Notes

Bankruptcies now dominate mass-tort litigation. Defendants file for bankruptcy because the class action and multi-district litigation devices have failed to deliver parties meaningful finality, and new legal tools—nondebtor releases, complex claims-processing schemes, and the Texas Two-Step—have made bankruptcy a more attractive forum for resolving mass-tort liabilities. Troublingly, litigants, courts, and scholars struggle to consistently evaluate a reorganization plan’s legitimacy. This Note takes a novel approach, arguing federal preclusion law and due process principles of exit, voice, and loyalty provide the best framework for evaluating a mass-tort bankruptcy. Bankruptcy resolutions are generally “otherwise consistent” with due process because they substitute claimants’ exit rights for voice rights. Whether a reorganization plan violates due process depends not on the formal legal tools mass-tort debtors deploy but on whether those tools infringe upon claimants’ voice rights or undermine aggregate litigation’s core goals of finality and equitable redress. This Note concludes that bankruptcy remains a valuable forum for resolving complex mass-tort crises and identifies several cases that can guide future stakeholders.

The role of stare decisis in constitutional law is a ubiquitous one. It shows up almost everywhere, leaving controversy and chaos in its wake. Yet despite the prominence of stare decisis, its jurisprudence remains perpetually unsettled. The Supreme Court identifies several factors that affect the strength of prior precedent. However, these factors are not consistently defined or even wholly agreed upon. How can something as crucial as the law of stare decisis have such scattered precedents? Something more, something deeper, is going on here. A hint of this deeper issue comes out in contentious cases like Payne v. Tennessee, Planned Parenthood v. Casey, and Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, where the Justices speak to or acknowledge democratic disagreement and its effect on the Supreme Court’s legitimacy. But to understand these cases as the Court simply confronting its own legitimacy, while partly correct, is much too narrow. A closer inspection of these opinions reveals more than just a simple debate about democratic disagreement. It is a debate about what role democratic disagreement should play in stare decisis and, therefore, in the Supreme Court as an institution. Thus, it is no wonder that stare decisis, as a doctrine, is unsettled. Stare decisis has become the battleground for America’s oldest contest: departmentalism or judicial supremacy.

This Note argues that stare decisis is much better understood when one analyzes the doctrine in connection with the broader discussions surrounding departmentalism and judicial supremacy. In doing so, this Note develops in three Parts. Part I examines the necessary background of stare decisis and its relationship to interbranch conflict. Part II surveys the three cases of Payne, Casey, and Dobbs, paying particular attention to how the Justices in these cases are, in truth, guided by their views of departmentalism or judicial supremacy. Part III further highlights the relationship between disputes over stare decisis and departmentalism versus judicial supremacy and provides the reader with a potential theoretical framework to explicitly incorporate the concept of departmentalism within precedent. Departmentalism and judicial supremacy will forever be negotiated. Ultimately, in stare decisis, a home has been found for this great American debate.

Autonomous vehicles are now driving people around in cities from San Francisco to Phoenix. But how to regulate the safety risks from these autonomous driving systems (ADS) remains uncertain. While state tort law has traditionally played a fundamental role in controlling car crash risks, this Note argues that the development of novel data tracking and simulation tools by the ADS industry has led to a regulatory paradigm shift: By leveraging these tools for regulatory analysis, the federal National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) could iteratively adapt and improve its regulatory standards after each crash. While many scholars have advanced proposals for how state products liability can adapt to ADS crashes, this Note is the first to propose such a model of “crash-adaptive regulation” for NHTSA and to show that this model will prove superior to tort liability in controlling ADS crash risks. In presenting this new regulatory model, this Note engages with two rich theoretical debates. First, it compares the efficacy of tort liability and agency regulation in controlling ADS crash risks. Second, it evaluates whether ADS safety standards should be set at the federal level or at the state level. It concludes that ADS’ technical characteristics call for an agency regulatory scheme at the federal level and urges NHTSA to build the technological and operational expertise necessary to operate a crash-adaptive regulatory regime.

The National Labor Relations Board (NLRB or Board) is charged with enforcing the keystone statute of U.S. labor law, the National Labor Relations Act (NLRA or Act), including its prohibition against employers’ firing workers in retaliation for union organizing. In a time of rising labor agitation, however, the NLRB’s procedures for remediating such alarmingly frequent discharges are woefully inadequate. This Note examines the perennially underutilized section 10(j) of the NLRA, which provides for injunctive relief in discriminatory discharge cases where the Board’s own slow-moving administrative procedures would defeat the purpose of the Act, and explains why current 10(j) procedures are plagued by delay and failure. It then proposes an alternative administrative procedure for 10(j) cases—including a delegation of prosecutorial discretion, quick evidentiary hearings, and review of Administrative Law Judge determinations by the Board—that would address many of the section’s shortcomings. The Note considers the salutary consequences of implementing this alternative procedure through notice and comment rulemaking before concluding by demonstrating how this procedure would enhance the Board’s enforcement of the Act. Ultimately this Note argues that section 10(j) can, through long-overdue procedural reform, become a robust guarantee of the statutory rights of workers that are at the heart of the NLRB.

More than a decade ago, the Supreme Court discarded its old notice pleading standard and replaced it with a “plausibility” standard in the landmark cases Bell Atlantic v. Twombly and Ashcroft v. Iqbal. A deluge of commentary followed, much of it critical of either the perceived informational imbalance that the standard created or the broad discretion that the decisions were understood to grant to district court judges. This Note identifies a pattern that appears to be emerging in the lower courts in which parties can satisfy their pleading burden by relying in part on “institutional facts”—that is, findings made by competent entities that implicate the factual allegations in the complaint. This Note argues that, as a matter of doctrine, this practice has yet to be recognized, but it should be applauded and encouraged as both intuitive and judicially tractable.

Torres v. Madrid is a seminal Supreme Court decision that was decided during the 2021 Supreme Court term. Torres centered on whether a woman who was shot in the back by the police but managed to escape was seized under the Fourth Amendment. This was a decision that garnered widespread attention because it was decided during a national reckoning with police violence following the George Floyd protests. The Court ultimately held that Ms. Torres was seized the instant the bullet punctured her body. This was a win for the civil rights groups as it allowed Ms. Torres to pursue a remedy, but the decision did not go far enough. This Note focuses on a special class of seizures called attempted and “touchless” seizures, and argues that recognizing both attempted and touchless seizures under the Fourth Amendment will open the door to redressing a broader range of police misconduct.

Within the literature on legal scholarship, academics have studied citation practices. For example, scholars have examined which authors, journals, and articles are most cited. But no one has examined which parts of articles scholars cite. Understanding which parts of articles scholars cite is not only intrinsically interesting, but also could inform how authors structure articles. This Note presents the results of a unique, hand-coded dataset of thousands of pinpoint citations. In brief: Authors are more likely to cite the beginning of articles but split their remaining citations roughly evenly. This pattern holds across flagship journals of variously ranked law schools and articles of varying length, but it is less pronounced for self-citation. While cynical explanations—that cite-worthy content is concentrated at the beginning, or authors tend not to thoroughly read the articles they cite—of the data is possible, a better explanation serves as a modest rebuttal to certain criticisms of legal scholarship.

While the Violence Against Women Act (VAWA) has long been venerated as a major legislative victory for those subjected to sexual and gender-based violence (S/GBV), VAWA is less often understood as the funding boon that it is for police, prosecutors, and prisons. A growing literature on the harms of carceral feminism has shown that VAWA has never ensured the safety of Black and Brown women; queer, trans, and gender-nonconforming people; sex workers; drug users; poor, working class, homeless, and housing insecure people; migrants; and others who do not fit the “everywoman” archetype; nor has it recognized their right to protect themselves from violence.

I contribute to this literature in three ways: First, drawing from the rich narrative traditions of critical race theory and critical legal studies, I tell untold and undertold stories of state violence against victims of S/GBV. Second, I weave together knowledge produced by scholars across disciplines, as well as by transformative justice organizers and practitioners, to situate my illustrations in a landscape of carceral violence. Third, I build on the written work of those scholars, organizers, and practitioners to propose transformative justice approaches to S/GBV. Specifically, I propose that we use VAWA to meet the demand that all criminalized survivors be freed by incentivizing the expanded use of state executives’ clemency powers, as well as by expanding the use of clemency at the federal level. I also argue that an anti-carceral VAWA must include financial reparations for criminalized survivors, as compensation for the harms that the state has inflicted on them through unjust prosecutions and imprisonment, as well as for the violence they have been forced to endure in prisons, jails, and the custody of police officers.

Courts cannot predict the future, but their decisions are binding precedent on future generations. Technological changes—that courts could have never predicted—break down this system of stare decisis. What made sense yesterday no longer makes sense today. Leveraging an understanding of technology, the rule of law, and stare decisis, this Note proposes a new approach to copyright fair use decisionmaking that involves utility-expanding technologies, or tools that radically change the use of and access to copyrighted works. When applying past precedent, courts should carefully contextualize prior decisions’ analyses of the first and fourth fair use factors within the precedent’s time and perform a similar analysis for the current case in the current era. The more that the factual circumstances diverge between the two cases, the less weight the court should give to the past precedent. Moreover, when generating precedent on utility-expanding transformative fair uses, courts should narrow their fair use decisions to the dispute before the court and only rule on the specific technology in question—helping ensure that the balance between advancing technological interests and protecting the rights of content creators does not become rooted in shortsighted thinking from a materially different past.

Public law, specifically constitutional due process law and administrative law, operates against a background presumption of no liability for omissions. To state the inverse, the majority rule is that liability applies only in the case of affirmative government actions. While this was not always the case, following DeShaney v. Winnebago County Department of Social Services and Heckler v. Chaney in the 1980s, the Court has generally closed off plaintiffs from litigating government failures-to-act. Scholars have pointed at the philosophical absurdity of delineating government acts and omissions, given that in a state as regulated as ours, everything is, at bottom, an affirmative choice. But the federal judiciary has remained fairly unmoved. Against this overriding presumption of no omissions liability, however, the courts have eked out several exceptions in which they are willing to find liability for inaction. While scholars have pointed to reasons why the judiciary has been reluctant to find liability for omissions, this Note looks at why the judiciary has been willing to find liability in certain cases. It identifies the overarching reason to be administrability, motivated by two characteristics that the court either creates or constructs. First, when the court identifies or constructs an affirmative component of an omission, it is more willing to find liability. Second, when there is an ex ante regulation or statute limiting government discretion, the court is similarly persuadable. This Note identifies seven categories across public law that fall into these two areas and in which omissions liability (at least in some way) exists: state-created danger doctrine, special relationships, Monell liability, a blurred line between procedural and substantive due process, abdication of agency statutory duties, failure to perform ministerial duties, and a refusal to initiate rulemaking. As its final contribution, this Note argues that scholars, litigants, and courts should seek to broaden public omissions liability, given that society is plagued with protracted crises resulting from government inaction. Relying on the proxies for administrability that the courts are already comfortable with, the final Part marries administrability with accountability and creates broader categories for each exception to tackle contemporary ills.