Notes

What motivates substantive presumptions about how to interpret statutes? Are they like statistical heuristics that aim to predict Congress’s most likely behavior, or are they meant to protect certain underenforced values against inadvertent legislative encroachment? These two rationales, fact-based and value-based, are the extremes of a continuum. This Note uses the presumption against extraterritoriality to demonstrate this continuum and how a presumption can shift along it. The presumption operates to diminish the likelihood that a federal statute will be read to extend beyond the borders of the United States. The presumption has been remarkably stable for decades despite watershed changes in the principles—customary international law and conflict of laws—that once supported it. As the presumption’s normative justifications have diminished, a new justification has grown in importance. Today, the presumption is often justified as a stand-in for how Congress typically legislates. This Note argues that this change makes the presumption less defensible but even harder to overcome in individual cases.

The Trademark Counterfeiting Act (TCA) has been widely applied to cases of postsale confusion, which occurs when someone buys a knock-off luxury item knowing that it is fake. When liability is predicated on post-sale activity, the only people that are confused are the members of the general public who observe someone wearing what looks like a genuine brand item—a Rolex watch or Louis Vuitton bag for instance—and think it is real when in fact it is not. While every circuit that has dealt with knock-off goods has held that post-sale confusion is criminalized by the TCA, this Note argues that this conclusion relies on an improper reading of the statute. The TCA was only designed to make criminal those actions that were clearly actionable civilly in 1984, when it was enacted. This Note will show that post-sale confusion was far from uniformly accepted civilly in 1984 and argue that, therefore, it should not be read into the TCA. Furthermore, this Note argues that the harms of post-sale confusion are identical to the harms of dilution, which was not covered in the Lanham Act until 1996 and was never included in the TCA. The Note then examines the statutory scheme to argue that Congress had only point-of-sale confusion in mind when it enacted the TCA. The statute unambiguously fails to cover more typical dilutive sales, which is strong evidence that, contrary to the courts’ collective reasoning, Congress did not have the harms of dilution in mind when it added criminal penalties to trademark law. Finally, this Note argues that, from a policy perspective, post-sale confusion should not be criminalized. The harms are small, and companies have had a great deal of success combatting knock-offs with civil actions. There is no need to impose severe fines and long prison terms for selling knock-offs. This Note concludes by stating that there are serious harms from counterfeits that create point-of-sale confusion, but the public does not take these seriously because they think only of knock-offs when they think about counterfeits. The decriminalization of the sale of knock-offs will allow the public to be more willing to accept the true dangers of “real” counterfeits and to become more vigilant in the marketplace.

This Note builds on the work of Professor William Berry, who has proposed a concept called “procedural exceptionalism” to explain the persistence of the death penalty in the United States in an age of abolition elsewhere in the West. Berry argues that there is a distinctive American faith in the procedural protections afforded defendants, such as the jury trial and multiple levels of appeal, which helps legitimize the institution of capital punishment in the United States. This analysis, however, only takes into account the conviction and sentencing aspect of the death penalty. This Note contends that the actual method by which executions are carried out is equally important in explaining the retention of capital punishment. This Note applies Berry’s idea of “American procedural exceptionalism” to method of execution in the particular context of judicial decisions governing the administration of lethal injection. It argues first that lethal injection as a method of execution perpetuates the notion of a more “humane” death penalty, and second that judicial faith in the perfectibility of the procedures governing lethal injection serves to reinforce this notion. This faith in the perfectibility of the procedure of lethal injection works in conjunction with a similar faith in the procedures governing conviction and sentencing to create an equilibrium that allows for the continued use of capital punishment in the United States.

Federal preemption is one of the most powerful defenses that a product liability defendant can raise. If a court finds that federal law preempts a state law product liability claim, it must dismiss the claim. Dismissal of the state tort claim may eliminate the only source of private liability of defendants and the only source of compensation for plaintiffs. If the applicable federal statute does not contain an express preemption provision, most courts find federal preemption only if a “conflict” exists between the state and federal laws. However, in some areas, courts have held that all state product liability claims in a particular “field” are preempted because an aspect of the field is subject to federal regulation. This Note argues that this broad “field-based” preemption framework, referred to as implied field preemption, should not be invoked to preempt state law product liability claims, despite the Supreme Court’s recent decision in Kurns v. Railroad Friction Products Corp. The case against the field-based framework is strong when viewed from doctrinal, theoretical, and historical perspectives. The case studies presented in this Note illustrate the problems that result when an appellate court finds implied field preemption. Field preemption prevents lower courts from determining whether the state claims in question and federal law are actually incompatible. In some cases a field-based framework defeats the purposes behind both state tort law and federal preemption by eliminating product liability law’s deterrence and compensation functions without providing a corresponding benefit to the federal regulatory structure.

International indicators are widely used as diagnostic tools for global governance. For the developing world, with scarce resources and complex social problems, indicators can help businesses, donors, and policymakers identify issues, tailor solutions, and measure impacts. This Note studies the dynamics between global and domestic indicators in Vietnam, particularly the ways they influence Vietnam’s policy processes. It finds that while global indicators have advanced the notion of competitiveness and made it a priority of the national government, sub-national indicators—here, a ranking of Vietnam’s provinces—play a significant role as a more tailored and focused tool to motivate internal competition for pro-business reforms. This Note therefore confirms the dominant viewpoint that global indicators influence a country’s development agenda, but concludes that this effect is even more pronounced in the presence of robust local indicators.

Single mothers are responsible for raising one in five American children. They are disproportionately poor women of color. This Note explores the Internal Revenue Code’s provisions that, though facially neutral, disadvantage single motherhood in effect. Although the tax code’s progressivity does some work to alleviate poverty among single mothers, major income tax provisions intended to support families fail many single mothers precisely because of their low-income status. Many of the benefits go to higher-income families, who tend to be married couples. This Note argues that the tax code should do more to support single mothers. Specifically, this Note argues that the existing federal child and dependent care credit should be made refundable so that it reaches more single mothers and better functions as an incentive to procure quality care for children.

This Note seeks to contribute to the revival of an underutilized section of the Fair Housing Act intended not just to ban individual acts of discrimination but also to achieve integrated residential neighborhoods. The gulf between lofty, vague federal policy and the local governments responsible for zoning, planning, and housing siting decisions, however, has stymied this pro-integration purpose. Although all state and most local governments are required to certify that they are meeting their obligation to “affirmatively further fair housing,” this certification has rarely risen above mere boilerplate. Building on recent litigation that reinvigorated the Act’s positive purpose with some skeletal substance and a new proposed rule seeking to improve procedural compliance, this Note proposes an expanded federal rule to define meaningfully this obligation through concrete, quantitative benchmarks. In the absence of such an expanded rule, this Note suggests guidance on how a court might evaluate compliance with this capacious statutory standard by using housing segregation data in a burden-shifting framework. This Note concludes by addressing workability and constitutionality concerns, evaluating practical hurdles, and testing the proposed rule against the Roberts Court’s jurisprudence on equal protection and federalism. The ultimate purpose is a pragmatic program to achieve the still-unrealized goal that animated the Act’s passage: a truly integrated nation.

The Eighth Amendment has been interpreted to demand proportionality between an offender’s crime and his punishment. However, the current proportionality standard is widely regarded as meaningless. In weighing the severity of the crime against the harshness of the punishment, modern courts do not consider any aspect of the sentence beyond the number of years listed. This Note argues that a more comprehensive analysis of the features of a sentence that contribute to its severity has the potential to reinvigorate the proportionality principle by giving courts a fuller picture of the harshness of modern sentences. Although there are some hurdles to conducting this more robust analysis, this Note proposes methods by which courts could consider the true length of carceral sentences, the prison conditions in which the sentences are served, and the collateral consequences that accompany many criminal convictions. In so doing, this Note demonstrates that some methods of accounting more accurately for the harshness of punishments are neither impracticable nor in tension with other areas of Eighth Amendment doctrine.

Since the mid-twentieth century, the Court’s developing view on the social construction of identity has driven some of the most fundamental changes in modern equal protection jurisprudence. One of these transformations has been the development of what I call the “antireification principle” in the Court’s affirmative action cases. Under this principle, an important function of constitutional law is to regulate social meaning in accordance with the view that social categories like race are mere constructs. Guided by the antireification norm, the Court has used judicial review to block state action that, in its estimation, treats false constructs as real, important, or enduring. The Court, however, has been highly selective in its application of the principle outside of the race context. Where gender and sexuality are at issue, the Court has been more than willing to cast existing categories as real and even celebrate them.

This Note describes and questions the Court’s selective use of antireification, suggesting that there is no reason, per se, why antireification could not further the goal of social equality in the realms of gender and sexuality. By denying their bases in reality, the Court could—according to the logic of antireification destabilize all such identity constructs and decrease the harms they cause. This Note proceeds to hypothesize a set of explanations for the Court’s selective application of the principle, but ultimately finds each unsatisfying. Finally, it suggests that selective deployment of antireification is symptomatic of inherent contradictions embedded in the structure of contemporary equal protection doctrine, which relies upon fixed identity categories at the same time that it seeks to destroy them.

Contrary to popular belief, pornography has not won the culture war. Far from enjoying the spoils of victory, pornography instead faces legislative ire up to the point of absolute prohibition. On November 6, 2012, close to fifty-six percent of voters approved the County of Los Angeles Safer Sex in the Adult Film Industry Act (“Measure B”), completely prohibiting “bareback”—or condom-free—pornography production. An intuitive response to such an imposition is to raise a First Amendment claim. However, bareback pornography has yet to receive explicit protection by any legislature or court. This Note takes a step toward assessing bareback pornography’s First Amendment status by first arguing that bareback pornography is sufficiently expressive to merit First Amendment protection under traditional theoretical justifications, doctrine, and emerging arguments for an expanded interpretation of First Amendment protection. This Note then argues that Measure B is a content-based restriction on protected expression and, therefore, should receive the Court’s most demanding scrutiny. Under such a test, Measure B should be deemed unconstitutional.