January 30, 2020
In November 2018, Florida amended its state constitution to restore voting rights to nearly 1.5 million ex-felons “upon completion of all terms of [their] sentence including parole or probation.” The ballot initiative, known as “Amendment 4,” was organized by Floridians for a Fair Democracy and spearheaded by Desmond Meade — an Orlandoan who overcame a…
November 27, 2019
What can states require of candidates for office before they may appear on a state’s ballot? Can they require petitions with thousands of signatures? What about health records? Birth certificates? College transcripts? While some ballot access laws are necessary to ensure organization and efficiency, others have the effect of frustrating democracy. Many times, ballot access…
November 26, 2019
Discriminatory school discipline practices have been the subject of much controversy in recent years. In December 2018, the U.S. Department of Education, led by Secretary Betsy DeVos, rolled back Obama-era guidance aimed at reducing racial disparities in school discipline. The move drew opposition from both state attorneys general and civil rights leaders, who worried about…
November 22, 2019
Labor law holds a precarious place within First Amendment jurisprudence. Since the 1930s, unions have enjoyed both protections and constraints that appear to push the boundaries of constitutionality. Recently, cases like Janus v. AFSCME have threatened labor law’s uneasy equilibrium of worker power and individual rights. With union-protective legislation falling under First Amendment challenge, scholars…
November 21, 2019
The President of the United States is pulling out every legal stop he can to prevent both the United States House of Representatives and the New York State District Attorney from requiring his accounting firm to hand over his tax returns and other personal financial information. The House Committee, among other things, is investigating whether…
November 20, 2019
Though “[p]rison walls do not form a barrier separating prison inmates from the protections of the Constitution,” (Turner v. Safley, 482 U.S. 78, 84, 1987) the rights of people inside prison walls vary dramatically from the rights of those outside of them. People who are incarcerated face abrogated rights: they are limited in if and…
November 18, 2019
For at least the second time this year, the Sixth Circuit has ruled on an Ohio law aimed at restricting access to abortion. In 2017, then-Governor John Kasich signed into law House Bill 214, which made it a felony for a doctor to perform an abortion if she has knowledge that the pregnant person is…
For decades, “conscience clauses” in statutes governing health care have protected the rights of employees from acting against their religious and moral beliefs. Critics of these provisions insist that there is a greater risk of discrimination against patients than discrimination against employees. Recently, in New York v. Department of Human and Health Services, Judge Engelmayer…
November 11, 2019
What is the difference between a legal opinion and an op-ed column? Judge James Ho of the Fifth Circuit appears to think not much. Recently, in Winzer v. Kaufman County, Judge Ho penned a dissent from an order denying a petition for rehearing en banc that seems better suited for the pages of the Dallas…
October 29, 2019
What was the Financial Crisis? Was it a mortgage bubble that burst the economy? Or risky decisions by investment bankers? Did it result from funding shortfalls in the shadow banking sector? Or was it the outcome of regulatory oversights? Whatever the answer is to this question – and it may well be all of the…
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…
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…
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…
December 5, 2017
Queues are a mundane and ubiquitous feature of our modern lives. We are all waiting in line for something, at least some of the time, whether in physical places or in virtual environments. We all feel indignant, at least most of the time, when “queue jumpers” cut in. The queue provides an ordered sequence of…
October 17, 2017
The Harvard Law Review starting a blog is an important moment. Law reviews have been crawling in this direction — toward shorter, somewhat less-heavily footnoted, somewhat less-heavily edited, more timely, and more relevant forms of writing — for a while. The Harvard Law Review, like many journals, has an “online only” component of shorter essays,…
