Notes

Login.gov is America’s new nationwide Digital ID system. In its few years of existence, it is already the only way to access an increasing number of government programs, benefits, and resources. The significance of this development hides behind technical details, confidential contracts, and jargony hyphenates like “single-sign-on” and “duo-authentication.” Yet properly examined, the story of why Login.gov was created, with whose input, and with which governance goals in mind exposes both the promise and pitfalls of infrastructural projects in the digital age.

A central facet of the Login.gov infrastructure is its reliance on a notoriously extractive and inscrutable data broker, LexisNexis. LexisNexis verifies the identities of Login.gov users—often welfare applicants, veterans, and federal employees—by comparing data input by users to a vast array of records scraped from every nook and cranny of the internet. The government’s decision to partner with LexisNexis openly flouted binding privacy and security guidelines set by the government’s own science and technology experts. Moreover, this massive aggregation of personal information, though legal, goes against the best practices for government collection and use of personal data set forth in the Privacy Act of 1974.

As ineffective as the Privacy Act of 1974 is as a data privacy law in the age of online data brokers, the law nevertheless represents a substantial effort by legislators from a bygone era to set principled guidelines for how to build trustworthy, democratically sustainable information systems. By contrast, the early years of America’s first nationwide digital identity credential are characterized by unscrupulous design judgments with dangerous consequences. But it is not too late to design tomorrow’s digital infrastructure to be safer, more equitable, and more trustworthy than what we have today.

Agency delay is a pervasive problem. It occurs in a broad range of policy areas, including environmental protection, healthcare, and financial regulation. The trope of slow and inefficient government agencies has become cliché.

Statutory deadlines are one solution to the problem of agency delay. Attaching a deadline to authorize legislation seems like an obvious way to make agencies act faster. Therefore, scholars and policymakers have urged the use of statutory deadlines to spur agencies to action. They have focused on ways to more vigorously enforce statutory deadlines through negative incentives, such as hammer provisions or mandamus remedies, as well as on the effectiveness and drawbacks of negative approaches.

The current debate neglects positive incentives as another way to encourage agencies to meet deadlines. This Note argues that statutory deadlines can be a superior way of avoiding agency delay when linked to positive incentives (“carrots”) rather than negative incentives (“sticks”). The Note specifically focuses on conditional relaxation of judicial review as a promising mechanism to induce agencies to more appropriately avoid unnecessary delay. Conditional relaxation of judicial review is so promising because it accounts for the costs of litigation and judicial review in a manner that the typical negative incentives do not. This Note will review the relevant current doctrine and debate on enforcement of statutory deadlines, lay out the possible ways to attach positive incentives to statutory deadlines, and in comparing this carrot approach to deadlines to the stick approach, will show the advantages (and limitations) of positive incentives. Ultimately, the carrot approach will be most appropriate where there is a policy need for speed and when an agency faces resource constraints, though such an approach may never be appropriate when there is a strong principal-agent conflict between Congress and the relevant agency.

Human trafficking and forced labor are serious crimes that violate the human rights of millions around the world. They also generate substantial profit for multinational corporations that purchase inputs at forced labor prices. This Note discusses how the Trafficking Victims Protection Reauthorization Act (TVPRA) can be used to establish civil liability for U.S. corporations benefiting from forced labor in their supply chains. Despite excitement in the human rights literature about the TVPRA, recent TVPRA claims involving international supply chains have failed to survive motions for dismissal and summary judgment. This article aims to provide insight into the recent decisions and to determine if they were correctly decided.

While civil liability could help combat global forced labor, recent TVPRA claims have failed because courts interpret the statute narrowly when adjudicating cases involving international supply chains. These restrictive interpretations are incorrect, especially because Congress intended the TVPRA to be a robust response to the global problems of trafficking and forced labor.

Legal scholars have long debated the President’s authority over administrative agencies. However, these narratives have ignored that Presidents have assumed directive control for decades—via the National Security Council. This Note fills that void in two ways. First, it provides a historical account. It reviews available national security directives and assesses their role in instigating administrative action. It reveals that, over time, Presidents have increasingly invoked these directives to mold domestic and economic policy. Second, this Note evaluates national security directives under three models of presidential authority: the unitary executive theory, Justice Elena Kagan’s notion of implied statutory authorization, and Professor Kevin Stack’s requirement of explicit statutory permission. It determines that all three theories sanction the President’s deployment of national security directives to control agencies and shape domestic affairs. This Note concludes that by providing a firm constitutional and statutory footing from which a President can dictate administrative action, national security directives are a powerful and expanding presidential tool.

In this Note, I challenge three dominant theories behind property tax exemptions for university housing—the “Quid-Pro-Quo,” “Sovereignty,” and, what I call, “Oxbridge” theories—and propose that only undergrad housing should be tax-exempt. My proposal would recognize the unique educational value of undergrad housing, help reduce town-gown tensions, and be easy to apply.

Data makes the world go round. Now more than ever, routine police work depends on the collection and analysis of digital information. Law enforcement agencies possess vast sums of intel on who we are, where we go, and what we do. The proliferation of digital technology has transformed federal criminal procedure—from how police investigate crimes to how prosecutors prove them at trial. Courts and commentators have written much about the first part, but less so about the second. Together, they represent two sides of the same problem: constitutional doctrine lagging behind new technology, leading to suboptimal constraints on law enforcement conduct.

This Note explores the effects of digital technology on the nature and scope of federal prosecutors’ disclosure obligations under Brady v. Maryland. As police pass along more data to prosecutors—usually terabytes at a time—prosecutors face the difficult task of sifting through mountains of evidence to determine what is exculpatory or otherwise favorable to the defense. Often, prosecutors turn over their entire case file, knowing full well that defense counsel will fare no better. This state of affairs puts our adversarial system on shaky ground. This Note urges district courts to exercise greater oversight of the discovery process, requiring prosecutors to take reasonable precautions so exculpatory evidence comes to light.

Our tax code is stuck in the Middle Ages. The Internal Revenue Code (“the Code”), codified at 26 U.S.C., uses the concepts of addition, subtraction, multiplication, and division, as one might expect of a tax code. But, disdaining the 1500s invention of the elementary math symbols ‘+,’ ‘–,’ ‘×,’ and ‘÷,’ the Code instead uses complicated English constructions such as “any amount of X which bears the same ratio to that amount as Y bears to Z.”

I propose that we use these elementary math symbols in our tax laws. To see whether this would increase the laws’ legibility, I conducted a preregistered, randomized, controlled trial involving 161 participants. One group received the actual Code, the other, a translation using math symbols. Both groups were asked to solve the same two Code-based tax problems. For the first problem, use of the translation with math symbols increased answer accuracy from 25% to 70%. For the second problem, answer accuracy increased from 11% to 50%.

This result, I argue, can be extrapolated to the broader population and to the Code as a whole, confirming the plausible intuition that math symbols would increase the understandability of the Code. I then argue that this would be a good thing, answering various objections along the way, with a particular appeal to the rule of law and the spirit of democracy. People ought to be able to understand the laws that govern them.

When an employer violates minimum wage and overtime laws, the Fair Labor Standards Act (FLSA) empowers a worker to bring a collective action on behalf of themselves and their affected coworkers. As an early step in such suits, courts authorize notice to the plaintiff’s coworkers so that they can join the litigation. However, employers increasingly require workers, as a condition of employment, to agree to arbitrate such claims and waive the right to sue in court under the FLSA. Courts in several circuits have begun to go along with employers who have pointed to alleged arbitration agreements as a reason the court should not notify a plaintiff’s coworkers of an ongoing suit. This Note explains that courts should reject this reasoning and argues that preventing workers—even those purportedly bound to arbitration—from learning of a collective action is contrary to the goals of the FLSA and the Supreme Court’s original rationale for authorizing lower courts to issue notice. Rather, notifying arbitration-bound plaintiffs of FLSA collective actions will result in more efficient and effective resolutions of lawsuits alleging minimum wage and overtime violations.

Since the end of the Civil War, courts consistently misread and under-utilized the historical sources available when interpreting the scope and meaning of the Reconstruction Amendments. Even as historians updated their understandings of Reconstruction history, the courts lagged, shackling themselves to incorrect historical accounts and outdated precedents.

Entering the twenty-first century, the Supreme Court engaged in a more thorough historical review of Reconstruction, prompting historians to question whether the Court was beginning to finally utilize Reconstruction history correctly. Students for Fair Admissions answers this question: No. This Note describes the history of the Court’s limited review of Reconstruction sources, notes the perceived shift to increased historical review in more recent cases, and outlines Students for Fair Admissions and its uniquely extensive, yet still underwhelming, review of history. Finally, and most crucially, this Note points to sources that were easily accessible to and missing from the opinions in Students for Fair Admissions to argue that the Court continues to misinterpret the meaning of the Fourteenth Amendment through a flawed approach to Reconstruction history.

Rule 17(c) of the Federal Rules of Criminal Procedure governs the ability of parties in a federal criminal case to discover material from one another and from nonparties prior to or during trial. The language of Rule 17(c) itself is broad and allows for any subpoenas to be issued so long as they are not “unreasonable or oppressive.” Yet, the Supreme Court, in two cases, Bowman Dairy Co. v. United States and United States v. Nixon, substantially narrowed the applicability of the Rule, such that— absent affirmative showings of admissibility, relevance, and specificity for all material sought—parties are not entitled to discovery. While this high bar for discovery does not create major issues for the prosecution, which has already conducted sweeping discovery during the grand jury process, the defense is left at the mercy of the Nixon standard and its requisite, near-insurmountable showings to obtain subpoenas. While some have critiqued the current system of federal criminal discovery, few have focused on the best way to reform that system, without overturning any Supreme Court precedent. And the literature that has proposed reforms to the criminal discovery system has concentrated on altering the text of Rule 17 itself. This Note instead advocates for a court-driven approach to reform and, in doing so, argues that this solution is preferable to Rule reform when one weighs speed and clarity. This Note proposes a novel approach to Rule 17(c) jurisprudence and the defense discovery system by providing historical context for Nixon and elucidating the due process and compulsory process concerns with this legal regime, ultimately recommending that courts use different standards of evaluation depending on the target of the subpoena—be it an opposing party, a nonparty, or the President of the United States.