April 9, 2021
In America, the people are sovereign and straightjacketed. Faced with a problem — passing, like a pandemic, or persistent, like poverty — they can call on their government to answer it. But, when they act, courts can tell them they’ve overstepped their Constitution’s grant of powers. Recently, several federal district courts, faced with a novel national…
April 7, 2021
Second Amendment doctrine—perhaps more than any other constitutional right save the Seventh Amendment civil jury—has become intensely preoccupied with genealogy. Ever since Chief Justice John Roberts in District of Columbia v. Heller remarked during oral argument (almost to himself) that, just as there appears to be “lineal descendants” of colonial-era weaponry, there could be “lineal descendants”…
March 15, 2021
In the last year, colleges and universities across the U.S. struggled with how to operate during the COVID-19 pandemic. The most recent data, from January 2021, shows a mix of online and in-person modes of instruction. At the same time, a study of the experience in early fall 2020 found an association between colleges and…
March 13, 2021
Editor’s Note: This piece is the first in our new series covering the Supreme Court’s “shadow docket” — emergency orders and summary decisions outside the Court’s main docket of argued cases and decisions. In November, the Supreme Court ruled in favor of the plaintiff in a qualified immunity case in Taylor v. Riojas. Commentators wondered whether Riojas would…
March 8, 2021
Not all employment relationships are created equal. Nearly every legal system in the world provides multiple frameworks for individuals and businesses to structure their economic relations, each governed by tailored regulations and safeguards. Different options generally entail different tradeoffs between flexibility and protection. In the United States, for example, individuals working as “employees” benefit from…
March 4, 2021
Editor’s Note: This piece is a part of our series celebrating the thirty-year anniversary of the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA). I never met my spring term Disability Law class in person. I told the students appearing on my computer screen, “Watch this moment. As a society, we will devote massive amounts of resources to…
Gladden Pappin is an assistant professor of politics at the University of Dallas and the cofounder and deputy editor of American Affairs. He is also a permanent research fellow at…
Helen Hershkoff is the Herbert M. and Svetlana Wachtell Professor of Constitutional Law and Civil Liberties (formerly the Anne and Joel Ehrenkranz Professor of Law, 2006–2009) and Co-Director of the…
Luke Goodrich is Vice President and Senior Counsel at the Becket Fund for Religious Liberty and the author of Free to Believe: The Battle Over Religious Liberty in America (2019).…
