October 18, 2019
Over 90 percent of McDonald’s restaurants in the United States are franchises. Franchising has many benefits for both the franchisor (who saves substantial operating expenses) and the franchisee (who can leverage the franchisor’s brand name and startup resources). But there are serious drawbacks to the franchise model for employees, whose legal recourse against a franchisor…
Election and Voting Law, General
October 15, 2019
The role of the judiciary in partisan gerrymandering is a topic du jour. This past summer, in a dispute over North Carolina’s congressional maps, the United States Supreme Court closed the federal courtroom doors to all partisan gerrymandering claims, declaring the issue non-justiciable in Rucho v. Common Cause. But the Court wrote that “[p]rovisions in…
October 8, 2019
“Here we are again.” The Third Circuit has had enough in Prometheus Radio Project v. FCC (“Prometheus IV”), the FCC’s fourth loss in a series of cases spanning over fifteen years, as the court vacated a set of FCC policies for analytical shortcomings. In reaching this decision, the court implicitly invoked two central principles: that…
Constitutional Law, First Amendment
October 7, 2019
Campus speech wars have been flaring up over the issue of offensive speech and the appropriateness of schools’ responses to it. Recently, the Sixth Circuit weighed in on the First Amendment implications of the matter. The specific battle had already ended by the time the court found itself in the speech wars’ trenches. But the…
October 7, 2019
Probation is often a punishment reserved for those who would otherwise be in jail, such as those who have committed felonies or misdemeanors. In Georgia, drivers who are put on probation can also find themselves in jail when accused of not paying off their speeding tickets. Recently, in Washington v. Rivera, the Eleventh Circuit held…
October 3, 2019
When times are good for constitutional lawyers, they are bad for everyone else. Boris Johnson, the Prime Minister of the United Kingdom and Leader of the Conservative Party, is in an almost unprecedented position. He has lost his majority in the House of Commons, but is unable to bring about an election. The majority of…
Lisa Graybill oversees the SPLC’s work to reverse the “new Jim Crow” and eliminate the structural racism entrenched in the policing, sentencing, imprisonment, and post-conviction practices of states in the…
Anu Bradford is Henry L. Moses Professor of Law and International Organization at Columbia Law School. She is also a Director for the European Legal Studies Center. Her research and…
Ezra Rosser is a professor at American University Washington College of Law, where he has taught Property, Poverty Law, Federal Indian Law, Housing Law, Land Use, and Wills, Trusts, and…
