Volume 71

Uncooperative Environmental Federalism 2.0

Jonathan H. Adler Volume 71, Issue 5, 1101-1126 As a presidential candidate, Donald Trump promised to curtail federal environmental regulation and empower the states. Has the Trump Administration made good on these pledges to reinvigorate cooperative federalism and...

Statutory Purpose in the Rollback Wars

Alice Kaswan Volume 71, Issue 5, 1177-1206 The Trump Administration has been rolling back environmental and other regulations at a rapid rate. Each time, they are called upon to interpret their authorizing statutes. As they reverse previous administrations’...

Sticky Regulations and Net Neutrality Restoring Internet Freedom

Aaron L. Nielson Volume 71, Issue 5, 1207-1224 Stable law is valuable, yet also remarkably lacking in our nation’s internet policy. Over the last two decades, the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) has charted a zigzagging course between heavier and lighter...

Operationalizing Internal Administrative Law

Christopher J. Walker & Rebecca Turnbull Volume 71, Issue 5, 1225-1248 As part of the Hastings Law Journal’s Administrative Law in the Age of Trump Symposium, this Essay argues that administrative law should stop fixating on federal courts. While court-centric...

Power Lines: Climate Change and the Politics of Undergrounding

Deborah Brundy Volume 71, Issue 5, 1249-1282 After years of enduring devastating loss of property and life, toxic air quality and intermittent power shutoffs, the public is primed for dramatic change to ensure a safe and resilient power grid. To achieve this,...

Fracking as a Test of the Demsetz Property Rights Thesis

David A. Dana & Hannah J. Wiseman Volume 71, Issue 4, 845-900 Since its introduction in 1967, the account of property rights formation by Harold Demsetz has pervaded the legal and economic literature. Demsetz theorized that as a once-abundant, commonly shared...

The Making of the Clean Air Act

Brigham Daniels, Andrew P. Follett, & Joshua Davis Volume 71, Issue 4, 901-958 The 1970 Clean Air Act is arguably Congress’ most important environmental enactment. Since it became law fifty years ago, much could be and has been said about how it has changed both...

A Public Health Law Path for Second Amendment Jurisprudence

Michael R. Ulrich Volume 71, Issue 4, 1053-1100 The two landmark gun rights cases, District of Columbia v. Hellerand McDonald v. City of Chicago, came down in 2008 and 2010, respectively. In the decade that has followed, two things have become abundantly clear. First,...

Roger Traynor, the Legal Process School, and Enterprise Liability

Edmund Ursin Volume 71, Issue 4, 1101-1052 Roger Traynor, who served on the California Supreme Court from 1940 to 1970, the last five years as Chief Justice, was one of America’s great judges. This Article compares Traynor’s view of the lawmaking role of courts with...

Supreme Court Politics and Life Tenure: A Comparative Inquiry

Kevin Costello Volume 71, Issue 4, 1053-1080 While the process of nominating and confirming justices to the U.S. Supreme Court has always been political in nature, the three most recent nominations of Merrick Garland, Neil Gorsuch, and Brett Kavanaugh illustrate the...

Putting Names to Money: Closing Disclosure Loopholes

Elections create an opportunity for voters to get to know the candidates, but elections also give voters the opportunity to get to know their fellow voters. Campaigns are obligated to disclose the identity of their donors, which can make these donors’ political affiliations known to the world. Also, the identity of a donor can adversely affect the recipient’s public image and potentially, the election. These disclosure requirements arguably enable stigmatizing candidates and fellow voters for their political ideology, but this is offset by the desire to make elections transparent.

In today’s polarized society, the risk of stigma seems greater than in the past—imagine wearing a MAGA hat in San Francisco or an Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez shirt in rural Alabama—but it pales in comparison to the need for transparency in elections. After the 2016 Presidential Election, Democrats and Republicans alike claimed that nefarious actors attempted to influence the election: be it through foreign interference or election fraud. While there are some disclosure requirements that help mitigate such influence, the current requirements have several loopholes that actors use to remain anonymous.

This Note evaluates three of these disclosure loopholes: (1) the 501(c) disclosure exemption for independent expenditures; (2) the internet loophole for certain electioneering communications; and (3) the straw-donor laundering loophole. Throughout this analysis, one theme stands out: the structure of the Federal Election Commission (FEC) has crippled the agency’s ability to enforce disclosure laws. Absent unlikely assistance from Congress, the solution lies with the courts.

Recent judicial decisions portend the possibility of meaningful judicial review of FEC inactions. While questions remain about whether FEC decisions based on “prosecutorial discretion” are exempt from judicial review, the Federal Election Commission Act gives the courts authority to review FEC decisions that are contrary to law. This Note concludes by arguing that FEC enforcement decisions are not exempt and should be nullified if they are “contrary to law.”

Dying for Equal Protection

Teri Dobbins Baxter Volume 71, Issue 3, 535-588 When health policy experts noticed that health outcomes for African Americans were consistently worse than those of their White counterparts, many in the health care community assumed that the poor outcomes could be...

Managerial Fixation and the Limitations of Shareholder Oversight

Emily Winston Volume 71, Issue 3, 699-748 BlackRock’s recent public letters to the CEOs of the companies in which it invests have drawn substantial attention from stock market actors and observers for their conspicuous call on corporate CEOs to focus on sustainability...

Reconceiving Legal Siblinghood

Ruth Zafran Volume 71, Issue 3, 749-782 How should the state treat siblings’ legal relationships in cases where the relationship is based solely on genetics, such as between siblings who were born of the same sperm donor, but did not grow up together? How should it...

Affording Obamacare

Isaac D. Buck Volume 71, Issue 2, 261-306 As it approaches its tenth birthday, the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (ACA) is devolving. Intended to solve problems that had vexed American health care for generations, the ACA built a comprehensive structure by...

Constitutional End Games: Making Presidential Term Limits Stick

Rosalind Dixon & David Landau Volume 71, Issue 2, 359-418 Presidential term limits are an important and common protection of constitutional democracy around the world. But they are often evaded because they raise particularly difficult compliance problems that we...

Unmasking the Right of Publicity

Dustin Marlan Volume 71, Issue 2, 419-474 In the landmark 1953 case of Haelan Laboratories v. Topps Chewing Gum, Judge Jerome Frank first articulated the modern right of publicity as a transferable intellectual property right. The right of publicity has since been...

Net Neutrality: A State[d] Approach

Katherine Grainger Volume 71, Issue 2, 475-500 In 2018, the Federal Communications Commission ended federal net neutrality protections in its Restoring Internet Freedom Order. In response, many states introduced legislation to create their own state-level protections....

Play Now, Pay Later?: Youth and Adolescent Collision Sports

Vivian E. Hamilton Volume 71, Issue 1, 151-196 The routine and repeated head impacts experienced by athletes in a range of sports can inflict microscopic brain injuries that accumulate over time, even in the absence of concussion. Indeed, cumulative exposure to head...

The Roper Extension: A California Perspective

Zoe Jordan Volume 71, Issue 1, 197-228 Although adulthood legally begins at age eighteen, young adults between the ages of eighteen and twenty-one are distinct from the rest of the adult population. Many studies conducted over the last two decades have revealed that...