Category: Articles

Al Capone famously boasted of his criminal empire: “Some call it bootlegging. Some call it racketeering. I call it a business.” Treasury Agent Frank Wilson and Prosecutor George Johnson put Capone behind bars not by disputing his characterization and pursuing murder or assault or RICO charges, but by accepting it and enforcing its tax implications….

Patents are intended as a means of promoting innovation through private pecuniary incentives. But the patent system has for some time been on a collision course with guarantees of expressive freedom. Surprisingly, no one has ever subjected patent doctrine to a close First Amendment analysis. In this paper I show, first, that patents clearly affect…

In its Eighth Amendment cases, the Supreme Court has often cited counter-majoritarian considerations as the basis for exercising judicial restraint. As a result, excessive and draconian punishments persist in the United States, with the Court being hesitant to use the Constitution to bar state punishment practices. The Court’s evolving standards of decency doctrine, however, is…

This Article identifies a discrepancy between law and epistemology and proposes a way to fix it. Our legal system relies on decisions of multimember tribunals, which include juries, state and federal appellate courts, and supreme courts. Members of those tribunals often disagree with each other on matters of fact. The system settles such disagreement by…

Price fixing is antithetical to a free-market economy. Competitive markets supply goods and services to consumers at the lowest efficient prices. Unfortunately, many businesses would prefer not to compete because they can increase their profits by conspiring to raise price. By refraining from competition, each firm in a price-fixing cartel can maximize its profits at…

In 2014, the Patent and Trademark Office (“Trademark Office” or “Agency”) made national headlines when it cancelled the Washington Redskins’ trademark registration. The Washington Redskins, a National Football League team, is valued at a staggering 2.4 billion dollars, of which a substantial portion of this value is attributed to the Washington Redskins brand. Whether the…

This Article presents the results of a quantitative analysis of writing style for the entire corpus of US Supreme Court decisions. The basis for this analysis is the measure of frequency of function words, which has been found to be a useful “stylistic fingerprint” and which we use as a general proxy for the stylistic…

Military commanders are not just officers leading soldiers into battle. In the military justice system, they also serve quasi-prosecutorial roles and decide what charges to bring and whether to accept a plea. With this responsibility comes the potential for misconduct, no different than with civilian prosecutors. Commanders too can improperly coerce witnesses or withhold favorable…

In the Affordable Care Act (“ACA”), passed in 2010, Congress provided that only “lawfully present” individuals could obtain insurance through the Marketplaces established under the Act. Congress left it to the Department of Health and Human Services (“HHS”) to define who is “lawfully present.” Initially, HHS included all individuals with deferred action status, which is…

Today’s publicly offered investment funds, including mutual funds, have ever more diverse investment strategies, as they increasingly invest in financial instruments that, in earlier years, had been the province of only the most sophisticated investors. Although the new landscape of investment possibilities may substantially benefit retail investors, one financial instrument attracting increasing amounts of retail…