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On February 5, 2022, Russia launched Cosmos 2553 into orbit. On December 5, 2024, the world learned that the satellite carried a dummy nuclear warhead, designed to test components for a nuclear-armed anti-satellite (ASAT) weapon. That satellite, if detonated in space, would have the potential to destroy the infrastructure on which much of modern life depends. Although the prospect of a nuclear-armed anti-satellite weapon is new, the threat to satellites is not. As satellite technologies have proliferated to facilitate civilian and military operations around the globe, so too have ASAT weapons. China, Russia, India, and the United States have all tested ASAT weapons, which can create millions of pieces of space debris in a realm where anything larger than one centimeter may damage spacecraft.

These new threats raise pressing questions that legal scholarship is only beginning to answer: Does the deployment of some or all ASAT weaponry violate international law? What lawful responses are available to states facing such threats? Do threats from weapons positioned in space meaningfully differ from those posed by ground-based systems? At what point may states lawfully invoke the right of self-defense and use force to counter these threats? This Essay aims to fill this gap. It begins by describing the novel threats posed by the rise of ASAT weaponry and outlining the legal framework governing spacefaring and hostilities. It then presents a framework to determine the lawful measures states can take to respond to ASAT threats and examines the threshold at which states may lawfully invoke their right of self-defense. The Essay urges caution in responding to novel ASAT technology, arguing that overreacting to space-based threats might trigger the very global catastrophe that states hope to avoid.

The second Trump administration has begun a concerted effort to reorganize the labor force of the entire United States. As federal workers are fired and higher education workers face funding cuts, the government is leaning into the bipartisan trend of using tariffs and subsidies to create jobs in sectors that serve a public purpose. Called “industrial policy,” the intervention of the federal government in private markets has spiked in popularity over the past decade. Bucking a longstanding tradition of laissez-faire capitalism and free trade, the executive and Congress have shown a willingness to put a visible hand on the market by subsidizing some sectors and taxing others. These interventions can easily backfire, as economists have warned, due to mistakes in the selection of subsidized sectors, high costs from tariffs, and ultimately slowed growth. Less discussed is the key role played by workers, whose unwillingness or inability to mobilize as directed by industrial policy could have dire consequences.

The Essay then lays out a policy agenda that would give industrial policy a better chance for success. The first sectors to target should be domestic industries that support labor productivity. These policies are the least likely to have unintended negative consequences and will enable the success of other reforms. Then, industrial policy can target missing labor markets already prioritized by the Biden and Trump administrations—manufacturing, construction, and new technologies. By prioritizing workers over artificial intelligence and other forms of non-human capital, industrial policy is more likely to create long-term value for the American economy.

Current frameworks for compensating victims of police violence inadequately address collective healing and repair. Overlooked are those who suffer policing’s harmful effects without direct police contact, e.g., bystanders and family members of those directly impacted. Consider 17-year-old Darnella Frazier, who documented George Floyd’s murder by Minneapolis police and subsequently required her mother’s comfort to sleep through the resulting trauma. While strangers far and wide rallied to support her healing through GoFundMe donations, most indirect victims receive no such widespread support. Typically, bystanders traumatized by police violence must rely solely on their families and local communities—often the same race-class subjugated circles that experience policing’s worst excesses. This Essay proposes a new direction: when local governments breach Fourth Amendment guarantees, liability should include damages for communal harms, or what I call “reparative” damages.

Rather than awarding damages to individual plaintiffs, courts would direct compensation to a community reparative fund—a hybrid model incorporating key features of both Victims Compensation Funds (VCF) and cy pres distributions. People harmed by police in that locality could thereafter apply to the program for compensation. Self-certification would enable anyone who could credibly establish that they were vicariously harmed by police to receive compensation. Embracing a dynamic approach to statutory interpretation, this approach aligns with Section 1983’s sweeping remedial vision and meets the equity demands of our time. And because the judiciary has played a principal role in enabling police violence by manufacturing stringent immunity doctrines and eroding the Fourth Amendment, enlisting courts to make collective amends for policing’s harms has stronger moral force than a legislative approach.

In mass tort multidistrict litigation (MDL), existing scaling-up devices have failed to generate significant efficiency gains. This essay suggests a novel device: issue presumption. Where courts possess the greater power to apply issue preclusion, courts may instead apply issue presumption to shift the burden of persuasion against the losing party in subsequent cases. By scaling up through this softer, more flexible approach, MDL courts can capture lost efficiency gains.

The Supreme Court’s decision in Loper Bright Enterprises v. Raimondo calls on courts to apply a broad range of rules of statutory construction instead of engaging in a deferential inquiry about whether an agency’s views are reasonable. Courts of appeals face the question how to apply their new interpretative responsibilities in the absence of Chevron deference. This Essay argues that courts of appeals must now apply the long- standing rule of strict construction of deportation statutes, also known as the immigration rule of lenity, which provides that ambiguities in deportation statutes be resolved to limit the sanction of deportation. This Essay shows that the Court developed the rule of strict construction of deportation statutes as a substantive check against the harsh consequences of deportation statutes. It further shows that the Court treated it as a strong substantive rule that applied to ambiguous statutes, even in situations where the agency’s position found support in its contemporaneous interpretation of the statute. By 1966, the Solicitor General as well as majority and dissenting Justices treated the rule as settled, leaving only the question whether a particular statutory provision contained an ambiguity sufficient to trigger the rule in the case before the Court. This established rule of strict construction is supported by the same justifications as the criminal rule of lenity and is further supported by unique aspects of deportation statutes, which typically have no statute of limitations and may apply retroactively. While much remains to be seen about how courts will apply their interpretive powers in the wake of Loper Bright, the rule of strict construction of deportation statutes has the pedigree of a strong substantive rule that ought to be considered fully in determining the scope of deportation laws.

The path to financial compensation for the wrongfully convicted can be complex and time-consuming. Exonerees often struggle to make ends meet and function in free society, let alone navigate serpentine processes while waiting years for the recovery they deserve. Securing the assistance of an attorney is often a critical step, but too few lawyers are willing to risk accepting these complicated cases on a contingency-fee basis—the only way that exoneree-clients can likely pay their lawyers without outside help.

Litigation finance—an important tool for increasing access to justice in tort cases—could help close this access to justice gap for exonerees. In a practice called client-directed financing, litigation funders have provided a relative handful of exonerees with cash advances, often leading to greater recoveries in the long run. After considering the benefits and burdens of client-directed financing, we argue that litigation funders ought to consider lawyer-directed financing as well. Through lawyer-directed financing, financiers provide funds directly to private lawyers (instead of to their clients), which mitigates the lawyers’ contingency-fee risk and thereby encourages more lawyers to represent exonerees. If more lawyers were to handle more exoneration compensation matters, the secondary benefits could be significant: securing more money for more exonerees, enhancing public safety, developing a more experienced bar, and increasing the likelihood that some police and prosecutors will alter their behavior towards future suspects and defendants.

For lawyer-directed financing to emerge, many states would have to make two changes to their laws: First, state supreme courts would need to interpret their attorney-client privilege laws to allow for necessary information to be shared with the financier without constituting waiver. Second, laws prohibiting champerty and sharing fees with non- lawyers would need to be removed. Even with those changes, we believe that ethics rules should properly constrain the financier’s ability to control the legal matter and that the risks presented by outside financing are outweighed by the gains in access to justice for the many exonerees who don’t presently have lawyers. For these reasons, we believe the expansion of litigation finance for exonerees merits serious consideration.

Well before the Supreme Court’s decision in Loper Bright, the Solicitor General laid the groundwork for treating the outcome of the case as irrelevant for immigration law. In recent cases, the Solicitor General has argued that 8 U.S.C. § 1103(a)(1) provides a freestanding basis for deference by the judiciary due to a phrase that the Attorney General’s views are “controlling.” This Essay shows that the Solicitor General’s argument is deeply flawed. Building on textual critiques, this Essay shows that for one hundred years Congress has considered how to manage multiple executive departments administering immigration laws. From 1924 until 1952, Congress did not preclude intrabranch disagreements, and in at least one case such disagreements were presented to the Supreme Court. In 1952, Congress acted to have the executive speak with one voice and placed that power with the Attorney General in § 1103(a)(1). Until recently, the Solicitor General recognized that § 1103(a)(1) was nothing more than a method for resolving intrabranch conflicts. The Solicitor General’s new effort to turn § 1103(a)(1) into a separate basis for judicial deference to agency views has no basis in the text or history of the provision. The Solicitor General’s argument should be abandoned before it leads to a new wave of circuit conflicts about deference in immigration cases in the wake of the Supreme Court’s decision this Term overturning Chevron.

This Essay expounds on the outsized role of private law in governing ownership of new technologies and data. As scholars lament gaps between law and technology, and the need for government regulation in these various spaces, private law has quietly intervened to essentially regulate key features related to ownership, control, and access. Whether such intervention is welcome, efficient, or effective probably depends on the context and is subject to debate. Nevertheless, this Essay provides an excellent illustration of the organic development of private ordering to occupy spaces left open by public law, and posits that the significance of this phenomenon, whether for better or worse, cannot be lost in the weeds.

More specifically, the way in which contract law and intellectual property law have coalesced to define and control data ownership is striking. As a threshold matter, it is property ownership that allocates control of and access to data resources and ultimately enables monetization and value in the marketplace. This control extends to both the public and private spheres, and the attendant implications are far reaching.

Building on my recent work, this Essay will provide three exemplar contexts in which ‘private law creep’ has occurred, especially with respect to trade secrecy—the area of intellectual property law most likely to govern data transactions. By scrutinizing implantable medical devices, facial recognition technology, and algorithmic models in the criminal justice system, one observation remains salient and pervasive: contracts rule. Despite the strong public interests that are implicated in these domains, none of them are regulated on a federal level. Instead, rights of access and ownership are governed by private law.