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In 1948 and again in 1950, Congress made significant changes to the military criminal legal system in the U.S. armed forces. It abolished the army's Articles of War (and the navy's counterpart) and created a new criminal code that was uniformly applicable to all the services, including the newly created air force. This article examines the social and cultural factors that were the impetus for congressional reform and demonstrates that there was a definite link between the post-World War II changes to military criminal law and earlier reform efforts that occurred after World War I. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

AbstractIdeal point estimation methods in the social sciences lack a principled approach for identifying multidimensional ideal points. We present a novel method for estimating multidimensional ideal points based on ℓ1 distance. In the Bayesian framework, the use of ℓ1 distance transforms the invariance problem of infinite rotational turns into the signed perpendicular problem, yielding posterior estimates that contract around a small area. Our simulation shows that the proposed method successfully recovers planted multidimensional ideal points in a variety of settings including non-partisan, two-party, and multi-party systems. The proposed method is applied to the analysis of roll call data from the United States House of Representatives during the late Gilded Age (1891-1899) when legislative coalitions were distinguished not only by partisan divisions but also by sectional divisions that ran across party lines. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Congressional control of the U.S. debt ceiling continues to prompt uncertainty among financial markets. Nevertheless, the standard defense of a statutory debt limit invokes the idea of accountability: oversight of the national debt by democratically elected policymakers precludes fiscal profligacy. For this argument to hold water, however, one should observe that lawmakers are indeed motivated and held accountable by voters on the debt ceiling. Do policymakers' positions toward the debt ceiling reflect the preferences of their constituents? And are policymakers punished or rewarded for their stances? Analyzing roll call votes on the debt ceiling in the U.S. House of Representatives from 1983 to 2014, I show that lawmakers' positions are driven predominantly by policymaker ideology and bank campaign contributions rather than the demographics or ideological makeup of their constituencies. Furthermore, I find no evidence that Republicans nor lawmakers from conservative-leaning districts are punished by their constituents when voting to raise the debt limit. Democratic lawmakers' reelection chances are affected by their voting behavior but in the form of rewards for approving debt ceiling increases. These findings suggest the U.S. debt ceiling – in addition to posing a high financial risk – contributes little to fiscal accountability. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Wildfires pose an immense and escalating threat to national forests. In addition to rising temperatures and accumulating fuels, rapid development of the wildland-urban interface (WUI) has exacerbated wildfire risk by putting more people and property in harm’s way and increasing the likelihood of human-caused fires. While restrictions on WUI development would reduce wildfire risk, varying political and economic pressures have caused substantial variation in how local governments regulate the WUI. Some governments have implemented stringent regulations, while others have permitted unbridled expansion. Such disjointed regulation acutely impacts national forests because WUI homes and communities are often clustered around them. Thus, to effectively protect the nation’s forests from wildfire, a more uniform approach to WUI regulation is necessary. This Comment contends that the Property Clause provides Congress authority to take such an approach. Specifically, this Comment argues the Property Clause grants Congress authority to regulate WUI development on state and private land adjacent to national forests because-by increasing wildfire risk-such development interferes with the purposes for which Congress established those forests. Most importantly, WUI development and the concurrent rise in wildfire risk interfere with national forests’ timber supply and watershed protection functions-the forests’ original and primary purposes. While the Property Clause grants Congress immense authority to regulate federal land-and in some cases, nonfederal land-how far that power goes is an open question. The Supreme Court has yet to define the “furthest reaches” of the Property Clause, but its cases suggest useful principles that may help discern those limits. Building on these cases, this Comment proposes a rule to clarify the limits of the Property Clause as it relates to Congress’s ability to regulate activities on nonfederal land. Specifically, the rule proposed here provides that Congress may use its Property Clause authority to regulate activities on state and private land if the regulated land is adjacent to the federal land Congress seeks to protect, and the regulated activity substantially interferes with the federal land’s primary purpose. If so, then the regulation should be considered a “needful rule respecting public lands” and therefore a lawful exercise of Congress’s Property Clause power. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In 1974, Congress enacted the Employee Retirement Income Security Act (ERISA) to provide oversight to voluntary employee benefit plans in the private sector. The statute, which draws from a deep well of common law history, places robust requirements on fiduciaries who safeguard such plans. Shortly after ERISA’s enactment, courts were forced to interpret the broad fiduciary duties set forth in 29 U.S. § 1104, which simply mandates that fiduciaries must discharge duties solely in the interest of the participants and beneficiaries. Considering this broad language, courts set out to define specific standards to which fiduciaries should be held, particularly surrounding miscommunications. Circuits split on the issue. Some circuits decided that fiduciary misrepresentation liability demands a tort-like standard akin to fraud with a showing of intentional deceit, while other circuits, citing to the statute’s roots in the common law of trusts, determined that intent was inconsequential for misrepresentations. Complicating the matter, the Supreme Court has declined to rule on unintentional miscommunications, allowing the split to widen. The resulting inconsistency is staggering, with some circuits allowing recipients to recover for accidental miscommunications and others barring recovery for flagrantly negligent misinformation. This Comment offers a critical analysis of both the tort and trust approach to ERISA fiduciary liability and recommends a variation on the trust approach to resolve the discrepancy. This Comment analyzes why courts, high and low, have been hesitant to follow the law of trusts standard uniformly and acknowledges that the trust standard may expose employers to heightened liability. At the same time, this Comment emphasizes how the alternative tort standard often bars employees from the very plan protection that ERISA seeks to cement. To analyze both approaches diligently, this Comment traces ERISA’s common law of trusts roots, initial circuit splits, and Supreme Court cases that failed to instruct firmly on how to approach unintentional misrepresentations. This Comment also discusses more recent circuit splits, tracing how judicial benefit enforcement grows inconsistent as the split widens. Finally, to encourage a compromise between the two approaches, this Comment urges Congress to cast aside the issue of intentionality altogether and focus on the miscommunication’s materiality. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

To prevent conflicting state-law interests and federal copyright interests in a single claim, Congress enacted Section 301 of the Copyright Act of 1976— providing a two-prong test to determine when a state-law claim is preempted by federal copyright law. Though Section 301 appears to be a clear and simple test, it has proven to be anything but. Between 1986 and 2023, six of the thirteen circuit courts decided whether state-law right of publicity claims are preempted by federal copyright law using the Section 301 two-prong test, but each court’s analysis was vastly different from the other. Specifically, the Second, Third, Fifth, Seventh, Eighth, and Ninth Circuits analyzed copyright preemption issues with right of publicity claims without a clear framework. Confusion plagues the courts in the following areas: (1) the subject matter and scope of the issues, (2) the equivalency of rights asserted by the plaintiff to copyright, and (3) the differing language within the relevant state right of publicity laws and its place within the preemption analysis. Further, each court has developed a different first step in analyzing preemption, which greatly affects the direction of the rest of the analysis. In some cases, courts consider both implied and express preemption. In others, courts only consider express preemption. Yet, none of the courts use a uniform framework. As the Ninth Circuit described, copyright preemption in relation to right of publicity claims has become quite the “murky body of law.” In the effort to clarify the murky waters of preemption, this Comment proposes a three-part framework for courts to uniformly apply in right of publicity litigations where copyright preemption is in question. The initial part of the framework provides a clear first step for courts to determine what is truly at the heart of the claim. The second and third steps preserve the Section 301 test but incorporate new considerations courts have historically encountered to clarify the confusion about subject matter, scope, and rights. This framework avoids the limitations of a bright-line rule by being broad enough to cover the many different fact-dependent and complex copyright issues found within right of publicity claims while still being clear enough to be helpful. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Prominent judges and scholars have long challenged the use of legislative history in statutory interpretation. Critics point to the privileged role that supposedly unrepresentative committee chairs play in the production of legislative history and a perceived inability to aggregate individual lawmakers’ intentions. These features, the argument goes, cast doubt on the reliability of committee reports, floor speeches, and the like as windows into congressional intent. This critique even comes with a pithy framing: using legislative history to interpret statutes is misguided because “Congress is a ‘they,’ not an ‘it.’” This widely adopted expression, although appropriate in previous congressional epochs, no longer reflects reality. Drawing on analysis of nine decades of congressional data, a detailed accounting of organizational changes on Capitol Hill, and case studies of bills passed in different eras, this Article synthesizes a set of developments that, taken together, greatly improve the signal quality of legislative documents. In brief, producers of legislative history in the contemporary Congress operate as agents of cohesive coalitions; the majority party selects them for these roles based on their orthodoxy, then decides to engage them to draft some bills and sideline them for others. In light of these developments, it is time for courts to inter the widespread view that legislative history cannot shed light on an enacting coalition’s collective will. In its place, this Article presents a new paradigm: when determining whether to consult legislative history, judges must consider Congress’s structure and procedures at the time of the relevant statute’s enactment. For laws enacted in recent decades, the conditions are such that legislative history evinces legislative intent. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article explores how election deepfakes fit into broader frameworks of defamation and impersonation law and suggests that the U.S. Congress and the judiciary may address the threat by borrowing from both areas of law. Topics include brief overview on deepfake technology and its use in election campaigns, information on defamation and impersonation laws, analysis of deepfakes within the defamation and impersonation frameworks and mechanical crafting of the proposed remedy.

The article analyzes prior Clean Water Act (CWA) of 1972 jurisprudence to construct a test that remains true to the U.S. Congress's purpose in originally including "adjacent" wetlands and recognizes the scientific understanding of wetlands' relation to and impact on waters. Topics include overview of the CWA legislation and its application in courts, analysis of the Supreme Court's decision in the Sackett v. EPA lawsuit and criticisms surrounding the overreach of the CWA.

Working hand-in-hand with the private sector, largely in a regulatory vacuum, policing agencies at the federal, state, and local levels are acquiring and using vast reservoirs of personal data. They are doing so indiscriminately, which is to say without any reason to suspect the individuals whose data they are collecting are acting unlawfully. And they are doing it in bulk. People are unlikely to want this personal information shared with anyone, let alone law enforcement. And yet today, private companies are helping law enforcement gather it by the terabyte. On all of us. Our thesis is straightforward: the unregulated collection of this data must cease, at least until basic rule-of-law requisites are met. Any collection must be authorized by democratically accountable bodies. It must be transparent. It must be based on clear proof of efficacy (that a legitimate purpose actually is being served). There must be protections that minimize or avoid harms to individuals and society. And, of course, there must be judicial review of whether indiscriminate bulk data collection is constitutional, either at all or with regard to specific programs. The basis for this thesis is a first-of-its-kind review of instances, from the dawn of the Information Age, in which Congress acted on these very issues. Much of that history involves indiscriminate collection of data on Americans for reasons of national and domestic security, because national security represents the outer bounds of what law enforcement and intelligence agencies are permitted to do, and much of what is done in the name of national security is inappropriate for domestic policing. Yet, in incident after incident, Congress made clear that indiscriminate bulk collection of Americans' data is unacceptable, unlawful, and of dubious constitutionality. To the extent that such collection was permitted at all, Congress demanded the very requisites specified above. Today's indiscriminate bulk surveillance by federal, state, and local policing agencies violates virtually all of these congressionally established norms. It should cease, at least until the rule-of-law requisites are met. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Much of the scholarship on immigration enforcement and environmental justice assumes that agencies negatively impact vulnerable and marginalized people as a result of individualized bias or arbitrariness in administration. This Article argues that, beyond idiosyncrasies or flaws in administrators themselves, the poor impact of administration on minorities emanates from institutional systems. In doing so, this Article introduces a framework of institutional oppression into the study of administration that illustrates how agencies subordinate minority interests to the ends of administrative competence and self-preservation. A healthy federal bureaucracy is sustained by administrative efforts to reduce institutional burdens, improve efficiency, conserve resources, and preserve the structures underlying the agency's power to regulate. In addition, a conventional justification for the existence of agencies is that they act on behalf of the public interest, and public interest theories of regulation prize criteria such as efficiency. Administrative actors, therefore, are motivated to pursue these values in order to maintain the administrative state. However, as this Article shows, agencies harm marginalized communities in pursuit of these institutional virtues. Put simply, agencies mistreat vulnerable people by acting as intended. Essentially, agencies that are operating as expected perpetuate systematic bias. Ironically, by prioritizing public interest values (such as efficiency), agencies may, in fact, cause harm. Arguably, this renders agencies less efficient to the extent efficiency requires not only speed and cost savings, but also good results. For example, immigration officials at the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) use arrest records to decide whom to deport, even if the targeted noncitizens were never convicted of a crime, because arrest records are inexpensive and accessible proxies for immigration data. The Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) failed to evacuate tens of thousands of poor people of color in the wake of Hurricane Katrina both as a result of the systematic management of an institutional history of limited resources and due to FEMA's post 9/11 placement as a subcomponent of DHS, whose focus on national security has overwhelmed FEMA's core mandate. The Bureau of Land Management approves gas and oil leases in rural towns quickly, even though the resulting rapid labor expansion reduces the safety of Native women, because focusing on rural communities for energy project expansion allows the agency to streamline its environmental review process. This Article's prescription is for institutional redesign. First, from the top down, filtered through legislation, Congress could utilize small-scale, targeted appropriations and pointed procedural interventions to influence how agencies exercise discretion. Second, from the bottom up, the President or agencies themselves could instigate efforts to use more accurate information and more meaningful process. Third, a focus on reviving a government of small, discrete agencies could shape and constrain administrative discretion in ways that encourage agencies to rebalance their priorities in the implementation of law. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

What can be done to challenge the U.S. government's unflinching support for Israel's war in Gaza? That is the question progressive organizers have been asking since the start of Israel's devastating ground invasion and aerial bombardment of the besieged territory. In the absence of a large antiwar caucus in Congress, and with limited national organizing capacity, it has not been easy to answer. Against the backdrop of this year's Democratic primaries, and as the death toll in Gaza mounted each day, veteran progressive strategist Waleed Shahid, along with other activists, launched the Uncommitted campaign, urging primary voters to withhold their support for President Joe Biden. The idea was to send a message: not only that the Biden administration was out of step with a large part of his party's base, but also that Biden's approach to Gaza risked alienating Muslim and Arab voters in key swing states like Michigan. To continue unconditionally backing Israel's war, the Uncommitted campaign argued, would be to risk a second Trump victory. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

How does Congress identify issues of sufficient concern to warrant consideration? Since the late nineteenth century, bill sponsorship by individual members has been the primary mechanism for winnowing the uncountable set of ideas for change to a finite agenda. Previous scholarship emphasizes electoral considerations and members' policy goals as motivating factors; however, the scant evidence for significant electoral returns to bill sponsorship raises questions about whether constituency concerns influence legislators' attention. We present a theory of bill sponsorship as constituency-minded policy-seeking activity and test its predictions using an original data set of bills introduced in the House of Representatives between 1881 and 1931. Using event count models and Monte Carlo simulations, we find that constituency concerns directly affect legislators' attention and indirectly influence bill sponsorship through committee assignments. These findings from a period when bill sponsorship was expansive and resource intensive illuminate how electoral factors and resource-based concerns shape legislative performance. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

President Biden's Executive Order 14,094, Modernizing Regulatory Review, continues the line of presidential directives dating back to the Reagan Administration that centralize the President's control over administrative agencies' regulatory processes. Its express purpose is to ensure well-reasoned, high-quality regulations, but it affords no private right of action to enforce its terms. The Administrative Procedure Act ("APA") shares a similar goal of achieving reasoned agency decision-making, however, unlike the executive orders, the APA authorizes judicial review and expects courts to set aside agency regulations that are arbitrary and capricious. These two authorities make overlapping demands from agencies, but one eschews judicial review while the other requires it. This creates an issue for courts when plaintiffs bring challenges alleging that an agency's failure to comply with the executive order requires vacating its final rule. Does the court have jurisdiction to consider the compliance failure? Courts try to bifurcate the issues and dismiss arguments grounded in the executive order. The issues are so intertwined, however, that this approach fails to account for the reality that the President's views on what well-reasoned decision-making requires informs our conception of what good governance looks like and cannot be ignored, regardless of whether the executive order creates a private right of action. This Essay argues that Congress has given the courts an imperative under the APA to consider all the relevant facts when reviewing unelected experts' policy decisions. This obligation does not depend on whether the President has created a private right of action through executive order--the APA already does so. It is further argued that courts fail to fulfill Congress's expectations when they put on blinders to the executive orders' requirements; instead, courts should treat noncompliance with presidential directives as persuasive evidence of arbitrary and capricious agency action. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Scholars and practitioners of U.S. foreign policy commonly describe the early Cold War as a lost golden age of bipartisan consensus. This article uses public opinion data, congressional voting patterns, and party platform statements to refute this conventional wisdom. In fact, the core internationalist principles that enjoyed bipartisan agreement during the Truman and Eisenhower administrations retain widespread approval from Democrats and Republicans today. Enduring support for this Truman-Eisenhower consensus is concealed by the way that recent presidents have enlarged the United States' foreign policy agenda to pursue policies that historically did not generate bipartisanship, such as fighting climate change or conducting decades-long projects in armed nation-building. Rising political divisions in U.S. foreign policy are thus primarily a result of Democrats and Republicans deploying global influence in new ways rather than renouncing traditional international commitments. These findings refute widespread claims that political polarization has undermined traditional conceptions of U.S. global leadership or depleted Washington's usable power. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Not all statutes are created equal. Contributing to the literature on "super statutes," I suggest that an analogy to the philosophical concept of weakness of will can illuminate circumstances under which some statutes ought to stand above others. Analogizing to philosopher Richard Holton's account of weak will, I develop an account in which some statutes express long-term commitments, are intended to foreclose future deliberation, and enact reasons into the law. Such statutes have the status of what Holton calls "resolutions." Like an individual resolving to stop eating meat, yet finding themself unable to resist, Congress can be weak willed when it violates such statutes, and this weak-willed action jeopardizes the advantages of enacting such statutes in the first place. I then propose that courts may apply familiar canons of statutory interpretation--the presumption against implied repeal, appropriations canon, and Charming Betsy canon--to hold Congress accountable to its commitments. This account also provides a new normative justification for each of these canons of statutory interpretation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Social movement theory holds that disrupting social and political processes is among the most effective tools social movement organizations (SMOs) use to motivate recognition for themselves and their constituents. Yet, recent research suggests that the political reception of disruption is not racially neutral. Black SMOs face a dilemma in that, although disruption is a powerful tool for change, the public often perceives nonviolent Black disruptive protest as violent. We investigate this bind by analyzing how nondisruptive protest, nonviolent disruption, or violence helps or hinders both Black and non-Black SMOs to gain state "acceptance" as legitimate spokes-organizations for their issues. We combine data on newspaper-reported protest events with data covering 41,545 SMO Congressional testimonies from 1462 SMOs from 35 movement families. In panel regressions, we find that Congress is generally more accepting of nondisruptive protest but that nondisruptive protest is only roughly one-tenth as effective for Black SMOs compared with non-Black SMOs. Furthermore, whereas non-Black SMOs are significantly more likely to testify after using nonviolent disruption, Black SMOs using nonviolent disruption are significantly less likely to testify before Congress. Regardless of race, violence was associated with fewer congressional testimonies. Collectively, these findings suggest that Black SMOs face a tactical bind: Black SMOs can use nondisruptive tactics that are resource-intensive and slow, or they can use nonviolent disruption that gets media attention but hinders congressional acceptance. These findings contribute to a growing literature on how racial inequality and prejudice impact the outcomes of social movements. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Scholarship on congressional public relations has been limited and largely focused on the relationships between individual members and their constituents rather than on Congress as an institution. Unlike other organizations, the United States Congress lacks a cohesive organizational identity, with members often "running against Congress" or bifurcated into partisan camps. On June 14th, 2017, shooter James Hodgkinson opened fire on Republican members of Congress, their staff, and members of their families as they practiced for the annual Congressional Baseball Game for Charity, a rare but long-standing tradition of bipartisan camaraderie among members. In the days that followed, members in both chambers responded to the attack through statements, interviews, floor speeches, and social media posts. I analyze 106 of these messages through the lenses of organizational voice and organizational identity. I argue that by positioning the attack as an assault on Congress and on the purity of America's pastime, members rejected partisan framings of the attack while espousing a shared rejection of political violence. Most importantly, members constituted a cohesive, bipartisan identity for Congress that stood in opposition to dominant trends of affective polarization and declining social capital among members. The study illustrates the constitutive potential of restorative rhetoric following a disaster and the unique insights to be gleaned from an institutional understanding of congressional public relations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Ongoing consolidation by hospitals and providers threatens to further reduce competition in U.S. healthcare markets. Physician-owned hospitals (POHs) served as a rare countertrend for many years--a pathway for innovative and efficient alternatives to enter hospital markets and offer a bulwark against this consolidation. However, that countertrend came to an abrupt and enduring halt in 2010, when hospital incumbents leveraged passage of the Affordable Care Act to obtain an ill-conceived and unrelated ban on POHs. While health services researchers have scrutinized the POH ban, this Article analyzes it through a competition lens. It incorporates the growing attention in antitrust to labor markets and explores how physicians, through POHs, are particularly well-positioned to identify market opportunities. In doing so, physicians can defeat the market power possessed by hospital incumbents, upstream against physicians and downstream against payors and patients. This Article first provides an overview of the seemingly inexorable trends towards further consolidation among healthcare providers and the related competition concerns this consolidation raises. Next, the paper discusses the factors that positioned POHs to counterbalance these consolidation trends as market entrants and innovators, and how, after lobbying by incumbent hospitals and health systems, POHs faced regulatory pushback culminating in a federal ban on further POH growth and expansion. The Article then describes how market power by hospital incumbents in both upstream and downstream markets accentuates the incentives and importance of physicians in identifying opportunities for market entry and innovation. It further discusses how the POH ban affects healthcare competition, identifies the potential benefits of relaxing the ban, and suggests more narrowly tailored policy options that could mitigate policymakers' concerns about POHs--concerns that may not be unique to physician ownership and do not justify depriving the market of POH competition. The Article concludes with our recommendation that Congress remove the ban on POHs and apply more appropriately tailored policies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Pursuant to its power to borrow money on the credit of the United States, Congress has periodically permitted the Executive Branch to incur debt subject to a steadily-increasing statutory limit--the so-called "debt ceiling." As the national debt climbs, bitter debate over whether the statutory ceiling should be raised, with the specter of default looming, has become a recurring phenomenon. Many scholars of constitutional law think their field of study offers an escape from the debt ceiling, though their proposed solutions vary. There is, at present, no published legal scholarship that defends the constitutionality of the debt ceiling, which could lead policymakers to overestimate the debt ceiling's legal vulnerability. This Article, in contrast, contends that the legal theories for negating the debt ceiling are unconvincing. It proceeds in four parts. Part I discusses the Fourteenth Amendment's Public Debt Clause. Though that Clause likely prohibits default on the national debt, it requires no more that the President pay the costs of debt service while reducing or halting other spending once the government hits the debt ceiling. Much of the government may shut down, but prioritizing spending on debt service avoids the only thing forbidden by the Public Debt Clause--default. Part II discusses the claim that the President may breach the debt ceiling when necessary to fund appropriations. The President, however, is under a constitutional obligation to faithfully execute the laws. This requires the President to respect, rather than breach, the debt ceiling. It is, after all, one of the "laws" that the President is obligated to faithfully execute. This can be done by treating appropriations laws as contingent on compliance with the debt ceiling, consistent with ordinary rules for statutory interpretation. Part III addresses the exotic options. Issuing a trillion-dollar platinum coin or novel bonds are likely unlawful breaches of the statutory debt ceiling, but, even if not, this gambit would be of no use if Congress and the President cannot reach an agreement on the annual federal budget. At that point, appropriations lapse, and the government must shut down anyway. The exotic options come with considerable legal and financial risk; they buy, at best, a few months to negotiate a budget and ultimately solve nothing. Part IV discusses the implications of the conclusion that the Constitution offers no way around the debt ceiling. What seems like bad news actually is not. Although default is both unconstitutional and unlikely, the quite realistic threat of a government shutdown when the government approaches the debt ceiling usefully forces competing factions to negotiate or face a threat of retribution from the voters at the next election. This Article concludes with a discussion of a question of constitutional theory which lurks behind the scholarly dispute over the debt ceiling. Any constitutional theory must be able to answer perhaps the most fundamental question in constitutional law--why should policy debate be removed from the realm of ordinary politics and be resolved instead as a matter of constitutional law? The scholarly attacks on the constitutionality of the debt ceiling, however, fail to even consider this question. Debate over whether a statutory debt ceiling should be used to restrain government spending is precisely the sort of debate that belongs in the realm of ordinary politics, not constitutional law. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Doomsday Book is a collection of documents and memoranda compiled by the legal department of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York (FRBNY). The book focuses on financial crises [...]

Existing theories offer conflicting perspectives regarding the relationship between career specialization and labor market outcomes. While some scholars argue it is better for workers to specialize and focus on one area, others argue it is advantageous for workers to diversify and compile experience across multiple work domains. We attempt to reconcile these competing perspectives by developing a theory highlighting the voluntary versus involuntary nature of worker–firm separations as a theoretical contingency that alters the relative advantages and disadvantages associated with specialized versus generalized careers. Our theory is rooted in the notion that the characteristics of involuntary worker–firm separations (i.e., job displacement) simultaneously amplify the disadvantages associated with specialized careers and the advantages associated with generalized careers, thereby giving displaced generalists a relative advantage over displaced specialists. We find support for our theory in the context of U.S. congressional staffing, using administrative employment records and a regression discontinuity identification strategy that exploits quasi-random staffer displacement resulting from narrowly decided congressional reelection bids. Our theoretical contingency is further supported in supplemental regressions where correlational evidence suggests that while specialists tend to be relatively penalized in the labor market after involuntary separations, specialists appear to be relatively privileged when separations are plausibly voluntary. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A key concept in American legislative politics is the extent to which members are effective, that is, have the ability to propose and advance bills on important topics in Congress. We propose a new measure of a member's legislative effectiveness that covers both chambers from 1873 to 2010 and incorporates all 1.1 million introduced bills, opening up a wide range of new opportunities for examining legislative institutions and behavior across this long historical period. To pursue this, we theorize and empirically examine how the determinants of a member's legislative effectiveness hinge on legislative institutions. While uncovering consistent results with the existing literature that has focused on the period starting in the early 1970s, we find striking differences when examining earlier periods. For instance, we find that ideological moderates have higher effectiveness relative to extremists before 1975, whereas the importance of majority party membership increases dramatically from 1947. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In 1974, the United States Congress asked a question prompting a national conversation about ethics: which ethical principles should govern research involving human participants? To embark on an answer, Congress passed the National Research Act, and charged this task to the newly established National Commission for the Protection of Human Subjects of Biomedical and Behavioral Research. The Commission's mandate was modest however, the results were anything but. The outcome was The Belmont Report : a trio of principles - respect for persons, beneficence, and justice - serving as an ethical compass for scientists, researchers, and institutional review boards (IRBs). Almost 50 years later, the utility, legacy, and ingenuity of The Belmont Report continues to be both admired and challenged. Critics argue that Belmont is not fit for the 21st century, while supporters praise Belmont for its enduring wisdom. The goal of this paper is to equip IRB practitioners with the tools necessary to maximally interpret The Belmont Report and meaningfully engage in ethical analysis that reconsiders outmoded legacy thinking and fixed decision-making. Through historical and contextual reflection, this paper describes how IRB practitioners can contemporize review of ethical human research using their moral imagination – a skill found at the intersection of creativity, deliberation, and empathy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Among the significant developments of the Roberts Court so far has been the announcement of the major questions doctrine, which conditions "major" agency action on a clear statement from Congress. Much of the commentary on the doctrine has framed it as a tool for reprimanding perceived agency overreach. This Note challenges that framing by focusing on tax policy, an area of governance in which several broad assertions of agency power have not been challenged by courts on separation of powers grounds. This Note argues that this phenomenon is due to Congress's own engagement in the realm of tax policy. First, Congress takes note of agency action and acts correctively where it disagrees. Second, Congress is more active in passing tax legislation than it is in passing other types of legislation. Third, Congress frequently makes piecemeal edits to individual code sections specifically in response to taxpayer behavior. This Note ultimately concludes that congressional inaction rather than agency overreach is to blame for the current imbalance of executive to legislative power to which the major questions doctrine purports to respond. Thus, the appropriate response to the doctrine lies not in reigning in administrative action, but in finding fixes to legislative gridlock. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]