Contesting Address : Conflicts Over the Words We Use to Address and Refer to Each Other

Professor Richard Brooks\u27s generative insights provide us with valuable tools for recognizing, and trying to make sense of, address\u27s role in human interactions. That address --the words we use to address and refer to each other--has the potential both to offer value and to inflict harm to these interactions sometimes triggers conflict over appropriate forms of address. In this Commentary to Professor Brooks\u27s Frankel Lecture, I examine some of these conflicts. As we\u27ll see, some address conflicts involve debates over whether and when address actually makes meaning or whether it’s instead relatively trivial--while others involve contestants who agree that address makes meaning in important ways but disagree over what meaning should be made. Examples include not only gender-specific and racially subordinating forms of address but also the (for a time) contested choice of simply President for addressing the nation’s chief executive and commander in chief. Address conflicts are sometimes resolved (if they are resolved) through social practice and sometimes through law. Legal efforts to resolve address conflicts, more specifically, sometimes involve addressees\u27 legal claim to control how they are addressed, and sometimes also involve addressers\u27 legal claim to control how they address others. In settings where the listener (the addressee) has less power than the speaker (the addresser), we can sometimes understand address as the speaker\u27s command about how the target should behave: to borrow legal scholar Kent Greenawalt\u27s vocabulary, speech sometimes does something, not just says something. In those settings, equality law recognizes that speech--including address--sometimes rises to the level of unlawful discriminatory conduct. Courts\u27 resolutions of address conflicts thus often turn on whether and when they understand the contested form of address to do something, and not just say something

Transforming Tax Expenditures

For decades, reformers have advocated the repeal of tax expenditures--disguised government spending through special preferences in the Internal Revenue Code. And yet, tax expenditures persist, impairing federal tax receipts by more than $1.8 trillion in 2024. This Article introduces a novel mechanism for tax expenditure reform. To the extent that direct statutory repeal proves impossible or impractical, lawmakers can achieve an equivalent result through a strategy of legislative anti-repeal. By radically expanding a tax expenditure\u27s legal scope, then adjusting progressive income tax rates to account for revenue loss and distributional considerations, lawmakers can effectively eliminate tax expenditures from the tax base and integrate them into the rate structure--a process this Article defines as base-rate transformation. Base-rate transformations reframe conventional understandings of repeal and restrictive reform, as well as traditional reform narratives oriented around a mantra of broad base, low rates. Under certain conditions, statutory expansion operates as de facto repeal--or as restrictive reform. The crucial insight is that, for tax expenditures, the stakes of legal change lie largely in how lawmakers address any adjustments to statutory rates. From a normative perspective, base-rate transformations have implications for customary tax norms such as equity, efficiency, and complexity, as well as the political economy of tax expenditure reform. More generally, base-rate transformations challenge standard framings of tax expenditures and press for a more holistic approach to legislative changes to these provisions

A Transformational Agenda for National Security

Past efforts to reimagine national security in legal scholarship have largely avoided systematic engagement with the foundational assumptions and presumptions of the field. Challenging and critiquing those assumptions is, however, necessary to producing scholarly work that reimagines, rather than reproduces, status quo approaches to U.S. national security. This Article presents an agenda for reimagining national security through legal scholarship, which is premised on the view that challenging the national security status quo should be part of those efforts. In doing so, this agenda explores seven premises central to how U.S. national security is currently conceived of, practiced, and implemented. Moving beyond the law, the agenda presented in this Article examines the structural power dynamics and political economy of national security, demonstrating why these issues are important to reimagining and transforming how we approach the discipline of national security as legal academics and advocates

Public Patent Powers

Congress has created multiple structures for agencies to control how patents are used, but that institutional design choice has received little academic attention. This Article provides the first comprehensive survey of existing laws that expressly authorize agencies to control patents. I locate 113 express conditions across 68 laws that expressly authorize executive actors to make some form of decision about patents. These powers, which I refer to as “public patent powers,” allow the government to use patented inventions, to obtain patents, to authorize third parties to use patented inventions, and to regulate how patents are used. Agencies have used many of these powers, but they have been reluctant to use others. Notably, agencies have refused to grant compulsory licenses on patents covering federally funded drugs, despite multiple requests to do so. The descriptive account of public patent powers has several implications for patent regulation. Public patent powers show different actions that the executive branch could take without the need for any legislative action when patents create policy concerns, as is currently happening with high drug prices. Themes in public patent powers and their use also reveal consistent policy judgments present throughout the history of patent regulation in the United States. These themes create a framework for identifying contexts where executive control over patents may be appropriate and politically feasible. The descriptive account further suggests that the Supreme Court’s decision in Oil States v. Greene’s Energy may have broader implications than previously recognized. Moving forward, this Article contends that the executive branch should create an interagency framework to guide how agencies use public patent powers and that courts should consider themes in public patent powers when deciding whether to grant injunctions in patent cases