Volume 78, Issue 2
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In Government We Trust: Judicial Deference to Government Evidence in Removal Proceedings
March 2025 | Marie S. Celentino | Article | On its face, the Form I-213 appears to be a humble bureaucratic form unremarkable to the untrained eye. In reality, this document alone can singularly sustain the federal government’s case for the deportation of a noncitizen in removal proceedings. The Form I-213 sits at the cradle of interlocking judicial and procedural norms within immigration practice that largely diminish the due process rights of noncitizens facing deportation. This Article sheds light on two important but relatively underexamined phenomena that undergird this system: how a disregard for evidentiary rules largely eliminates the government’s burden of proof in removal proceedings and how judicial deference to government agents systemically enables this practice.
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Shareholder Litigation in Delaware: An Empirical Investigation
March 2025 | James D. Cox, Randall S. Thomas, Lynn Bai | Article | The empirical study of shareholder litigation in state courts is a seriously underexamined subject. To remedy this gap, we collected data on all 4,741 fiduciary duty complaints filed in the Delaware Court of Chancery over a sixteen-year period, from January 1, 2004, to December 31, 2019. After removing the duplicative cases consolidated into a lead complaint, the number of unique complaints was reduced to 2,958 in our dataset. In our coding, we examined over one hundred variables (with many variables being further subdivided into as many as eight subvariables) for each of these cases, including information about the parties, claims, motions, fees, outcomes of each motion filed, and final disposition of the case.
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Destroy, Rebuild, Repeat: How to Break the Climate Disaster Cycle
March 2025 | Mark Nevitt | Article | Climate change is fundamentally reshaping how we live, where we live, and whether we invest in or retreat from climate-exposed communities—but climate and disaster law is not changing with the climate. This legal latency is driven by antiquated statutes, doctrines, and policies that have not kept pace with the climate moment. Ex ante adaptation decisions governing where to live are life and death choices that shape ex post disaster response. Laws and policies should facilitate sound climate decisionmaking, but too often they frustrate individual and governmental decisions on whether to stay or retreat. In this Article, I argue that laws designed for a different physical environment, an environment more stable than the one we currently have, harm our ability to respond to climate-induced disasters.
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Reasonable AI: A Negligence Standard
March 2025 | Mihailis E. Diamantis | Article | Even as artificial intelligence (“AI”) promises to turbocharge social and economic progress, its human costs are becoming apparent. For example, self-driving technology will someday make traffic jams a thing of the past, but technologists now acknowledge that it will never eliminate all traffic deaths. By design, AI behaves in unexpected ways. That is how it finds unanticipated solutions to complex problems. But unpredictability also means that AI will sometimes harm us. To curtail these harms, scholars and lawmakers have proposed strict regulations (to help ensure firms develop safe algorithms) and strict corporate liability (for injuries that nonetheless occur). These rigid approaches go too far. They dampen innovation and disadvantage domestic firms in the international technology race.
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Retaliation and Confrontation of the State
March 2025 | Jon McNeal | Note | Popular resistance to the weaponization of government has eroded in America. On the political Right, the post-Reagan consensus favoring limited government has given way to a new generation of leaders—like Vice President J.D. Vance and Florida Governor Ron DeSantis—who openly advocate for using state power against their political opponents. Collectively they are the New Right: a populist, antiestablishment, conservative movement opposing pluralistic systems, institutions, and cultural elites. While both political liberals and conservatives have wielded state power against their adversaries, leveraging state power to reward friends and punish enemies is fundamental to the New Right’s worldview.
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Brain-Dead Surrogacy and Testamentary Disposition: Legal Rights over One’s Body for Reproductive Purposes
March 2025 | Cassandra L. Nelson | Note | Through the advancement of modern medical technology, including life-support machines and in vitro fertilization, it may soon become possible to carry out brain-dead surrogacy—that is, gestational surrogacy in brain-dead carriers. When a person experiences brain death, life-support machines can nevertheless artificially maintain the body’s homeostatic functions, including the ability to gestate a fetus, for several years thereafter. There have already been several reported instances of brain-dead pregnant people on ventilation successfully carrying and delivering children. In light of the United States’ historical interest in promoting familymaking, this emerging avenue for surrogacy could increase the availability of surrogates and expand opportunities for infertile couples to welcome a child. Yet so far, no literature has considered the implementation of brain-dead surrogacy from a legal perspective.