Jan 16, 2026 Edward RubinAdministrative Law
Donald Trump has placed the issue of the President’s removal power before the Supreme Court, and its answer will undoubtedly be one of its most important decisions in the entire field of administrative law. Independent agencies, where leadership is appointed by the President with Senate approval and can only be removed for cause, have been a mainstay of our modern administrative state since its development in the late nineteenth century. The first modern agency, the Interstate Commerce Commission, was structured in this manner, and the model has been regularly employed for many others, including the Federal Trade Commission, the Securities Exchange Commission, and the Federal Reserve Board.
Although prediction is a notoriously difficult enterprise, current indications are that the Court will accede to Trump’s argument (sometimes described as the unitary executive theory) that the President has inherent power to remove most, or all, executive officials and that the many enacted provisions limiting him to removal for cause are unconstitutional. This will reverse a century of Supreme Court doctrine; indeed, except for some expansive language in Chief Justice Taft’s 1926 decision in Myers v. U.S. (whose actual holding is the uncontroversial principle that Congress may not participate in the removal process), the Court has never questioned the constitutional validity of independent agencies. In decisions such as Seila Law v. CFPB and Free Enterprise Fund v. PCOAB, it struck down the use of for cause provisions to create innovative agency structures, but it left the basic principle – as articulated in Humphrey’s Executor v. U.S. and revised in Morrison v. Olson — intact. The pragmatic consequences that will flow from reversing this long-established doctrine will be unfortunate at best. Donald Trump has demonstrated hostility to democratic governance and the rule of law, not merely by statements and behaviors reported by the press, but through actions repeatedly struck down by federal courts. In other words, his troubling pattern of political and legal irresponsibility can be discerned from the legal record that falls within the Court’s institutional purview. To grant him the power to ignore the limits that have accompanied Congressional grants of authority for one hundred fifty years and exercise sole control of the entire administrative apparatus is to court disaster. Continue reading "How to Avoid Trumping the Legal History of Removal"
Jan 15, 2026 Anne Marie LofasoWork Law
As I often remind my students, labor law stands among the most demanding courses in law school—not just for its intellectual rigor, but for the layered complexity it presents. Labor law is rooted in a dense statutory framework. It requires mastery of intersecting doctrines from constitutional, administrative, and contract law, all of which are interpreted through a case-heavy lens.
At its core, labor law grapples with deeply human issues—power dynamics, structural inequities, and the lived realities of working people. Its scope is wide and constantly in flux, shaped by the shifting politics of Board leadership and the broader currents of social change. But what makes it so compelling—so urgent—is that it is never abstract. It is relentlessly real. It forces us to grapple with clashing perspectives from workers, employers, and unions, each bringing their own lived experience and competing visions of fairness, autonomy, and justice. Continue reading "Can You Hear Section 7 Now?"
Jan 14, 2026 David HortonTrusts & Estates
When I read the premise of Mark Glover’s terrific new article Nominal Bequests—that some small-dollar gifts are problematic—I couldn’t help wonder whether it was a kind of stunt, like writing a novel without using the letter “e.” What could be wrong with testamentary gifts of trivial sums? Even if these bequests were somehow harmful, wouldn’t the payoff from regulating them pale in comparison to the costs? But Glover (who has been publishing up a storm) is waiting in the weeds with creative and thoughtful answers.
For starters, Glover argues that “[s]ome nominal bequests . . . are wasteful” and “undermine the fundamental policies of the law of succession.” He astutely observes that testators invariably make nominal bequests for one of two reasons. First, some are motivated by spite. Glover offers the real-life example of a mother who left each of her four daughters $1 and quips that she “wanted to give [them] something worse than nothing.” Second, Glover notes, other testators are laboring under a mistake of law. They want to disinherit the beneficiary entirely, but they incorrectly believe that they must acknowledge the individual to prevent a court from deeming the individual to be accidentally omitted. Either way, Glover contends, there’s no social value in implementing these testators’ wishes. Freedom of disposition supposedly encourages industry and thrift, but “[t]he donor has no reason to increase her wealth during life to functionally disinherit the beneficiary at death.” Continue reading "Small Gifts, Big Problems"
Jan 13, 2026 Gregory KeatingTorts
In an illuminating article, A Novel Tort Duty for Platforms that Intermediately Produce Real World User Interactions, Jordan Wallace-Wolf proposes that we recognize that a distinctive duty of care should attach to internet platforms that “cultivate” markets. Ridesharing Apps— Uber and Lyft— are the paradigm platforms that he has in mind. Professor Wallace-Wolf’s perceptive proposal warrants careful consideration. It puts its finger on properties of the interactions that platforms promote that courts and other commentators have not identified as clearly. And its proposed liability rule responds to those properties in an attractive, justified way. Continue reading "Sponsoring Torts: Reconceptualizing Platform Liability"
Jan 12, 2026 Samy AyoubLegal History
Mohammad Fadel’s Beyond Liberal Zionism, is an extraordinary work of legal and moral imagination. Fadel reframes one of the most enduring and polarizing questions in international law: what would a just Zionism look like? In his answer, Fadel insists that international law and political liberalism, properly understood, retain the moral and institutional resources to guide Israelis and Palestinians toward a just settlement.
The article opens with an assessment of liberal Zionism. Fadel argues that what is commonly called liberal Zionism recognizes Palestinian suffering but denies Palestinians standing as rights-bearers. This position is exemplified by New York Times commentator Ezra Klein and by the late Israeli legal theorist Ruth Gavison. The goal of liberal Zionism is a humane peace, not a just one. This distinction—between a moral appeal to compassion and a juridical claim to equality—animates Fadel’s entire article. Through a careful reading of Klein’s widely discussed, post-October 7 podcast series on the Israel–Palestine conflict, Fadel shows how even the most self-consciously liberal commentators confine Palestinian aspirations to a humanitarian vocabulary of aid, decency, and empathy. The effect is to transform a problem of law and justice into a problem of sentiment. Palestinians appear as objects of moral concern rather than subjects of legal right. Continue reading "Equality Before Law: Just Zionism, Political Liberalism, and the Question of Palestine"
Jan 9, 2026 Ignacio CofoneTechnology Law
Julie Cohen’s Oligarchy, State, and Cryptopia is a bracing account of how a handful of technology companies can move beyond regulatory arbitrage to something more ambitious: remaking the rules by which they are governed. The article’s core claim is that some groups of tech elites do more than evade oversight: they reconfigure the administrative state to relocate meaningful rulemaking into private hands.
Cohen’s analysis clarifies a particular form of power and why several familiar toolkits in the law, such as antitrust, fail at addressing it. From the many explanations that emerge from Cohen’s comprehensive framework, three are worth noting. Today’s tech elites fit the description of oligarchs not because they are rich, but because they can use their wealth for infrastructures that enable them to produce private rules (including both self-regulation and private governance) insulated from democratic accountability. So, programs of AI governance should consider political economy because the firms that build and operate the infrastructure also shape the State that might regulate them. An extension of this idea is that privacy law’s traditional focus on individual consent misses the point because the risk that privacy law should be addressing is the structural concentration of informational power. Continue reading "Tech Elites Don’t Just Evade the State, They Change It"
Jan 8, 2026 Sarah SchindlerProperty
In her recent essay, Slum Managers, Professor Anika Singh Lemar interrogates the distinction between ownership and management of rental housing. Numerous legal commentators and legislators have focused on the harms associated with large commercial entities purchasing rental housing, and some have even proposed prohibiting or placing limits on certain types of ownership to address the housing affordability crisis. However, fewer lawmakers and scholars have discussed who manages these properties. Professor Lemar investigates whether management might have an even greater impact on rental housing and its tenants than ownership.
Property management often has more to do with the actual lived experience of a tenant than the property’s ownership. Indeed, it is generally the management company that is responsible for making repairs, ensuring safety, collecting rent, and carrying out evictions. As Lemar points out, small owners can also be or employ bad managers. Thus, Lemar’s thesis is that lawmakers and others interested in tenants’ rights should be pushing for laws and policies that focus more on harmful management practices and less on forms of ownership. Continue reading "Let’s Focus on Property Managers Rather than the Form of Ownership"
Jan 7, 2026 Ian StephensLexLegislation
Textualism confounds the linkage between jurisprudential methodology and philosophy. In popular conception, a judge’s choice of interpretive tools is bound to be tightly intertwined with the ideological flavor of that judge’s outcomes: originalism or strict constructionism lead to conservative results, while living constitutionalism or purposivism lead to liberal results. Textualism, once pilloried as a tool of the right, is now making a play at escaping that perceptual mold. As the methodology has become more and more ubiquitous, it has taken on a new character. It now boasts of broad acceptance throughout the judiciary and even such conservative paragons as Neil Gorsuch and Clarence Thomas have sometimes followed textualism toward what might seem rather progressive outcomes. Muldrow v. City of St. Louis, decided last term, is sure to join cases like Southwest Airlines v. Saxon, New Prime v. Oliviera, and the quintessential Bostock v. Clayton County in the pantheon of progressive textualism.
Missouri’s Sandra Sperino makes this point in her forthcoming article, When is Discrimination Harmful?, where she explores Muldrow’s dominating use of textualism to drastically expand the reach of employment discrimination laws. But, in its quest to excise subjective applications of Title VII, the Muldrow Court opened just as many doors as it closed—leaving lower courts to struggle with applications that are no less subjective than the standard Muldrow abandoned. What’s the root of this inextricable challenge? Sperino posits that the concept of “harm,” a foundational component of anti-discrimination law, inevitably “rests on judgments that cannot be answered through the statutory text alone.” Continue reading "New Standards, New Questions, and Old Answers"
Jan 6, 2026 Melissa MortazaviLegal Profession
While there is a growing body of research on rural lawyering and rural access to justice, none approaches the subject with the level of detail and care to individual experiences that Professor Hannah Haksgaard does in her quietly landmark work, The Rural Lawyer: How to Incentivize Rural Law Practice and Help Small Communities Thrive. She sets out the book’s seemingly modest goal with a humility that mirrors the project she describes so lovingly, as an “analysis of how a program can help new rural lawyers.” (P. 8.) However, this deeply intimate account detailing the successes (and failures) of South Dakota’s Rural Attorney Recruitment Program, does far more than that: this book interrogates the relationship between communities, legal practice, lawyer to lawyer mentorship, and law itself. In doing so, it provides vital insights for our turbulent times.
The chapters of the book proceed intuitively and usually begin with an individual lawyer’s story; to Professor Haksgaard, this is always a study of and for people, both lawyers and clients. Even the opening chapter’s broad discussion of historic rural lawyering practices includes a specific illustrative biography: a stubborn lawyer riding circuit decides to “brave the weather” to get home, only to freeze his legs to his stirrups, ultimately causing his untimely death (we learn this is the author’s great grandfather). (Pp. 13, 18.) Providing the reader with the individual narrative first, and then diving into the broader observations and conclusions continuously grounds the reader in the human aspect of practice both for the lawyer and the client. In this way, Professor Haksgaard sidesteps a common flaw in works analyzing the legal profession: writing about it in such a technocratic role-differentiated way that neglects the fact that lawyers are still whole people. Continue reading "One Person at a Time: Lawyers and Legal Legitimacy in a Shifting World"
Jan 4, 2026 Kenneth HimmaJurisprudence
Luka Burazin,
Naturalized Jurisprudence, in
Elgar Concise Encyclopedia of Legal Theory and Philosophy of Law, (John Linarelli ed.) __ (forthcoming 2026), available at
SSRN (Nov. 11, 2024).
Luka Burazin’s Naturalized Jurisprudence is an elegant discussion of the various movements to naturalize legal philosophy. Burazin differentiates between substantive and methodological naturalism, further distinguishing two types of substantive naturalism: “Ontological naturalism is a view that philosophy should accept as real or actually existing only (in a broad sense) natural things, properties, entities and phenomena (i.e., those identified through the methods of empirical sciences)…. Semantic naturalism is the view that a philosophical analysis of a concept must show it to be ‘analyzable in terms that admit of empirical inquiry’” (P. 1).
In contrast, he explains methodological naturalism as “the view that philosophical theorizing should abandon armchair theorizing on the basis of philosophers’ intuitions and common-sense beliefs (‘truisms’), thought experiments (hypothetical situations), and a priori conceptual analysis, and use instead the (empirical) methods of successful (natural and social) sciences and the scientific style of explanation.” (P. 1.) Continue reading "What is “Naturalized Jurisprudence”?"
