The First Amendment’s establishment clause prohibits the government from passing laws “respecting an establishment of religion.” It follows that the U.S. government cannot fund or otherwise support any particular religion through its laws. However, although this has always been the case in theory, it has been inconsistently followed. Two 2005 cases before the Supreme Court illustrate the difficulties in doing this. Van Orden v. Perry and McCreary and County v. American Civil Liberties Union of Kentucky both concerned displays of the Biblical Ten Commandments outside of government buildings. These cases were viewed by many as being quite similar, but were decided by different 5-4 rulings released the same day. The intensely subjective nature of these two rulings illustrates the difficulty of trying to allow the government to facilitate religious expression in certain instances but not others.

While an absolutist interpretation against any association between the government and religion might be desired by some, it would be impossible to implement because of how thoroughly enmeshed religion is in much of American society and history. Rather, the practice of taking into account the historical nature of a religious display both protects the monuments of the past while allowing for a stricter interpretation of the separation between church and state in the present. The current framework used regarding religious displays and the establishment clause, which takes into account the history of a religious display, although subjective and difficult to define, is the best way to handle these cases. It is the best way to ensure that the law remains flexible enough to prevent abuse.

Inspired by controversy surrounding Prime Minister Boris Johnson of the United Kingdom’s decision to prorogue Parliament in 2019, this article investigates the differences between codified constitutions, such as the U.S. Constitution, and uncodified constitutions, such as the British and Israeli constitutions; through analysis, the article recommends western democracies with uncodified constitutions to adopt codified constitutions because the structure of uncodified constitutions could lead to tyranny and currently create tensions between branches of government. First, I commend the U.S. Constitution for clearly stating the laws while subjecting itself to interpretation and amendments. Next, I describe the legal threat of tyranny in the United Kingdom and the fierce tension between the judiciary and Parliament regarding Johnson’s prorogation of Parliament that resulted from an uncodified constitution. I also analyze Israel’s Basic Laws system and its current tensions between branches of government to corroborate the necessity of a codified constitution. I highlight current efforts in both democracies to enact codified constitutions; furthermore, I dismiss the advantages of uncodified constitutions by highlighting that those advantages exist in codified constitutions and that a codified constitution might save the U.K.’s monarchy and traditions rather than destroy them.

Child marriage, the legal union where at least one party is under the age of 18 years, is a common practice in the United States. While popular belief suggests that this practice solely occurs outside the bounds of normative law, it is in fact consistently supported by American legal precedent. Using the Commonwealth of Massachusetts as a case study, this article examines historical legal precedent for child marriage and recommends a new legal framework to protect youth from exploitative marriages.

In 2011, President Obama authorized a drone strike to kill Anwar Nasser al-Awlaki, an operational leader of al-Qaeda “engaged in the planning and direction of attacks” against Americans. At the time of his death, al-Awlaki was hiding in the Al Jawf Governorate of Yemen, a lawless region of the country beyond President Saleh’s practical jurisdiction, thereby preventing his capture and extraction. Commenting on the strike, President Obama said “The death of Awlaki is a major blow to Al-Qaeda's most active operational affiliate. He led in planning and directing efforts to murder innocent Americans.” This attack appears no different from the 541 other known drone strikes launched by the Obama administration. However, unlike other al-Qaeda operatives targeted in these strikes, al-Awlaki was an American citizen and never indicted for a crime in the US. In this essay, I examine the legality of the targeted killing of al-Awlaki and the broader question of whether Presidents have the authority to condemn American citizen-enemy combatants to death without judicial approval.

In his July 2021 Executive Order, President Biden urged the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) “to restore net neutrality rules undone by the prior administration.” Net neutrality, a term coined by Professor Tim Wu at Columbia Law School in 2002, is the network design principle that all traffic on the internet should be treated equally so that the users of a network, not the operator of the network, decide what the network is used for. The FCC’s approach to net neutrality, however, has swung back and forth as the partisan makeup of FCC leadership changes according to the presidential party. In this article, I delve into what net neutrality is, how the FCC has oscillated on net neutrality rules under different administrations in the past two decades, and how bipartisan Congressional legislation can bring this net neutrality pendulum to rest for the best interests of consumers, internet service providers, and the entire internet ecosystem.

Fair Use copyright law is incredibly vague in a way that protects large corporations and penalizes small independent entities. Fair Use is important to encourage conversations around art and popular culture. YouTubes policies have not done enough to uphold Fair Use, and Fair Use laws need to be revised to be clearer.

The Supreme Court has taken multiple opportunities to avoid addressing the tension between the rights of same-sex couples and those of religious citizens. I argue that the Court’s dodging of the free exercise question in 303 Creative LLC v. Elenis is part of a trend of avoiding the definitive settlement of issues in which religious liberty and same-sex rights conflict.

The rise in popularity of virtual reality (VR), spurred further by the COVID-19 pandemic, has led to a concerning increase in reports of virtual sexual assault. Under the current criminal justice system, however, virtual sexual assault is not considered a crime as there is no “real” physical contact. In this article, I argue that since immersive VR tricks users into thinking that their virtual experience is real, virtual sexual assault still feels like “real” sexual assault and has real negative psychological consequences. As providers of VR platforms are failing to confront virtual sexual assault effectively, it is imperative that legislators establish proper VR criminal law to make the virtual world a safer place for everyone.

Even with the supposed benefits of smart contracts, the fundamental tensions inherent to liberal, free-market contractual agreements are still present. The incompleteness theory of modern contracts was pioneered by Nobel Prize winner Oliver Hart and seeks to understand why firms exist at all—or more precisely, why one firm would decide to buy another instead of entering into a contract. This theory operates on the assumption that contractual parties operate to maximize individual profit rather than the common surplus for all entrants. As such, Hart claims that the ubiquity of contracts is in part due to their intrinsic incompleteness which permits opportunistic profit-maximizing behavior. This incompleteness is generated due to the impossibility of foreseeing every potential contingency that may occur, and though moral hazard or asymmetric information may encourage the compliance of contracting parties, there are often ambiguities or inconsistencies that may produce conflict.

Mass incarceration is arguably one of the most critical problems of the American judicial system. Legal scholars and practitioners alike have put forth several proposals that would reform the currently broken criminal justice system, which puts in jail millions of Americans. Among all these voices, progressive prosecutors have distinguished themselves through their radical and innovative agenda. Wielding their vast discretionary power as a tool to reduce mass incarceration, these prosecutors rely on tactics such as refusing to prosecute low-level offenses. Despite the noticeable successes of the progressive prosecutor movement, I will argue in this article that prosecutors cannot by themselves fundamentally change the criminal justice system. Electoral volatility and the classic principal-agent dilemma are two of the reasons why I suggest prosecutors should in fact relinquish some of their power.

Education has long proved itself essential to fostering a healthy democracy, as school teaches children the importance of collaboration, creativity, and civic engagement. The current method of which public schools are funded, upheld by San Antonio Independent School District v. Rodriguez (1973), is inherently flawed and has proven to lead to inequitable education outcomes. Given that education is critical to the functioning of our democracy and funding is a key determinant of academic success, there is a strong basis for viewing education as a constitutionally protected right and changing educational funding to be more reliant on state and federal funding rather than local property taxes.

Existential crises have precipitated legally dubious executive decisions throughout the history of the United States. While significant legal scholarship chastises President Abraham Lincoln’s decision to suspend the writ of habeas corpus in 1861, such scholarship tends to neglect the subsequent executive actions surrounding the writ undertaken by the president. The U.S. currently finds itself engaging in an international—not civil —struggle, making a rigorous examination of the utility of executive restraint in times of crisis ever-more important. President Biden ought to heed the lesson of restraint typified in the martyred president’s legal endeavors during the Civil War.

Texas is booming economically, as numerous Fortune 500 companies reside in the state, more people move to its cities and corresponding suburbs, and more industries find its pro-business policies profitable. However, the Texas state government (and its governor) have recently moved toward implementing more and more socially conservative policies, especially those targeting the trans community. For example, Governor Greg Abbott of Texas recently expressed interest in classifying parents who give their children gender-affirming medicine as child abusers, and Dan Patrick, the current lieutenant governor, introduced the controversial “bathroom bill” in 2017 (which would have restricted access to public bathrooms for transgender people). The precedents such policies and statements have set has already started to scare away that would like to appeal to customers through virtue-signaling capitalism and will continue to do so until the social move rightward reverses somewhat. If it does not, business will not be booming in Texas, as the industry explosion that fuels growth in the state will begin to regress due to the state’s politics.

105 years have passed since the United States granted American citizenship to the people of Puerto Rico. Nevertheless, Puerto Ricans still suffer from an unequal treatment by the United States government and they are subject to continued discrimination in a variety of government programs. An example of this troublesome pattern is the case of José Luis Vaello-Madero. He was a resident of New York who was eligible and received SSI assistance (a program where Puerto Rico is not eligible for assistance) for a number of years. After relocating to Puerto Rico, he was notified that he would no longer be eligible for this program and had to retroactively pay the United States government for benefits received while in Puerto Rico. In the case that is currently at the Supreme Court, he argues that this exclusion goes against the equal protection guarantees of the Fifth Amendment. By looking at the arguments of the case, I reach his same conclusion. The discrimination against the people of Puerto Rico has been the case for far too long, and the Supreme Court currently has an opportunity to fix this wrong.

This article explores the complexity involved in awarding legal and physical custody to parents when domestic violence has occured between them. Presently, the states have significant interpretive power in deciding which factors their courts will consider in cases of child custody when spousal abuse has occured. While each state strives to maintain meaningful contact with both parents, several states have invoked rebuttable presumption statutes in cases of domestic violence. These statutes declare that the courts must consider instances of domestic violence before awarding custody, even when the children are not directly involved. Sources like the Journal of Family Violence and the Juvenile Family Court Journal suggest that domestic violence continues to impair the family unit, long after incidents of abuse have occured. I examine the way in which awarding custody to an abuser perpetuates post-separation abuse, leads to behavioral and emotional issues in children, and creates opportunities for domestic violence to reoccur. I argue that the implementation of rebuttable presumption statutes should be adopted nation-wide. Federally standardizing domestic violence laws, especially in cases regarding child custody, is a necessary step to ensure that domestic violence is not enabled by the courts.

The Supreme Court recently agreed to hear two cases, against Harvard and the University of North Carolina, that challenge race-based affirmative action in college admissions. In each case, a group called Students for Fair Admissions argues that the universities’ admissions policies unlawfully discriminate against Asian Americans. These cases rest on two legal issues — the Equal Protection Clause and Title VI of the 1964 Civil Rights Act. These issues are only relevant because UNC is a public university and Harvard receives federal funds. The Court’s ruling in today’s cases is unlikely to end or even calm this debate. If race-based affirmative action is prohibited, then universities will likely switch to other factors associated with race, and history suggests legal challenges will continue. To calm this debate, instead of banning or regulating affirmative action, federal and state governments should eliminate all financial support of higher education. Use of affirmative action would become a decision for private institutions using their own funds. Such decisions would answer only to the marketplace for higher education. Reasonable arguments may exist for government support of higher education, but these cases are a teaching moment: government intervention often provokes polarizing debate over the goals, structure, and limits of that intervention. This lesson should enter policy debates in higher education and beyond.

As artificial intelligence becomes increasingly complex, there are also more inadvertent consequences of algorithmic bias, or the unfair prejudice in a computer’s decision making that derives from systematic errors or imperfect data. Often times, a good faith attempt to use technology to curb human error can quickly spiral into a discriminatory practice, such as an algorithm tested by companies to screen resumes or a state-led algorithm to predict recidivism rates of criminal defendants. From a legal perspective, this marks a renewed challenge to the Supreme Court's precedents over disparate impacts, where laws or procedures are unintentionally discriminatory yet still result in disproportional outcomes. The key question, then, is how courts should adjudicate cases of disparate impact with artificial intelligence on the rise, especially given that algorithmic bias can be incredibly adverse. One proposed solution is to hold the use of artificial intelligence to a higher standard, requiring that such an algorithm must be narrowly tailored to the use, or an improvement over all plausible human alternatives. In doing so, courts can apply their judicial power to prevent further discrimination veiled through the application of artificial intelligence.

In the United States legal system, classifications and fundamental rights are protected by the Supreme Court’s tiers of scrutiny model. These tiers apply different levels of judicial scrutiny to different types of classifications. In theory, these leveled classifications provide the necessary additional constitutional protections for historically marginalized groups; however, in practice, the tiers of scrutiny fall short of this ideal. The amorphous tiers themselves create confusion and ambiguity, leading to arguably flawed judgments. Further, the tiers do not provide adequate support for all potential discrimination or classifications, specifically classifications based on gender or sexuality. Thus, the current tiers of scrutiny model is flawed because of its unclear application and because it does not protect equal rights against discrimination for all historically marginalized groups.

My article concerns the Equal Pay Act and Title VII and its importance in the recent settlement between the United States Women's National Team and the United States Soccer Federation. I argue that while the settlement is important for female athletes and equal pay, it fell short of what the team originally demanded specifically due to Judge Klausner's initial decision in the district court to grant summary judgment to the defendants. Had he analyzed the contracts of both the men's and women's teams correctly, while adhering to precedent, the USWNT could have reached a settlement that was much closer to their original demands. I use the EPA, precedent, and several briefs from the case as evidence in support of this argument. I conclude that the settlement sets a dangerous precedent for female athletes as it is far from what they deserve.

The Supreme Court recently ruled on United States v. Zubaydah, finding that the United States government has the ability to block the case under the state secrets privilege established in United States v. Reynolds. The states secrets privilege holds that the United States government retains the power to block information from any case that may be a threat to national security. The Supreme Court took the ruling in Reynolds one step further by expanding the state secrets privilege to information that is already publicly known. Zubaydah gives the United States nearly unlimited power to intervene in any trial under the guise of trying to protect national security. The Supreme Court sided with the United States government over lower courts in this ruling, establishing a dangerous precedent of allowing extensive military operations with no oversight. Through Zubaydah, the Supreme Court has shown that it will protect the United States governments interest over the interests of freedom of information for the American people. A democratic society cannot begin to plant seeds of censorship, for that is when corruption starts to grow.