court avoided comment on the vigorously debated definition of the "substantial noninfringing uses" standard from Sony Corp. v. Universal City Studios, Inc., affirmed the Sony doctrine without modifying it, and...

In the past two decades, business groups and their political allies have often criticized broad civil rights remedies—particularly the availability of money damages—as encouraging abusive and extortionate litigation practices. In its decision in Buckhannon Board & Care Home, Inc. v. West Virginia Department of Health & Human Resources, the U.S. Supreme Court seemed to heed those arguments...

An implicit dichotomy of the corporation exists in legal scholarship. On one side of the dichotomy rests the publicly held corporation suffering from a significant conflict of interest between its managers and dispersed shareholders; on the other side, the closely held corporation plagued by intershareholder conflict. This Article argues that understanding the agency problems that can exist...

An enduring challenge for administrative law is the tension between the ideal of democratic policymaking and the ubiquity of bureaucratic discretion. This Article seeks to reframe the problem of agency discretion by outlining an interpretivist model of administrative law based on the concept of fiduciary obligation in private legal relations such as agency, trust, and corporation. Administrative...

In 1999, California enacted domestic partnership legislation for the first time. In its initial stages, registration of a domestic partnership offered few rights and no responsibilities to partners. Subsequent legislation added greater rights and responsibilities to the skeleton of the registry, culminating in the Domestic Partner Rights and Responsibilities Act of 2003, which conferred upon...