As partisan gerrymandering takes a larger role in conversations about elections and election policy, the role and authority of state courts has become increasingly important. Partisan gerrymandering, the process in which state legislatures draw Congressional maps to skew the results towards their side by taking advantage of the first-past-the-post system, is an incredibly powerful tool to skew House races. The power is typically vested in state legislatures as per the Elections Clause of the Constitution, which states that the “...manner of holding Elections for Senators and Representatives shall be prescribed in each State by the Legislature thereof” [1]. From the Elections Clause, conservative strategists have developed the Independent State Legislature Theory (ISLT), a legal philosophy that interprets the Elections Clause to grant state legislatures unregulated control of the redistricting process [2]. This interpretation is particularly helpful for Republicans, granting their 23 state legislature trifectas unregulated control while Democrats fall behind due to their mere 15 trifectas [3].

Over 70 years have passed since the decision in Brown v. Board of Education, which ruled segregation and the “separate-but-equal” doctrine as unconstitutional [1]. In the following year, the Supreme Court released another decision focused on implementing the Brown v. Board ruling, which pressured local Southern areas to desegregate “with all deliberate speed” [2]. While the North was not the focus of desegregation efforts, attempts to address the city’s racial imbalance in schools resulted in intense conflict and division [3]. In 1974, a group of Black parents brought a case against Boston Public Schools—Tallulah Morgan et al., Plaintiffs, V. James W. Hennigan et al., Defendants—accusing the school district and committee of maintaining de facto segregation [4]. The U.S. District Court for the District of Massachusetts ordered Boston Public Schools to desegregate through various programs, including a busing program that reassigned students to schools around the city [5]. The aftermath was heightened racial tensions and conflicts, with mass protests of the busing efforts and other changes [6]. Decades later, after massive White flight to Boston suburbs, Boston Public Schools went from majority White students to 85% students of color today [7]. The decision to order Boston Public Schools to desegregate was within the court’s bounds, but the specificity and enforcement of the following orders were an overstep that violated the extent of judicial power.

In March 1788, as vehement debate over the ratification of the Constitution swept across the young American republic, Alexander Hamilton published Federalist No. 70, which laid out his sprawling vision for the executive branch [1]. Hamilton argued that the president must lead the country with “energy,” “vigor,” and “expedition,” while still committing to a “steady administration of the laws” [2]. In other words, the president must — within the limits of the law — make decisions, take action, and assert control over his branch, his government, and his country. In recent decades, however, a new theory that asserts complete presidential authority over the executive branch has disastrously overextended Hamilton’s original vision.

Across the United States, local governments are increasingly turning to the courts to address the mounting costs of climate change. In the absence of significant state and federal action, some municipalities have begun directly suing major greenhouse gas emitters for damages tied to extreme weather events, rising sea levels, and the expense of climate-proofing local infrastructure [1]. Many of these suits invoke “public nuisance”: a tort in state common law governing unreasonable interferences with a plaintiff’s access to public rights and services [2]. In these cases, municipalities generally argue that greenhouse gas emissions have infringed on the public’s right to a healthy environment—the paradigmatic “public right” under this tort—and that fossil fuel companies are therefore legally liable on public nuisance grounds [3].

For over a decade, the armed conflict in eastern Ukraine has tested international law’s capacity to regulate modern warfare. After Russia’s annexation of Crimea in March 2014, pro-Russian armed separatist movements in Donetsk and Luhansk seized administrative buildings and declared independence from Kyiv [1, 2]. These separatist movements were organized, financed, and militarily supported by Russia through the supply of heavy weaponry, intelligence, and paramilitary advisors [3]. The conflict evolved into a protracted low-intensity war and a humanitarian crisis that resulted in torture, mass displacement, enforced disappearances, and the downing of Malaysia Airlines Flight MH17 in July 2014, which killed 298 civilians, most of them Dutch nationals [4, 5]. What began as an internal insurgency gradually transformed into an interstate confrontation that challenged the existing boundaries of international law.

On September 3, 2025, just a few weeks after a Massachusetts district judge ordered the unfreezing of over $2 billion in federal funding to Harvard, the Trump administration announced it was reclassifying the university under a “heightened cash monitoring” status. Pursuant to that reclassification, the federal government demanded that the university a) disburse financial aid to eligible students before, rather than after, receiving the funding for that aid from the Department of Education (ED) and b) provide an irrevocable letter of credit (LOC) worth over $36 million to establish itself as a “financially responsible institution”[1]. Separately, the administration threatened further funding cuts lest Harvard release its undergraduate admissions data[2].The sustained withholding of federal funds from the university represents an unprecedented attack on higher education in the United States has been widely argued since the policy’s very adoption. Equally important, especially in the wake of the administration’s disregard of the high-profile Massachusetts district court ruling, is the place that such funding freezes occupy in American law. On these most recent federal actions, precedent provides a clear guide: the Department of Education is engaging in arbitrary and capricious agency action under the Administrative Procedures Act (APA) and infringing on the First Amendment’s protection of academic freedom.

Mahmoud v. Taylor (2025) is just one of many in the long line of Supreme Court cases concerning the First Amendment’s free exercise clause of religion. Yet, the subject remains just as legally contested as it was in Wisconsin v. Yoder (1972) over 50 years ago. In Yoder, the Court ruled that the state of Wisconsin could not compel Amish children to attend school past eighth grade, as doing so violated their parents’ First Amendment right to freely exercise their religion [1]. In the more recent (and momentous) 6-3 decision in Mahmoud v. Taylor, the Court ruled again in favor of parents’ right to freely exercise their religion under the First Amendment, allowing them to opt their children out of instruction involving LGBTQ-themed storybooks [2]. However, by relying heavily on case-specific factors, rather than articulating a consistent test for evaluating free exercise claims like Yoder before it, Mahmoud v. Taylor demonstrated that America is far from having a clear legal standard for future rulings concerning the free exercise clause within the public school system. Through granting parents excessively broad discretion to opt out of school curriculum, the Court set a troubling precedent that risks creating a society in which virtually any parent can tailor public education to fit their own specific beliefs. With education’s pivotal role in sustaining our democracy, such a precedent threatens to weaken the very civic and social fabric that underlies our Nation. 

The development of artificial intelligence (AI) tools has raised questions about data privacy. More specifically, text and data mining (TDM), the process by which computers extract information from written sources, has been the subject of several recent AI court cases [1]. The disputes are rooted in the large-scale web scraping and local storage of billions of copyrighted works that TDM entails [2]. In the United States, a general “fair use” test for copyrighted material is applied in TDM cases to determine whether the acquisition of AI training data has infringed on copyright protections [3]. “Fair use” refers to legal authorization to use copyrighted material without consent of the rightsholders, or owners of the copyrighted materials [4].  By contrast, as part of its Digital Decade initiative, the European Union has implemented stricter data collection laws to protect the rightsholders [5]. These laws clearly delineate the procedures that AI companies are prohibited from undertaking, such as the collection of superfluous data, thus reinforcing the applicability of data privacy laws to AI [6]. This article advocates for the US to adopt laws akin to those in the EU. It is important that the US leverages the EU as a pedagogical model because the US’ current system for adjudicating TDM cases fails to establish data guardrails tailored to AI development. Safeguarding intellectual property in the US through a federal TDM law will provide AI companies with clarity and allow for a more uniform enforcement of data protection. As such, the US should follow the EU’s lead in bolstering data privacy laws to solidify their relevance within the AI and TDM sector. 

In 2011, Joseph Ronald Power was suddenly suspended from his job as a medical radiation technologist in a New Brunswick hospital. His employer had discovered that he had previously been convicted of two indictable sexual assault offences. Two years later, Power applied for a pardon — now called a record suspension — a process that, at the time of his conviction, was permissible under the Criminal Records Act (R.S.C. 1985, c. C-47) and allowed individuals convicted of indictable offences to be eligible for a pardon five years after completing their sentence. This provision, however, had since been amended in 2010 and 2012, making certain indictable offences, such as Power’s, permanently ineligible for a record suspension [1].

On 3 December, 2024, South Korea was subject to an event that, to many, was limited to history. Using emergency powers rarely seen since the military dictatorships, President Yoon Suk Yeol imposed martial law on the nation. This was the first time in 40 years that martial law was declared. Police and military blocked legislatures, tanks encircled the National Assembly — all while fundamental rights were suspended. The reason provided was overblown, asserting that the legislature had been infested by pro-North Korean criminals and he had to “immediately eradicate the unscrupulous pro-Pyongyang antistate forces that pillage the freedom and happiness of our people and to protect free constitutional order” [1].  It is integral to understand the background of the heightened political polarization in South Korea when discussing President Yoon’s decision to invoke martial law [2]. In recent years, South Korea has witnessed deep divisions between rival political factions, leading to legislative gridlock and contentious public debate [3]. This provided context for the president’s extraordinary measure of invoking martial law. However, such an event posed a pertinent legal question: can such a declaration ever be justified within the framework of South Korea's constitutional commitment? Although emergency powers are lawful, they are limited to legitimate necessity and proportionality. President Yoon’s December 2024 martial law order, issued without invasion, war, or rebellion, was not founded on factual necessity and was, therefore, unlawful under both constitutional and international law. Far from a legitimate emergency measure, it was an unconstitutional attempt at self-coup.

The Supreme Court’s decision in Citizens United v. FEC (2010) dramatically expanded corporate personhood by granting corporations First Amendment protection for political spending. This ruling overturned a long-standing balance established through earlier cases such as Dartmouth College v. Woodward, Hale v. Henkel, and Grosjean v. American Press Co., which had recognized corporations as legal entities with limited, functional rights. By equating corporate political expenditures with individual free speech, the Court effectively enabled unlimited corporate influence in elections, undermining democratic accountability. Drawing on Justice Stevens’s dissent, this essay argues that corporations, as artificial entities created for economic purposes, should not share the same expressive rights as citizens who participate in self-governance. To restore integrity to American democracy and the framers’ constitutional vision, Citizens United must be overturned, returning corporate personhood to its intended, limited scope.

Since Humphrey’s Executor v. United States (1935), the Supreme Court has permitted Congress to insulate officials in quasi-legislative or quasi-judicial agencies from at-will presidential removal, establishing the foundation of the modern independent agency. Yet nearly a century later, Trump v. Slaughter (2025) challenges whether that insulation remains constitutional. This essay argues that Humphrey’s Executor should be reaffirmed, but strictly confined to agencies that truly perform quasi-legislative or quasi-judicial functions. The Federal Trade Commission, whose modern activities center on enforcement and litigation, now operates primarily as an executive agency and should therefore fall within the President’s removal power. In contrast, entities like the Federal Reserve—whose functions align with the original rationale of Humphrey’s Executor—deserve continued independence. By preserving this doctrinal distinction, the Court can maintain both democratic accountability and the legitimate autonomy of genuinely independent agencies.

The border search exception, once justified by limited privacy interests in physical containers, strains under the weight of digital technology. This essay argues that forensic searches of smartphones at the border should require reasonable suspicion, as such searches expose vast quantities of personal data far beyond the regulatory aims that justify the exception. While cases like Ramsey and Flores-Montano grounded suspicionless searches in the nature of tangible objects, Riley v. California recognized that digital devices demand greater constitutional protection. Extending the container analogy to smartphones, as in Touset, misapplies a doctrine built for another era. Requiring reasonable suspicion restores the proportional balance between state power and individual privacy, ensuring that the border remains a site of limited exception rather than expanding constitutional compromise into the digital age.

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.