Print Issues

What role should the realities of the legislative drafting process play in the theories and doctrines of statutory interpretation and administrative law? The ongoing debates frequently turn on empirical assumptions about how Congress drafts and what interpretive rules Congress knows, but, until now, there has been almost no testing of those assumptions. This is the…

Courts and Congress are often reluctant to constrain the executive branch when it limits individual rights in the pursuit of national security. Many scholars have argued that mechanisms within the executive branch can supply an alternative constraint on executive power—whether as a preferred alternative due to the comparative advantages of such institutions or as a second-best option necessitated by congressional…

Criminal punishment is systematically harsher, given an otherwise fixed crime, where victims are vulnerable or innocent, and systematically less harsh where victims are powerful or culpable. We make a distinction between one gangster attacking another and a gangster attacking a bystander (though the assaults might be formally identical) or between selling drugs to an adult and selling them to a…

This Note challenges the prior and current scholarship on suspicionless drug testing of welfare recipients, and the Supreme Court’s special needs doctrine more broadly, by applying the doctrine of unconstitutional conditions to the cases. It contends that the Fourth Amendment’s special needs doctrine is insufficient, because conditioning welfare benefits on drug testing may fail the special needs test but still…