This paper argues that the Ninth Circuit’s 2024 decision in Cassirer v. Thyssen-Bornemisza Collection Foundation misapplied California’s governmental interest test by excluding Spain’s public commitments to the restitution of Nazi-looted art from its analysis. While the Court concluded that Spain’s property laws outweighed California’s interest in protecting dispossessed owners, it ignored that the Thyssen-Bornemisza Collection (TBC) is a state-managed institution, making Spain’s conduct inseparable from its government’s policies. By dismissing Spain’s endorsement of the Washington Principles and Vilnius Forum Declaration as legally irrelevant, the Court artificially narrowed what counts as a “governmental interest.” This paper contends that those commitments — though nonbinding — are part of Spain’s official policy framework and therefore should have informed the comparative impairment analysis. Integrating such moral and diplomatic obligations would not only have strengthened California’s position but also brought judicial reasoning into closer alignment with the evolving international norm of cultural restitution. The Cassirer case ultimately reveals how rigid formalism in choice-of-law doctrine can obscure the deeper intersections of law, morality, and state identity.

This paper exposes how Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) has weaponized commercial data—utility bills, cell records, and license plate databases—to locate undocumented individuals without warrants, creating a constitutional crisis hidden behind corporate contracts. Under the Trump administration, ICE transformed private information into a surveillance tool, exploiting loopholes in the third-party doctrine and bypassing the Fourth Amendment’s protection of individuals’ “papers and effects.” Drawing on Carpenter v. United States (2018) and contrasting it with United States v. Miller (1976), the paper argues that modern privacy law must evolve to treat commercial data as protected personal property, not as corporate collateral. Left unchecked, ICE’s digital dragnet doesn’t just erode privacy—it chills First Amendment freedoms of speech, religion, and assembly, as fear of tracking silences entire communities. The Supreme Court must act to restore the boundary between data collection and constitutional protection before surveillance becomes the new normal.

This paper argues that as the boundary between human cognition and machine computation dissolves, attention—the foundation of thought and autonomy—has become the new site of exploitation. Modern platforms treat attention as data to be extracted, optimized, and sold, yet American law still assumes users can meaningfully choose where to direct their focus. Tracing analogies to nuisance and privacy law, from Olmstead to Carpenter, the paper proposes recognizing a legal right to attention—one that treats manipulative digital design as a form of intrusion upon the mind. By reframing doctrines like time, place, and manner restrictions in First Amendment jurisprudence, it shows how courts could distinguish between persuasion that respects agency and systems that erase it. If the industrial era required clean air and fair labor, the algorithmic era demands protected mental space. Without it, freedom of thought risks becoming just another data stream.

This paper examines how Trump v. V.O.S. Selections may force the Supreme Court’s conservative majority to confront the limits of its own textualism. President Trump’s sweeping tariffs, imposed under the International Emergency Economic Powers Act (IEEPA), stretch a statute meant to restrict emergency powers into a tool for economic nationalism. At stake is whether the Court will apply its own doctrines—the nondelegation and major questions doctrines—consistently, or bend them to politics. Tracing the IEEPA’s Cold War origins, its statutory language, and the constitutional allocation of tariff power to Congress, this paper reveals how Trump’s reading of the law represents not originalism, but opportunism. If “history, not policy, is the proper guide,” as Justice Kavanaugh insists, the Court must decide whether that principle binds everyone—or only its opponents.