Student Loans and Surmountable Access-To-Justice Barriers

Findings and conclusions from the 2012 American Bankruptcy Law Journal Study and Response to Professor Rafael I. Pardo’s latest piece, The Undue Hardship Thicket: On Access to Justice, Procedural Noncompliance, and Pollutive Litigation in Bankruptcy

Do Corporations Have Religious Beliefs?

Despite two hundred years of jurisprudence on the topic of corporate personhood, the Supreme Court has failed to endorse a philosophically defensible theory of the corporation. In this Article, I attempt to fill that void. Drawing upon the extensive philosophical literature on personhood and group agency, I argue that corporations qualify as persons in their own right. This leads me to answer the titular question with an emphatic yes. Contrary to how it first seems, that conclusion does not warrant granting expansive constitutional rights to corporations. It actually suggests the opposite. Using the Affordable Care Act’s contraception mandate as a case study, I develop this theory of corporate personhood and explore some of its constitutional implications

Student Loans and Surmountable Access-To-Justice Barriers

Findings and conclusions from the 2012 American Bankruptcy Law Journal Study and Response to Professor Rafael I. Pardo’s latest piece, The Undue Hardship Thicket: On Access to Justice, Procedural Noncompliance, and Pollutive Litigation in Bankruptcy

Killing Us Sweetly: How to Take Industry out of the FDA

For more than a century, the Food and Drug Administration has claimed to protect the public health. During that time, it has actually been placing corporate profits above consumer safety. Nowhere is this corruption more evident than in the approval of artificial sweeteners. FDA leaders\u27 close ties to the very industry they were supposed to be regulating present a startling picture. Ignoring warnings from both independent scientists and their own review panels, FDA decision makers let greed guide their actions. They approved carcinogenic sweeteners such as saccharin, aspartame, and sucralose while simultaneously banning the natural herb stevia because it would cut into industry profits. This Article proposes two reforms that can end these corrupt practices and take industry out of the FDA. By strengthening conflict of interest regulations and preventing companies from participating in safety trials, the FDA will be able to gain the independence it needs in order to regulate the food and drug industries

Do Corporations Have Religious Beliefs?

Despite two hundred years of jurisprudence on the topic of corporate personhood, the Supreme Court has failed to endorse a philosophically defensible theory of the corporation. In this Article, I attempt to fill that void. Drawing upon the extensive philosophical literature on personhood and group agency, I argue that corporations qualify as persons in their own right. This leads me to answer the titular question with an emphatic yes. Contrary to how it first seems, that conclusion does not warrant granting expansive constitutional rights to corporations. It actually suggests the opposite. Using the Affordable Care Act’s contraception mandate as a case study, I develop this theory of corporate personhood and explore some of its constitutional implications

Jury Voting Paradoxes

The special verdict is plagued by two philosophical paradoxes: the discursive dilemma and the lottery paradox. Although widely discussed in the philosophical literature, these paradoxes have never been applied to jury decision making. In this Essay, I use the paradoxes to show that the special verdict’s vote-reporting procedures can lead judges to render verdicts that the jurors themselves would reject. This outcome constitutes a systemic breakdown that should not be tolerated in a legal system that prides itself on the fairness of its jury decision-making process. Ultimately, I argue that, because the general verdict with answers to written questions does not suffer from these paradoxes, it should be adopted in place of the special verdict

The Student Loan Bankruptcy Gap

Each year, a quarter of a million student loan debtors file for bankruptcy. Of those, fewer than three hundred discharge their educational debt. That is a success rate of just 0.1 percent. This chasm between success and failure is the titular “Student Loan Bankruptcy Gap,” and it is a phenomenon that is unprecedented in the law. Drawing upon an original dataset of nearly five hundred adversary proceedings, this Article examines three key facets of the Student Loan Bankruptcy Gap. First, it establishes the true breadth of the gap. Second, it explores why the gap has persisted for more than two decades and, in doing so, uncovers a creditor case-selection strategy designed to deter debtors from bringing legitimate claims. And third, it identifies solutions that have the potential to close the Student Loan Bankruptcy Gap and bring debt relief to millions of individuals

Why Capital Punishment is No Punishment At All

Capital punishment has generated an incredible amount of public debate. Is the practice constitutional? Does it deter crime? Is it humane? Supporters and opponents of capital punishment disagree on all of these issues and many more. There is perhaps only one thing that unites these two camps: the belief that the death penalty is society\u27s most severe punishment. In this Article, I argue that this belief is mistaken. Capital punishment is not at the top of the punishment hierarchy. In fact, it is no punishment at all. My argument builds from a basic conception of punishment endorsed by the Supreme Court: for something to qualify as a punishment, it must be bad, in some way, for the person who is punished. By drawing upon the philosophical literature regarding death, I show that this is not the case. Contrary to our intuitions, the death penalty is not bad, in any way, for a condemned criminal. This conclusion should not be understood to suggest that death is never bad. In most circumstances, death is bad. There are, however, situations in which it is not, and capital punishment, as employed in the United States penal system, is one such situation. By showing that capital punishment is not bad for the condemned criminal, I provide a strong constitutional objection to the practice

Jury Voting Paradoxes

The special verdict is plagued by two philosophical paradoxes: the discursive dilemma and the lottery paradox. Although widely discussed in the philosophical literature, these paradoxes have never been applied to jury decision making. In this Essay, I use the paradoxes to show that the special verdict’s vote-reporting procedures can lead judges to render verdicts that the jurors themselves would reject. This outcome constitutes a systemic breakdown that should not be tolerated in a legal system that prides itself on the fairness of its jury decision-making process. Ultimately, I argue that, because the general verdict with answers to written questions does not suffer from these paradoxes, it should be adopted in place of the special verdict

Neuro Lie Detection and Mental Privacy

New technologies inevitably raise novel legal questions. This is particularly true of technologies, such as neuro lie detection, that offer new ways to investigate crime. Recently, a number of scholars have asked whether neuro lie detection testing is constitutional. So far, the debate has focused on the Fifth Amendment—specifically whether evidence gathered through neuro lie detection is constitutionally admissible because it is “physical” in nature or inadmissible because it is “testimonial” in nature. Under current Supreme Court doctrine, this Fifth Amendment debate is intractable. However, the more fundamental question of whether the government can compel individuals to undergo a neuro lie detection test does have a clear answer. It just so happens that the answer lies in the Fourth Amendment, not the Fifth. In this Paper, we argue that forcing a criminal defendant, or any other person, to submit to a neuro lie detection test is a substantial invasion of mental privacy that is unconstitutional under the Fourth Amendment