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The Supreme Court has two sides. On its ordinary docket, the Court answers questions of law after briefing and oral argument. On its extraordinary docket, the Court fields applications from litigants asking it to equitably set the status of a new law or executive action while a lawsuit is pending. Only a decade ago, the equity side was an obscure backwater of Supreme Court practice; today it is where the Court confronts some of the most contested and consequential public law disputes. This aspect of the Court’s work has taken on various labels—the shadow docket, emergency docket, interim docket, to name a few. This Article proposes the “equity docket.” That term best captures what is distinctive about this growing part of the Court’s business and helps us to get a normative handle on where the Court has gone right—and wrong. Any judicial practice grounded in equity will be vulnerable to the charges of arbitrariness and lack of transparency. Historically, equity was able to reform itself successfully in response to these charges. Our basic contention is that the Court has assumed a far-reaching new form of equitable jurisdiction without also accepting the historical guardrails that both limited and legitimated equity. The Article makes three contributions. First, it links the emergence of the equity docket to the Court’s broader engagement with the history of federal equity in recent years—what some have called the “new equity.” Second, it argues that the Court has lost sight of important constraints that kept equity in a subsidiary position. And finally, it suggests that the Court on the equity docket has impoverished the traditional inputs of equitable decisionmaking, relying almost exclusively on hastily formed predictions about the merits. In place of the Court’s current approach, we propose a model of a more objective, “filtered” conscience, drawn from the history of equity, that would give proper weight to precedent and keep the equity docket from engulfing the Court.

The last half century of American statutory interpretation theory grew out of a U.S. Constitution that never prescribes how to read statutes. This has compelled the mistaken conclusion that constitutional law can have little to say about two of the most fundamental questions in statutory interpretation: whether courts should be able to treat interpretive methods as binding precedents, and whether interpretive methods need to reflect the customs and beliefs of “the people” to be democratically legitimate. But while the U.S. Constitution never directly prescribes how to read statutes, astoundingly twelve state constitutions do. Those state constitutions contain what I call “directly interpretive constitutional provisions”—constitutional provisions that on their own terms supply a mandatory method of statutory interpretation.

In this Article, I gather these overlooked and under-theorized provisions together for the first time, present original historical case studies on the surprising reasons they came into being, and offer the first sustained analysis of how they have been used in practice. In uncovering this neglected category of statutory interpretation law, this Article demonstrates how two critical assumptions of existing statutory interpretation theories derived from the U.S. Constitution—that interpretive methods are justifiable on democratic grounds merely if they reflect a proper balance of power between government institutions and that only weak and sub-constitutional sources of law are available to ground interpretive methodology as binding precedent—are poor fits for state-level statutory interpretation. By developing an alternative account of a directly democratic and constitutional foundation at the state level, this Article both introduces a new framework for understanding state statutory interpretation on its own terms and provides a counterpoint against which we can measure the relative democratic legitimacy and legality of federal statutory interpretation methodology.

Most fundamentally, this Article contends that in most states the democratic and constitutional bases of statutory interpretation methods ultimately rest not on the institutional dialogue among courts, legislatures, and executives (as may be the case with federal statutory interpretation), but instead on popular sovereignty—on the public’s ongoing formal participation through elections in directly approving, disapproving, or deferring to government on those methods. As this Article further argues, people have exercised their sovereignty in limited yet surprising ways that reveal what I call a “democratic division of interpretive labor”—a formally legitimized allocation of statutory interpretation functions between government and civil society.

These insights lend themselves to three practical upshots. First, courts applying these constitutional provisions should not treat the required methods as if they obeyed the same rules as judge-made canons of interpretation. Second, state constitutions’ distinctive commitments to popular sovereignty and to limiting legislative plenary power provide new grounds for why statutory interpretation methodology should differ between the state and federal levels; meanwhile, the fact that only some states allow citizens to unilaterally amend their constitutions provides a new reason why statutory interpretation methodology should differ from state to state. Finally, the political infeasibility of constitutionally overriding a given interpretive method should be a factor against judicial entrenchment of that method as precedent.

This Note considers what may be the next major constitutional attack on American labor law: a First Amendment challenge to private sector exclusive representation. In the wake of Janus v. AFSCME, public sector employees filed hundreds of lawsuits alleging that exclusivity compels speech and association by requiring employees to be represented by and associate with a union whose views they oppose. Although those challenges uniformly failed, some commentators have suggested that the same constitutional theory applies with equal force in the private sector, where the state action requirement is satisfied and the Supreme Court has not spoken directly to uphold the arrangement.

Drawing on compelled speech and expressive association doctrine, as well as the post-Janus cases, this Note argues that private sector exclusive representation can survive a First Amendment challenge. It notes that the constitutional impingements imposed by exclusivity are real yet sufficiently attenuated that they fail to outweigh the state interests in labor peace, unitary representation, and workplace majoritarianism. Collective bargaining over the terms and conditions of employment is primarily economic rather than expressive activity, and the involuntary association with unions under the National Labor Relations Act does not interfere with employees’ ability to express their own views, even as unions wade deeper into partisan politics. At the same time, dismantling exclusive representation would invite competing unions in a single workplace and the proliferation of individual employment contracts, threatening the stability of labor relations.

Noting the Supreme Court’s treatment of integrated bar associations and other mandatory relationships, this Note situates exclusive representation within a broader debate about the boundary between economic and political association. Ultimately, it concludes that, even under the current Court’s expansive view of compelled speech and association, the harms imposed by exclusivity are constitutionally permissible because of the federal government’s strong interest in preserving an orderly system of collective bargaining.

In Bondi v. VanDerStok, the Supreme Court issued a consequential decision for statutory interpretation. Drawing on law-and-linguistics research, it infused new empiricism into the search for word meanings, introducing a method this Article labels “Linguistic Textualism.” It is incumbent upon the legal community to reckon with Linguistic Textualism, the Article asserts—because if VanDerStok is the future of statutory interpretation, we are in some trouble.

To make that argument, the Article first diagnoses the pathologies of Linguistic Textualism. It chronicles multiple artificial constraints that Linguistic Textualism imposes upon interpreters, including a striking tendency to erase the historical evolution of a statute. This can undermine interpretation of amended statutes, in particular, which now dominate the Court’s docket. Attempting to do better, the Article then develops a competing interpretation of the statute from VanDerStok. Through an increased attention to amendment history, the Article uncovers the untold story of the Gun Control Act of 1968. In so doing, it provides a vivid illustration of why courts should be attentive to the rich, layered nature of statutory law—and it gives a methodological template for how to accomplish that goal.

The result is a comparative interpretive project with numerous insights—both doctrinal and theoretical. It provides a new understanding of the GCA, a statute whose unresolved questions will shape the future of gun control in America. The Article reveals the shortcomings of Linguistic Textualism, an interpretive approach only increasing in prevalence. The Article develops new tools and strategies to better interpret amended statutes—including a proposed “dead-hand canon,” which can resolve the inconsistencies that amendments often produce. And the Article outlines a new principle for assessing interpretive methods—one that offers a useful baseline for interpretive debates. Through these many lessons, the Article aims to help transform VanDerStok into a productive moment for statutory interpretation.

Should linguistics inform textualism? When legal theories make claims about another discipline’s subject, that discipline is often illuminating: History impacts originalist debates, economics shapes “law and economics” analysis, and psychology imbues behavioral legal studies. Linguistic claims abound in textualist decisions and debates, but linguistics—the scientific study of human language—less often informs these. Now, critics question whether it should.

This Essay defends the relevance of the field of linguistics to the theory, practice, and critique of textualism. We offer examples, including the Supreme Court’s 2025 VanDerStok decision. Our argument implies neither that textualism is the correct interpretive theory nor that linguistics invariably bolsters it. Indeed, linguistics often challenges textualist assumptions and conclusions. The Essay’s claim is simply that for both textualists and their critics, considering—rather than eschewing—linguistics makes discussion more sophisticated and productive.

American constitutional development has long followed cycles of crisis and restoration, resisting linear narratives of progress. This pattern is especially evident in the interplay between Black protest movements and constitutional interpretation, where transformative possibilities emerge during periods of social rupture but are later constrained by institutional restoration. This Essay argues that W.E.B. Du Bois’s 1920 speculative fiction, The Comet, offers a framework for understanding these cyclical dynamics. The short story’s three-part structure—normalcy, rupture, and restoration—reveals how genuine equality surfaces during catastrophic disruption yet proves unsustainable once hierarchical “normalcy” returns. Using interdisciplinary analysis that combines legal theory, historical inquiry, and literary criticism, this Essay traces “comet cycles” within major Black protest movements from abolition to contemporary struggles. It demonstrates that literary imagination can illuminate constitutional dynamics that conventional doctrinal analysis cannot reach.

Specifically, this Essay argues that Black protest movements function both as catalysts of constitutional rupture and as interpreters of constitutional possibility during suspended moments of normalcy. Examining the abolitionist era, the Civil Rights movement, and present-day struggles through Du Bois’s framework highlights how social movements advance foundational promises of liberty and equality while revealing the fragility of constitutional gains. Even radical critiques of constitutional legitimacy often arise because movements have taken these promises seriously, exposing the inadequacy of conventional reform. This approach offers strategic insight for contemporary movements, clarifying when transformative possibilities emerge and how restoration dynamics undermine them. By centering Black lived experiences as integral to constitutional interpretation, this Essay reframes American constitutionalism as shaped fundamentally by those historically excluded from legal discourse, yet central to its most transformative moments.

In the past ten years, jurisdictions across the United States have witnessed an explosion of fossil-fuel-industry-backed laws targeting anti-pipeline and anti-critical infrastructure protestors. In passing these laws, state legislators throughout the country have sought to criminally punish activists who dissent against the construction of infrastructure sites atop their homes and in their neighborhoods. These activists resist a trend in which local governments designate their communities as “sacrifice zones.” In these areas, local governments allow companies to build polluting industries and facilities that subject residents to severe health and safety risks. Because these infrastructure sites disproportionately displace and harm communities of color, some have deemed this practice “the new Jim Crow” and have argued that it functions as a relic of slavery. In cracking down on these communities’ opposition to the creation of sacrifice zones, state legislatures and the oil and gas industry silence Black- and Indigenous-led racial justice movements across the country.

Using dissent in sacrifice zones as an example, this Note argues that modern suppression of racial justice advocacy hearkens back to a long tradition of silencing movements that promote racial equality. This repressive practice traces its roots back to pre-abolition times. As this Note explicates, the Framers of the Thirteenth Amendment (which formally abolished slavery) sought to curtail such speech- silencing efforts. Thus, suppression of racial justice advocacy—and specifically, suppression of anti-sacrifice zone advocacy—should be considered a “badge and incident of slavery” violative of the Thirteenth Amendment.

This Note offers two Thirteenth Amendment avenues for challenging what this Note calls “sacrifice zone speech suppression,” a subset of anti-protest speech suppression aimed at silencing dissent in sacrifice zones specifically. First and foremost, this Note proposes a litigation pathway, and second, it proposes a legislative pathway. In proposing these solutions, this Note shares the hope of the many activists who have spent years, decades, and centuries fighting for an end to the legacies of slavery: the conviction that, in the words of Bill Quigley, “justice is possible.”

One of the longest running disputes at the intersection of education law and the First Amendment has involved conflict over evolutionary biology in American public schools. Through a century of nearly continuous litigation, creationist legislation and parental demands to exempt students from science instruction have been constrained by longstanding First Amendment doctrines.

That settlement is now unraveling. In Kennedy v. Bremerton School District, the Supreme Court abandoned its prior approach to the Establishment Clause in favor of a history-and-tradition analysis that is ill-suited to questions about modern scientific education. And in Mahmoud v. Taylor, the Court held that students’ compulsory exposure to ideas conflicting with their parents’ faith burdens religious exercise rights and triggers strict scrutiny.

This Essay provides the first comprehensive account of how these twin doctrinal shifts imperil the teaching of evolution. By tracing conflicts over evolution through three different eras—before, during, and after the regime ushered in by Lemon v. Kurtzman—this Essay shows how prior First Amendment doctrine cabined antievolution strategies, which included criminal statutes, “balanced-treatment” mandates, teacher-speech claims, and parental-rights suits. The Essay then evaluates Mahmoud, identifying two doctrinal disruptions: (1) exposure to disfavored ideas now constitutes a burden on religious exercise, and (2) strict scrutiny now reaches a broader swath of curricular challenges. Finally, the Essay forecasts the fallout: a surge in opt-out demands, heightened litigation risk, and an administrative chilling effect likely to erode already fragile scientific instruction.

As the first piece to frame Kennedy and Mahmoud as pivotal developments in the ongoing contest over science education, this Essay illuminates the doctrinal and institutional stakes of the Court’s Religion Clause revisionism. It also offers a roadmap for those seeking to preserve evidence-based curricula in the face of resurgent antievolution advocacy and a decline in the public acceptance of scientific consensus.

It is not often that the Supreme Court creates constitutionally required exceptions to established evidentiary rules. For that reason, when the Court created a racial bias exception to the centuries-old no-impeachment rule in Peña-Rodriguez v. Colorado, the decision was billed as a significant step in addressing racial bias in jury deliberations. But nearly a decade later, the decision has fallen far short of its promise. This Essay explains why.

This Essay argues that two structural impediments—juror non-disclosure instructions and no-contact rules—combine to make juror racial bias effectively undetectable and as a result, irremediable. Recognizing that relaxing no-contact rules or instructing jurors to report bias each comes with serious tradeoffs, this Essay does not propose a single reform. Instead, it calls on trial courts to serve as laboratories of racial justice, experimenting with locally tailored approaches to surface juror racial prejudice while balancing competing values.

Ultimately, if the legal system is committed to ensuring defendants are judged for what they are accused of and not the color of their skin, courts must confront not only the substance of bias but also the hidden procedural barriers that keep it from ever coming to light.

The First Amendment is a well-known bulwark against a government that might use its regulatory powers to silence speech based on the viewpoint of the speaker. The government speech doctrine extended those protections to the government itself, allowing the government to adopt its own viewpoint when it speaks on its own behalf. The result of the Court’s decision to extend First Amendment protections to the government is that the government can use the First Amendment as a shield when it uses viewpoint discriminatory regulation to coerce speakers into silence. The theorists and judges who created the government speech doctrine have argued that the democratic process and the other provisions of the Constitution would be strong enough to stop the government from abusing its speech powers. This Note, however, identifies a gaping hole in their doctrinal framework where low-visibility government speech meets the ambiguity of the coercion-persuasion line. At that critical point, neither the First Amendment, nor the other provisions of the Constitution, nor the democratic process can stop the leviathan’s inclination to silence dissent.