Jul 14, 2025 Dara E. PurvisFamily Law
In June of 2025, Secretary of Health and Human Services Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. told a legislative committee that his agency would be working towards a goal of every American wearing a device tracking information about the wearer’s body and health within four years.
One assumption underlying RFK Jr.’s campaign is that more information is always helpful – but what if the health information you learn warns of elevated risks that you can do nothing to prevent? Even further, what if you never asked for the information at all? In Poked, Prodded, and Privacy: Parents, Children, and Pediatric Genetic Testing, Allison M. Whelan incisively explores these questions in the context of genetic testing, explaining multiple ways that the privacy rights of children can be violated if their parents consent to genetic testing on their behalf. Professor Whelan’s analysis also illuminates broader dilemmas about the rights of children and authority of parents playing out in multiple troubling ways, including denials of gender affirming care to transgender youth. Continue reading "The Right to Children’s Future Privacy"
Jul 11, 2025 Jack Beermann
When the sun sets in New York City, it rises in Tokyo. Okay, maybe not exactly, but you get the idea: setting somewhere, rising somewhere else. Now substitute Chevron for N.Y.C. and the Major Questions Doctrine for Tokyo. For the past forty years, administrative law scholars have been arguing over Chevron, and now that the sun has set on that doctrine, it’s time to turn our attention to the new rising sun, the Major Questions Doctrine (“MQD”). The sudden emergence and prominence of the MQD in administrative law has led scholars to ask just what kind of legal doctrine the MQD is. If the voluminous scholarship on Chevron is any indication, there will be much, much more to come.
Sometimes, to figure out what something is, you first have to figure out what it isn’t. That is what Professor Anita Krishnakumar has helped us do with her excellent article What the New Major Questions Doctrine is Not. In this article, Professor Krishnakumar persuasively argues that neither scholars nor jurists have provided convincing characterizations of the doctrine. After illustrating how all attempts thus far to categorize the MQD have failed, she offers her own tentative characterization, recognizing that a definitive answer is impossible because it’s relatively early in the life of the current MQD and because the Court’s opinions invoking the MQD are somewhat inconsistent and unclear, making a definitive characterization impossible. Remind anyone of Chevron scholarship? Continue reading "What the Hell is the Major Questions Doctrine?"
Jul 11, 2025 Test User
BLUESKY TEST CITATION.
BLUESKY TEST.
The post BLUESKY TEST POST. appeared first on Jotwell: Zeta-Section. Continue reading "BLUESKY TEST POST."
Jul 11, 2025 Jack Beermann
When the sun sets in New York City, it rises in Tokyo. Okay, maybe not exactly, but you get the idea: setting somewhere, rising somewhere else. Now substitute Chevron for N.Y.C. and the Major Questions Doctrine for Tokyo. For the past forty years, administrative law scholars have been arguing over Chevron, and now that the sun has set on that doctrine, it’s time to turn our attention to the new rising sun, the Major Questions Doctrine (“MQD”). The sudden emergence and prominence of the MQD in administrative law has led scholars to ask just what kind of legal doctrine the MQD is. If the voluminous scholarship on Chevron is any indication, there will be much, much more to come.
Sometimes, to figure out what something is, you first have to figure out what it isn’t. That is what Professor Anita Krishnakumar has helped us do with her excellent article What the New Major Questions Doctrine is Not. In this article, Professor Krishnakumar persuasively argues that neither scholars nor jurists have provided convincing characterizations of the doctrine. After illustrating how all attempts thus far to categorize the MQD have failed, she offers her own tentative characterization, recognizing that a definitive answer is impossible because it’s relatively early in the life of the current MQD and because the Court’s opinions invoking the MQD are somewhat inconsistent and unclear, making a definitive characterization impossible. Remind anyone of Chevron scholarship? Continue reading "What the Hell is the Major Questions Doctrine?"
Jul 11, 2025 Test User
BLUESKY TEST CITATION.
BLUESKY TEST POST.
The post BLUESKY TEST. appeared first on Jotwell: Zeta-Section. Continue reading "BLUESKY TEST."
Jul 11, 2025 Anita KrishnakumarLexLegislation
James J. Brudney & Lawrence Baum,
Does Textualism Constrain Supreme Court Justices?, available at
SSRN (Feb. 3, 2025).
Textualist jurists and scholars have long contended that their preferred interpretive approach is superior to competing approaches because text-based analysis limits judicial discretion and constrains judges. Indeed, the late Justice Scalia declared in his book, Reading Law: The Interpretation of Legal Texts, that a textualist interpretive approach would “narrow the range of acceptable judicial decision-making” and “curb—even reverse—the tendency of judges to imbue authoritative texts with their own policy preferences.” Correspondingly, textualists long have criticized legislative history as an illegitimate interpretive tool that “has something for everyone” and “greatly increases the scope” of judicial manipulation of statutory meaning to suit the judge’s ideological preferences. To date, these claims have gone largely untested, although several scholars have offered anecdotal evidence suggesting that textualism does not, in fact, constrain judges all that much.
Enter Professors Brudney and Baum, who marshal an impressive dataset of 660 statutory decisions involving labor and employment law statutes decided between 1969 and 2024 in order to measure empirically how well textualist interpretive tools constrain judicial decision making. The result is an article rich in both empirical and doctrinal analysis of liberal and conservative justices’ use of textual canons, legislative history, and legislative purpose to reach interpretive outcomes consistent (or inconsistent) with their ideological preferences. Because their dataset is so broad—covering 54 terms’ worth of cases—Brudney and Baum are able to document historical changes and draw historical comparisons that other scholars have only been able to gesture at anecdotally. Continue reading "Is Textualism Akin to Letting Judges Look Over a Crowd and Pick Out their Friends?"
Jul 10, 2025 Test User
BLUESKY TEST CITATION.
BLUESKY TEST POST.
The post BLUESKY TEST POST. appeared first on Jotwell: Zeta-Section. Continue reading "BLUESKY TEST POST."
Jul 10, 2025 Jack Beermann
When the sun sets in New York City, it rises in Tokyo. Okay, maybe not exactly, but you get the idea: setting somewhere, rising somewhere else. Now substitute Chevron for N.Y.C. and the Major Questions Doctrine for Tokyo. For the past forty years, administrative law scholars have been arguing over Chevron, and now that the sun has set on that doctrine, it’s time to turn our attention to the new rising sun, the Major Questions Doctrine (“MQD”). The sudden emergence and prominence of the MQD in administrative law has led scholars to ask just what kind of legal doctrine the MQD is. If the voluminous scholarship on Chevron is any indication, there will be much, much more to come.
Sometimes, to figure out what something is, you first have to figure out what it isn’t. That is what Professor Anita Krishnakumar has helped us do with her excellent article What the New Major Questions Doctrine is Not. In this article, Professor Krishnakumar persuasively argues that neither scholars nor jurists have provided convincing characterizations of the doctrine. After illustrating how all attempts thus far to categorize the MQD have failed, she offers her own tentative characterization, recognizing that a definitive answer is impossible because it’s relatively early in the life of the current MQD and because the Court’s opinions invoking the MQD are somewhat inconsistent and unclear, making a definitive characterization impossible. Remind anyone of Chevron scholarship? Continue reading "What the Hell is the Major Questions Doctrine?"
Jul 10, 2025 Test User
TEST CITATION.
TEST POST.
The post BLUESKY TEST POST. appeared first on Jotwell: Zeta-Section. Continue reading "BLUESKY TEST POST."
Jul 10, 2025 Dalindyebo ShabalalaInternational & Comparative Law
The first thing I read by Stephen R. Munzer was an article that he had done with Kal Raustiala, The Uneasy Case for Intellectual Property Rights in Traditional Knowledge, 27 Cardozo Arts & Ent. L.J. 37 (2009). There had been plenty of arguments made against providing protection for traditional knowledge (TK) and traditional cultural expressions, but that article provided a clear and challenging analysis for WHY providing protection was such a challenging theoretical problem, not just in the Global North but also in the Global South. In the most fascinating way, Munzer does this again in this article, once again providing a new and challenging reframing of the problem of resolving disputes relating to indigenous and traditional knowledge.
In reading this article Munzer does two things here that I especially appreciate. The first is that he brings the issue of disputes between indigenous communities and their member/citizens and disputes between one indigenous community and another up to the same level of analysis and concern as that of indigenous communities and non-member/non-citizens. I believe that due to the focus on current negotiations at the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO) on new instruments for protection of traditional knowledge and traditional cultural expressions the tendency has been to focus on misappropriation across borders by non-members/non-citizens, perhaps missing other avenues for enforcement. Continue reading "Not just Politics: Traditional Knowledge Disputes through a Comparative Lens"
