Dec 5, 2025 Helen NortonConstitutional Law
Guy-Uriel Charles, Luis Fuentes-Rohwer, & Farris Peale,
Reconstructing (The Law of) Democracy (Jun. 25, 2025), available at
SSRN.
Can the law of democracy save democracy? Maybe—but not if we’re counting on the courts to save us, answer Guy Uriel-Charles, Luis Fuentes-Rohwer, and Farris Peale in their thought-provoking (and sobering) article, Reconstructing (The Law of) Democracy. Their paper’s key insight observes that today’s most important election law cases involve questions of “partisan existentialism” that are not only entirely absent from earlier election law disputes, but are also beyond courts’ capacity to resolve.
The authors start by explaining why one might have thought that the courts could help us escape from today’s democratic dysfunctions. They describe the series of mid- to late 20th-century malapportionment, ballot access, and related election law decisions in which the Court was understood as protecting representative democracy from certain democratic dysfunctions. The “perceived success” of that series of cases—which began with Baker v. Carr and continued through Reynolds v. Sims and Williams v. Rhodes, among others—“helped to develop a foundational view: that the Court both could and should intervene to prevent breakdowns in the systems of representative democracy.” Continue reading "Can the Law of Democracy Save Democracy?"
Dec 4, 2025 Richard MurphyAdministrative Law
Recently, for whatever reason, I found myself thinking that it would be helpful to read something that could help me order my scattered thoughts about presidential control of regulatory power. Maybe because of all the executive orders. Fortunately, I ran across just the thing, Presidential Regulation, by Professors Timothy Meyer & Ganesh Sitaraman, which provides a wonderfully illuminating account of the nature, history, implications, and likely future of, well, presidential regulation.
Meyer and Sitaraman explain that presidential regulation “takes place when the President relies on his own powers—whether statutory, constitutional, or a combination thereof—to regulate the U.S. economy in ways not explicitly contemplated or directed by Congress.” (P. 807.) Presidential regulation is thus distinct from “presidential administration,” a la Justice Kagan, which involves presidents “shaping and taking credit for agency actions.” (P. 809.) Rather, presidential regulation involves direct exercise of powers delegated to the president by the Constitution or Congress. Continue reading "The What, When, How, and Why of Presidential Regulation"
Dec 3, 2025 Sandy SteelTorts
Nico Cornell’s terrific book Wrongs and Rights Come Apart rejects the commonly held view that moral wrongs are simply moral right violations. Rather, wrongs and rights ‘come apart’: there can be wrongs without right violations and right violations without wrongs.
The book proceeds by providing a range of powerful examples from law, philosophical writing, and literature to make its case. How can we tell, in these examples, whether a person has been wronged but their rights not violated? Cornell provides an account of the characteristic features of an entity holding a right: (1) the power to waive the correlated duty, (2) the fact that certain conduct can be demanded by that person, (3) enforceability of the correlated duty, (4) the presence of a special kind of reason (a trump or an exclusionary reason), and (5) a distinctive phenomenology. (Pp. 14-15.) Continue reading "Are Wrongs Always Right Violations?"
Dec 2, 2025 Deepa Das AcevedoWork Law
I’m always a little surprised by how rarely debates about academic freedom pay attention to the actual work of academia. Sure, there are anecdotes featuring syllabi wars or lectures gone wrong (or wrongly prevented from going on at all). But those vignettes —used to illustrate and persuade—are always hurried along so that the author can get to their normative argument defending academic freedom or announcing, once again, its demise. The vignettes aren’t really there to make us focus on the “what” and “how” of academic labor.
Archana Sridhar’s recent article isn’t exactly about granular academic labor practices, either. I doubt she’d consider it a “labor” piece at all. But in very refreshing way, she focuses on academic work structures and patterns in ways that generate insights about what makes academic freedom possible. Continue reading "Putting the Work of Academia Back into Academic Freedom Debates"
Dec 1, 2025 Sergio ParejaTrusts & Estates
Professors Allen and Rothman have written an excellent piece that addresses an issue of growing importance. While questions about privacy have always existed, technological changes that are occurring at a lightning-fast pace are creating demand for a consistent and clear legal framework. These technological changes include artificial intelligence, social media and email accounts, as well as the ubiquitousness of cameras and recording devices. This raises new questions regarding rights to a person’s name, image, voice, life history, beliefs, and identity after death.
Postmortem privacy refers to privacy protections that continue after death. The traditional view, which has been repeated for over a century, is that privacy rights end with death. The reality is much more nuanced, and courts sometimes do in fact protect some privacy rights after death. The growing importance of digital legacies and technologies makes reevaluating postmortem privacy critically important. Professor Allen and Professor Rothman’s article aims to build a theoretical and legal foundation for recognizing and shaping privacy rights after death. Continue reading "A Proposed Framework for Privacy Rights After Death"
