As with phrenology and the polygraph, society is again confronted with a device that the media claims to be capable of reading our minds. Functional magnetic resonance imaging (“fMRI”), along with other types of functional brain imaging technologies, is currently being introduced at various stages of criminal trials as evidence… Read More »
Stopped in time and sealed in place. Hundreds of high-poverty neighborhoods of color are trapped in the vestiges of rural poverty, though they sit adjacent to incorporated cities and suburbs across the country. City growth through annexation has passed them by (though city crime may not have). Homes lack rudimentary… Read More »
This Article proposes a general approach to applying the Fourth Amendment to the Internet. It assumes that courts will try to apply the Fourth Amendment to the Internet so that the Fourth Amendment has the same basic function online that it has offline. The Article reaches two major conclusions. First,… Read More »
Brandon Garrett
-University of Virginia School of Law
The scholarship of interrogations has taken a turn from procedure to substance. The Supreme Court’s landmark criminal procedure rulings regulating modern psychological interrogations remain static, inviting lingering decades-long debates over whether the Court correctly decided decisions such as Miranda. Meanwhile, psychologists increasingly study not the legal regulation of interrogations, but… Read More »
Imagine the following scenario: A police officer is investigating a major drug trafficking ring. She obtains a wiretap on the cell phone of the suspected kingpin of the organization. The wiretap enables her to overhear conversations between the top target of the wiretap and several other people in the drug… Read More »
In 2007, the Court handed down its opinion in Bell Atlantic v. Twombly. The case set the civil procedure world abuzz; in addition to “retir[ing]” Conley v. Gibson’s famous “no set of facts” standard, Twombly introduced the concept of “plausibility” as the dividing line between complaints that do and do… Read More »
Solutions are not coming from Washington. Solutions are coming from our cities. . . . We are the ones that address the issues that matter to people the most. We are the ones that provide the front line, the last hope. . . . When faced with inaction on climate… Read More »
Politicians, policymakers, and academics will occupy the foreseeable future debating the appropriate lessons to draw in the aftermath of the recent economic downturn. But few observers would question one lesson that has already come into sharp focus: bankruptcy courts play a central role in modern American life. The past two… Read More »
I. The Insulation Thesis
The standing doctrine is the Rorschach test of federal courts. In theory, the doctrine serves a distinct function, namely ensuring that a litigant is the proper party to bring a claim in court. Yet standing remains one of the most contested areas of federal law, with… Read More »
Legal fictions are pervasive. Some are hopeful–when Chief Justice Roberts, for the plurality in Parents Involved in Community Schools, writes that “[t]he way to stop discrimination on the basis of race is to stop discriminating on the basis of race,” he is alluding to the aspirational fiction that racial categorizations are… Read More »