COURT IS DRAG: WHAT CITIZENS UNITED REVEALED ABOUT WESTERN IDENTITY POLITICS

COURT IS DRAG: WHAT CITIZENS UNITED REVEALED ABOUT WESTERN IDENTITY POLITICS

“The East is waiting to be understood by the Western races, in order not only to be able to give what is true in her but also to be confident in her own mission.”  – Rabindranath Tagore, “Creative Unity” (1922). * * * I came to law school because I seek nirvana. Because in my meditations three and four summers ago, I felt my country’s law, and indeed, its language itself, blocking my way to myself. This conflict of mine…

Read More Read More

Motions to Bifurcate: Procedural Qualified Immunity for Municipalities

Motions to Bifurcate: Procedural Qualified Immunity for Municipalities

Qualified immunity is getting a lot of well-deserved attention these days. The doctrine protects individual state actors—and by extension, their government employers—from liability when they have violated a constitutional right if that right was not “clearly established in law.” Protests over police brutality and demands for accountability have brought qualified immunity into the public spotlight. These conversations about individual accountability are important. But as necessary as they are, we cannot ignore the legal mechanisms for and barriers to institutional accountability…

Read More Read More

Personal Jurisdiction in Class Actions After Bristol-Myers Squibb: How Ford May Foreshadow the Supreme Court’s Answer

Personal Jurisdiction in Class Actions After Bristol-Myers Squibb: How Ford May Foreshadow the Supreme Court’s Answer

Federal circuit courts have recently split over applying Bristol-Myers Squibb Company v. Superior Court (BMS) to class actions. The Supreme Court’s watershed personal jurisdiction opinion in 2017 held that courts can only exercise specific personal jurisdiction over plaintiffs’ claims that arise out of or relate to defendants’ conduct in the forum state. But BMS did not resolve whether federal courts must find specific personal jurisdiction over absent class members in addition to named class representatives. Nor did the Court’s more…

Read More Read More

Remote vs. In-Person Testimony in Hong Kong Courts

Remote vs. In-Person Testimony in Hong Kong Courts

Should the pursuit of effective scrutiny of witnesses override public health considerations and the witness’s right to health? Recently in Hong Kong, there has been a debate on whether a witness can choose to give evidence via video-conferencing facilities (VCF) during the COVID-19 pandemic. Contrary to the practices of allowing remote testimony in other jurisdictions such as Australia and the UK, a number of Hong Kong judges oppose witnesses giving evidence via VCF. These judges openly voice the concern—based on…

Read More Read More

Circuits Are Splitting Hairs over Morphed Child Pornography

Circuits Are Splitting Hairs over Morphed Child Pornography

Many will remember 2020 for the various panics it revived: America’s second greatest toilet paper shortage since the 1970s, its first great pandemic since 1918, and another financial crisis. The year also brought back another moral hysteria commonly visited in America’s past: child porn panic. Tech companies caught flack for announcing a surge in child pornography being traded on their platforms, while simultaneously planning to encrypt messages that would prevent detection of those very same materials in the name of…

Read More Read More

How to Stop Sentencing Children to Death by Incarceration

How to Stop Sentencing Children to Death by Incarceration

The Supreme Court in April handed down its decision in Jones v. Mississippi, a ruling that permits sentencing judges to condemn children to spend life in prison without the possibility of parole without entering a finding that the child is, in the court’s words, “permanently incorrigible.” This was wrong. Importantly, however, the case did not present the question of whether juvenile life without parole is constitutional at all. As a result, there is still a way for the Court to…

Read More Read More

Dew-Becker v. Wu: Daily Fantasy Sports as Gambling

Dew-Becker v. Wu: Daily Fantasy Sports as Gambling

Fantasy sports contests, enjoyed by millions of Americans, are probably not the first thing people think of as “gambling,” which is tightly regulated in most United States jurisdictions. Indeed, while state regulation of gambling is widespread, “fantasy sports are legal in most states.” However, new daily fantasy sports (DFS) platforms have muddied fantasy sports’ legal standing. While DFS is now legal in forty-three states, including Illinois, some have argued DFS is gambling (including, as detailed below, former Illinois Attorney General…

Read More Read More

Too Close for Comfort: Congressional Insider Trading and Why Accountability Still Matters in Congress

Too Close for Comfort: Congressional Insider Trading and Why Accountability Still Matters in Congress

Under the insider trading laws that apply to Congress, legal liability is hard to prove and convictions are even harder to place; this should not sit well with the American people. Members of Congress are no strangers to scandal. Every year reveals a new controversy involving behavioral misconduct, campaigns, or, more frequently, money. Therefore, it should come as no surprise to the American people that multiple Senators have been accused of insider trading for trading hundreds of thousands of dollars…

Read More Read More

Economic Loss at Maritime Choke Points

Economic Loss at Maritime Choke Points

Ever had a bad week? At least you’re not the captain of the Ever Given—the Empire State Building-sized container ship that brought the global economy to its knees for nearly six days by getting stuck in the Suez Canal. Heralded as “the ship that launched a thousand memes,” the Ever Given sparked some of 2021’s best online content so far. Hilarious and absurd? Definitely. But a joke? Absolutely not—the blockage cost $9.6 billion to global trade each day. The Ever…

Read More Read More

Thole, Trusts, and Standing Discussed

Thole, Trusts, and Standing Discussed

Would the Supreme Court rather stand by its strict standing doctrine than hold fiduciaries accountable for gambling Grandma’s retirement gains away? It seems the answer is yes. In its June 2020 decision, Thole v. U.S. Bank, the Court held that beneficiaries of a defined-benefit retirement plan lack Article III standing to bring a claim for breach of fiduciary duty, even when improper investment by the plan’s asset managers results in underfunding. In other words, yes: fiduciaries of retirement plans are…

Read More Read More