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In New York State, unmarried fathers have only tentative rights to parent their children. Unmarried fathers, unlike mothers and married fathers, must prove that they are “consent fathers”—that is, a father who pays child support and maintains contact with his children—before they are allowed to intervene in adoption proceedings. While this makes sense in a private adoption scenario, in which the interests and rights of the mother must be balanced against those of the father, and in which the State has a substantial interest in promoting already intact families, the same analysis should not be unthinkingly applied to termination of parental rights proceedings, as it is now. Unlike the private adoption scenario, a termination of parental rights proceeding involves very different interests on the part of the mother and the State as well as a completely different analysis of what may be best for children. I argue that unmarried fathers should be given the protections in termination of parental rights proceedings that are automatically afforded mothers because the law as it currently stands works against the State’s interest in promoting unified families and violates the Equal Protection Clause of the U.S. Constitution.

The United States immigration detention regime that was reborn in the 1980s is not only unprecedented in scale, but also in rationale. Whereas immigration detention had historically been justified primarily as a means of ensuring immigration compliance, with a secondary purpose of protecting national security, today’s system increasingly functions in collaboration with criminal law enforcement systems to incapacitate allegedly dangerous individuals for the purpose of preventing potential domestic crime. Regardless of the validity of judicial deference when immigration detention truly serves to aid in the removal process, this Note argues that such deference cannot legitimately be extended to the newly ascendant crime control function of immigration detention. At minimum, Due Process requires immigration detention procedural safeguards that are parallel to those in other preventive detention contexts, in which the government bears the burden of individually demonstrating a need for confinement.

Courts have increasingly scaled back children’s First Amendment rights and deferred to schools’ fear of disruption; today, children face discipline for even off-campus expression. Meanwhile, in the name of others’ free speech rights, the Supreme Court has discounted the state’s claimed interest in children’s welfare and has repeatedly rejected restrictions on third parties’ abilities to approach children with sexually explicit, commercial, and violent speech. These dueling trends have created a paradox: Although First Amendment principles indicate that children’s ability to speak is more important than their access to others’ speech, the doctrine errs in the wrong direction and protects speech to children more strongly than it protects children’s own expression. Therefore, the Court should both allow for greater government restrictions on speech to children and more strongly protect children’s speech rights, especially outside school. This modified doctrine would be more sensitive to the government’s regulatory interest in children and to the principles behind the First Amendment.

There is significant uncertainty as to what types of remedial affirmative action programs in government contracting are constitutional. This uncertainty adversely affects policymakers, courts, government agencies, and businesses. This Note discusses how one remedial contracting affirmative action effort, the Department of Transportation (DOT) Disadvantaged Business Enterprise (DBE) Program, has a unique cooperative federalist structure that can help policymakers address this constitutional uncertainty. This structure, constrained constitutional experimentation, has three aspects: (1) an underlying context of constitutional uncertainty, (2) the use of the federal government’s Spending Power to create incentives for and constrain state action, and (3) the preservation of state governments’ flexibility to experiment. Because of this structure’s ability to transfer the results of experimentation from one state to others, the DBE program helps policymakers resolve the constitutional uncertainty surrounding remedial contracting affirmative action programs.

The last decade has seen a noted increase in the amount of traffic-stop data available for researchers hoping to analyze racial profiling on America’s highways. A group of economic scholars—Knowles, Todd, and Persico—proposed a bright-line statistical test that asks whether different racial groups have the same hit rate, or to put it differently, are searches of individuals equally efficacious, regardless of their race? Accepting this conception of racial profiling as a minimum floor, I apply the test to a superior and newly-compiled data set of nine million Illinois traffic stops. The Illinois police fail the bright-line test and show signs of discrimination against Hispanic, Asian, and Black motorists. I then examine whether Seventh Circuit equal protection precedent would permit an Equal Protection claim based on that statistical disparity alone, concluding that additional evidence is needed to satisfy the discriminatory intent prong.

In the last decade, anti-bullying legislation has rapidly proliferated, motivated in part by a string of highly publicized suicides by bullying victims—many of whom were targeted because of their sexual orientation. Despite heightened attention to the issue of anti-gay bullying, few statutes extend explicit protection to sexual minorities. In this Note, I argue that statutory proscriptions against bullying speech targeted at LGBT youth are necessary to ensure full protection for this particularly vulnerable group. Such limitations are constitutional under Tinker v. Des Moines Independent Community School District, the Supreme Court’s seminal case on student speech. Just as importantly, explicit prohibitions on anti-gay speech place state authority behind a clear message that LGBT students are just as important as their heterosexual peers. This message helps construct a reality that leaves no room for anti-gay bullying—where full equality for sexual minorities is the norm, rather than the exception.

This Article explores how the path of the common law shaped some of the Supreme Court’s most important decisions regarding constitutional remedies. The Article first introduces the original system of common law remedies for constitutional rights. It then explains how these remedies atrophied, both doctrinally and pragmatically, and how this posed deep problems for the constitutional rights that depended on them. The Article selects three cases—Mapp v. Ohio, Monroe v. Pape, and Bivens v. Six Unknown Named Agents—to demonstrate how concerns about those remedies shaped constitutional rights. These cases have been debated many times over, but for all the debate, there has been scarce attention paid to the problem the Court was addressing: the relationship between the Constitution and common law remedies and, more specifically, what to do about constitutional rights that depended on dwindling common law remedies. Indeed, this relationship hardly receives any attention in classrooms or scholarship today, yet it is at the core of the judiciary’s role in implementing the Constitution. This descriptive gap has distorted our normative debate about the relative merits of these cases. The last part of the Article suggests four potential methodologies for coherently managing the relation- ship between the Constitution and common law remedies.

This Article explores, through the lens of speech I refer to as “autobiographical lies,” the extent to which the First Amendment protects one’s ability to craft one’s own public persona. Thus far, courts and commentators have generally neglected to address the degree to which this particular autonomy-based value—the interest in individual self-definition—carries distinct weight under the First Amendment. This is unsurprising, since it is rare that an issue arises that directly implicates this interest in a manner that isolates it from more traditional free speech principles.

Recently, however, litigation has arisen surrounding the constitutionality of the Stolen Valor Act, a federal statute that criminalizes lying about having received military honors. The Act’s regulation of a particular subset of speech—knowing, factual falsehoods about oneself—uniquely crystallizes the question of whether, and to what extent, the self-definition interest merits protection under the First Amendment. By and large, there is no strong reason rooted in traditional First Amendment interests to protect these sorts of autobiographical lies. But if the self- definition interest has any meaningful constitutional force, then circumstances would surely exist under which such speech merits First Amendment protection, since freely choosing what to tell others about oneself—whether truth, half-truth, or falsehood—is a vital means of controlling how one defines oneself to the world.

After reviewing the current dispute surrounding the Stolen Valor Act, which has divided lower courts and at the time of this writing is pending before the Supreme Court, this Article outlines the doctrinal origins and basic characteristics of the self-definition interest. I argue that if one takes seriously the Supreme Court’s repeated assertions that the First Amendment is designed, at least in part, to preserve individual autonomy, then courts should accord at least some distinct constitutional weight to this interest. I then explore some of the practical implications of recognizing a constitutionally protected self-definition interest and apply these observations to the Stolen Valor Act, concluding that the Act, as currently constituted, should be deemed unconstitutional. Finally, I observe that a constitutionally protected right to define one’s public persona via one’s speech fits comfortably within the Constitution’s general protection of interests deemed essential to individual personhood.

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.

This Article identifies how the current spate of state and local regulation is changing the way elected officials, scholars, courts, and the public think about the constitutional dimensions of immigration law and governmental responsibility for immigration enforcement. Reinvigorating the theoretical possibilities left open by the Supreme Court in its 1875 Chy Lung v. Freeman decision, state and local officials characterize their laws as unavoidable responses to the policy problems they face when they are squeezed between the challenges of unauthorized migration and the federal government’s failure to fix a broken system. In the October 2012 term, in Arizona v. United States, the Court addressed, but did not settle, the difficult empirical, theoretical, and constitutional questions necessitated by these enactments and their attendant justifications. Our empirical investigation, however, discovered that most state and local immigration laws are not organic policy responses to pressing demographic challenges. Instead, such laws are the product of a more nuanced and politicized process in which demographic concerns are neither necessary nor sufficient factors and in which federal inactivity and subfederal activity are related phenomena, fomented by the same actors. This Article focuses on the constitutional and theoretical implications of these processes: It presents an evidence-based theory of state and local policy proliferation; it cautions legal scholars to rethink functionalist accounts for the rise of such laws; and it advises courts to reassess their use of traditional federalism frameworks to evaluate these subfederal enactments.