All Online Essays

Independent craft breweries contributed approximately $68 billion to the national economy last year. However, an arcane regulatory scheme governs the alcohol industry in general and the craft beer industry specifically, posing both obstacles and benefits to independent craft brewers. This Essay examines regulations that arguably infringe on free speech: namely, commercial speech regulations that prohibit alcohol manufacturers from purchasing advertising space from retailers. Such regulations were enacted to prohibit undue influence and anticompetitive behavior stemming from vertical and horizontal integration in the alcohol market. Although these regulations are necessary to prevent global corporate brewers from dominating the craft beer market at the expense of independent craft beer and consumer choice, evolving commercial speech doctrine threatens to invalidate them due to a trend towards increased protections for commercial speech. Without these regulations, and many others like them, nothing would restrain global corporate brands from engaging in illegal pay-to-play conduct to regain lost market share and force independent craft beer from the shelves and tap handles.

The media and academic dialogue surrounding high-stakes decisionmaking by robotics applications has been dominated by a focus on morality. But the tendency to do so while overlooking the role that legal incentives play in shaping the behavior of profit-maximizing firms risks marginalizing the field of robotics and rendering many of the deepest challenges facing today’s engineers utterly intractable. This Essay attempts to both halt this trend and offer a course correction. Invoking Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes’s canonical analogy of the “bad man . . . who cares nothing for . . . ethical rules,” it demonstrates why philosophical abstractions like the trolley problem—in their classic framing—provide a poor means of understanding the real-world constraints robotics engineers face. Using insights gleaned from the economic analysis of law, it argues that profit-maximizing firms designing autonomous decisionmaking systems will be less concerned with esoteric questions of right and wrong than with concrete questions of predictive legal liability. Until such time as the conversation surrounding so-called “moral machines” is revised to reflect this fundamental distinction between morality and law, the thinking on this topic by philosophers, engineers, and policymakers alike will remain hopelessly mired. Step aside, roboticists—lawyers have this one.

In this essay, Professor Kagan asserts that recent disputes in Ohio and Nevada about whether lawyers should be allowed to wear “Black Lives Matter” pins in open court expose a fault line in First Amendment law. Lower courts have generally been unsympathetic to lawyers who display political symbols in court. But, Kagan argues, it would go too far suggest that free speech has no relevance in courtrooms. This essay argues for a way to strike a balance.

In this essay, Professor Morley explains that states generally conduct their elections in a “unitary” manner, applying many of the same rules, requirements, and procedures to races for offices at all levels of government. Morley argues that the unitary status of American elections has evolved into a convention: a principle that people expect to limit government officials’ discretion, despite not being constitutionally required. A few states have begun to challenge the convention of unitary elections. They have engaged in uncooperative federalism by imposing different rules for state and local elections than federal law establishes for federal races. Morley concludes that, while such changes constitute a sharp break from states’ consistent practice over the past decades, they are a valid exercise of states’ constitutional prerogatives. Congress’ authority over state and local elections, Morley demonstrates, is far narrower than its virtually plenary power over congressional and presidential elections. States therefore have discretion to protect the integrity of their state and local elections by imposing safeguards and requirements beyond those Congress has chosen to establish for federal elections.

In this essay, Professors Dana and Tuerkheimer conceptualize Flint as an archetypical case of underenforcement—that is, a denial of the equal protection of laws guaranteed by the U.S. Constitution. Viewed as such, the inadequacy of environmental regulation can be understood as a failure that extends beyond the confines of Flint; a failure that demands a far more expansive duty to protect vulnerable populations.