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With the rise of the internet and computer storage, the loss and theft of individuals’ private information has become commonplace. Data breaches occur with increasing regularity, leading some to question if the current statutory and regulatory schemes properly incentivize the maintenance of adequate security measures amongst federal agencies. This Note argues that inadequate data security practices by government agencies implicate the constitutional right to informational privacy. While the Court has previously upheld intrusive personal information collection programs, the Privacy Act, which plays an essential role in the Court’s decisions, has been weakened significantly by recent interpretation of its damages provision. Given this change in the effectiveness of the statutory protection of private data, lawsuits alleging a violation of the constitutional right to informational privacy might succeed and could help incentivize optimal levels of data security amongst government agencies.

Being queer—like deviating from the norm in any way—can be socially disabling. So why not turn to disability law for redress? After a nationwide same-sex marriage ruling from the Supreme Court, many are devoting more attention to the current absence of uniform, federal employment discrimination protections for lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) people. As Title VII has grown friendlier to claims made by LGBT individuals, people are debating the merits of cognizing anti-LGBT bias as sex discrimination in the law. Meanwhile, the Equality Act, introduced in Congress in 2015, would ban discrimination on the basis of LGBT status throughout the country. But while vital, Title VII and the Equality Act could leave a gap through which queer people whose identities are not legible within the gender binary and are not politically stable as lesbian, gay, bisexual, or transgender are left out. This Note argues that LGBT people should challenge their current exclusion from the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) through constitutional litigation to fill this gap. Through its disavowal of traditional identity politics, the ADA offers an additional comparative advantage that has transformative potential for queer plaintiffs: Its foundation on the social model of disability topples the LGBT rights movement’s historic emphasis on respectability to enable unrestrained self-determination.

Dignity has been associated with death in two very different areas of constitutional jurisprudence: assisted suicide and the death penalty. This Note seeks to analyze what the concept of dignity means in these two contexts: who is the subject of dignity and what are dignity’s requirements? It argues that assisted suicide foregrounds the subjective dignity of the individual; what dignity involves is largely, though not wholly, a question of what an individual considers a dignified way to die. By contrast, the subject of dignity in death penalty jurisprudence is the collective and not the individual. Inasmuch as the jurisprudence claims to speak to the dignity of the individual, that dignity is objective and extends no further than collective dignity’s reach. As a result, what constitutes dignity in execution is almost wholly determined by what appears dignified to society. This Note ends by critically assessing how the two constitutional areas that link death and dignity may fruitfully inform each other. It suggests that assisted suicide’s individualistic dignity includes not just a right to decide how to die, but also a responsibility to collective society to consider how the nature of that suicide may impact collective dignity. In turn, in the death penalty context, states and courts should import subjective individual dignity considerations and reconsider whether their invocation of “dignity” in fact reflects a collective valuation of dignity or merely assuages social sensibilities by masking the reality of death.

Nearly half of all employers consider applicants’ credit histories when making some hiring or promotion decisions—and they risk violating Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 (Title VII) when they do so. Employer credit checks have a potentially disparate impact on minorities and an attenuated relationship to asserted concerns about job performance and employee theft. The case law analyzing disparate impact challenges to credit check policies, meanwhile, is sparse, leaving employers with little direction as they shape their practices. This Note suggests that the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) issue detailed guidance on employers’ use of credit checks and proposes a novel framework drawn from agency guidance on the use of criminal records, which adopts the Eighth Circuit’s Green factors. Specifically, the EEOC ought to recommend that employers take into account the source or type of debt, the time between the “negative behavior” and the employment decision, and the nature of the job; the guidelines should also advocate for individualized assessments. Guidance along these lines would clarify what constitutes lawful credit check usage and benefit the job-seekers that Congress intended to protect with Title VII’s enactment.

The prevailing medical consensus is that drug addiction and alcoholism are disabilities. Before 1996, SSI and SSDI, the nation’s major disability benefits programs, recognized that consensus and provided benefits to people struggling with addiction. Then, the “DAA materiality” provision of Congress’s 1996 welfare reform legislation revoked eligibility not only from people struggling with addiction, but also from people with addiction and another severe disability whose addiction contributes to the severity of the other disability. For this latter group of “dual-diagnosis” claimants, it is often impossible to determine which of a claimant’s impairments would remain absent substance abuse. In such cases, the evidence is in equipoise, and whichever party bears the burden of proof of DAA materiality will lose. Despite its importance to many disability benefits claimants, the issue of who bears the burden of proof remains unresolved, with the Social Security Administration placing the burden on the government and a split among the federal appeals courts that have taken up the issue. This Note argues that the burden of proof of DAA materiality should fall on the government. It shows that the DAA materiality provision creates an exception to the definition of disability in the Social Security Act that functions like an affirmative defense for the government to deny benefits to otherwise eligible claimants. It then contrasts the many obstacles facing dual-diagnosis claimants with the government’s superior resources and expertise to offer proof on the complex DAA materiality issue.

In recent years, antidiscrimination scholars have focused on the productive possibilities of the “universal turn,” a strategy that calls on attorneys to convert particularist claims, like race discrimination claims, into broader universalist claims that secure basic dignity, liberty, and fairness rights for all. Scholars have urged litigators to employ universalist strategies in constitutional and voting rights cases, as well as in employment litigation. Thus far, however, arguments made in favor of universalism have largely been abstract and theoretical and therefore have failed to fully consider the second-order effects of universalist strategies on the ground. In this Article, we challenge the prevailing arguments in favor of universalism by exploring the market consequences as lawyers shift from particularist Title VII race discrimination claims to universalist Fair Labor Standards Act claims. Drawing on a review of case filing statistics and an inductive, purposeful sample of attorney interviews, we describe a phenomenon we call “post-racial hydraulics,” which are a set of non-ideological, economic, and pragmatism-based drivers produced by the trend toward universalism. Post-racial hydraulics must be understood as key but previously unexplored factors in racial formation. Left unchecked, these non-ideological drivers will have substantive ideological effects, as they threaten to fundamentally reshape the employment litigation market and alter our understanding of race discrimination.

Normally we don’t think of administrative agencies as policing constitutional equality norms. There’s a good reason for this—courts are often thought of as the “ultimate expositor” of constitutional meaning, while agencies are thought of as undertaking not constitutional interpretation, but statutory implementation. But recently scholars have explored the ways in which constitutionalism enters agency decisionmaking—commonly referred to as “administrative constitutionalism.” Administrative constitutionalism theories loosen the assumption that courts have a monopoly on constitutional understanding, and instead recognize agencies as constitutional actors in their own right. This Note explores how agencies have engaged in administrative constitutionalism to police LGBT equality rights—often in ways that differ markedly from judicial applications of equal protection. It then offers a defense of these practices, arguing that agencies have acted in the face of widespread underenforcement of equality norms by the judiciary owing largely to institutional considerations that—justified or not—have no bearing on the meaning of equal protection.

Brennan Lecture

A series of changes within civil procedure over the past few decades—including the rise of private arbitration, the accompanying decline of public adjudication, and the erection of barriers to class actions—have diminished the economic power of workers, consumers, and diffuse economic actors. This Article demonstrates that avoiding these economic consequences was a central goal of those who crafted American federal civil procedure in the first place. Driven to action by the procedural issues involved in labor injunction cases, leading procedural reformers behind the modern regime strove to make American federal civil procedure sensitive to questions of political economy and designed it to mitigate rather than reflect economic power imbalances. This Article connects their procedural reform efforts in the enactment of the Norris-LaGuardia Act of 1932 to the rise of the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure of 1938, and, in so doing, reveals the unexplored progressive economic foundations of federal civil procedure.

This history provides a platform for a more conceptual analysis about civil procedure and economic power. The Article embeds the Norris-LaGuardia Act’s procedural provisions in the rise of the federal government’s facilitation of the “countervailing power” of workers, and begins to articulate the procedural dimensions of economic empowerment. While countervailing power is typically thought of as being facilitated by substantive law, the Norris-LaGuardia Act demonstrates how civil procedure can facilitate the exercise of countervailing power by providing economically less-resourced parties with open hearings and structuring procedure to protect their ability to amass power through association. More broadly, and returning to present issues, this Article argues that the recent transformations in civil procedure both undermine the economic purposes that were central to the regime’s rise and diminish the ability of diffuse economic actors to exercise counter- vailing power—threatening once-enduring procedural commitments.

Political gerrymandering has been a feature of our republic since the early days of the United States. The majority of states in the U.S. allow state legislators to draw the district lines for legislative elections. Legislator-led redistricting is plagued with legislator conflict of interest, producing elections that are spectacularly uncompetitive and rampant with partisanship. In the process, the interests of voters are in conflict with the party and individual interests of legislators, threatening the legitimacy of our republican form of government. The results are often incumbent entrenchment in “safe seats” and overt partisan-based district manipulation. While not necessarily indicative that the will of the people is being usurped by the ambitions of legislators, one must inevitably ask, are voters choosing their legislators or are legislators choosing their voters? Until recently, the Supreme Court has taken a “hands-off” approach to remedying the negative effects of the partisan gerrymandering that occurs in states employing legislator-led redistricting. In Arizona State Legislature v. Arizona Independent Redistricting Commission, the Supreme Court upheld Arizona voters’ right to transfer redistricting authority from state legislators to an independent commission of citizens via ballot initiative. This Note argues that the delegation theory applied by the Court in the Arizona Independent Redistricting Commission decision, and the authority of voters to be the supreme regulators of the political market, is supported by the Framers’ vision of political competition and accountability as articulated in The Federalist Papers.