If ever a decision embodied the heroic, countermajoritarian function we romantically ascribe to judicial review, it was the 1962 decision that struck down school prayer—Engel v. Vitale. Engel provoked more outrage, more congressional attempts to overturn it, and more attacks on the Justices than perhaps any other decision in Supreme Court history. Indeed, Engel’s countermajoritarian narrative is…
Statistical evidence is the subject of a heated and ongoing debate. Courts and legal scholars often view statistical evidence with suspicion, treating it as inadmissible even when it is probabilistically equivalent to individualized evidence. But attempts to vindicate the suspicion or to dismantle it altogether have been largely unsuccessful. The aim of this Article is…
Many believe the root cause of the patent system’s dysfunction is that the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office (PTO or Agency) is issuing too many invalid patents that unnecessarily drain consumer welfare. Concerns regarding the Agency’s overgranting tendencies have recently spurred the Supreme Court to take a renewed interest in substantive patent law and have…
In United States v. Jones, the Supreme Court held that the Fourth Amendment prohibits the government from installing GPS devices on suspects’ cars without a warrant. Although the majority limited its holding to the physical installation of such devices, five concurring Justices (including Justice Sotomayor, who joined the majority opinion) indicated their desire for broader…
Descamps v. United States may not have grabbed many headlines when it was decided, but it has proved to be one of the most influential opinions of the Supreme Court’s October 2012 Term. This Comment serves two purposes. First, it elucidates how the Supreme Court reached its counterintuitive conclusion that a person convicted of “burglary”…
