Kate Bloch‘s article “Harnessing Virtual Reality to Prevent Prosecutorial Misconduct,” just published in the Georgetown Journal of Legal Ethics, seeks to provide a technological solution to reduce the serious problem of Brady errors (prosecutorial failure to disclose materially exculpatory evidence). Bloch’s point of departure is that prosecutorial mishandling of exculpatory evidence often stems from cognitive… Continue reading →
All government officials take an oath to uphold the Constitution. The Supreme Court is the ultimate authority on the interpretation of the Constitution and, more pointedly, when a law or official conduct is unconstitutional. But the Court doesn’t decide all those questions. And so executive officials are often left with unanswered questions about whether a… Continue reading →
A “tax opinion” is a formal, written statement provided by a lawyer to a client about the tax consequences of a specific transaction. In addition to describing the expected tax treatment, the opinion also specifies the lawyer’s confidence in this determination—a “will” opinion indicates near certainty; a “more likely than not” opinion is much more… Continue reading →
Much has been said about the new $10,000 cap on the federal deduction for payments of state and local taxes (“SALT”), but the commentary generally focuses on the state-level impacts and responses. My colleague Manoj Viswanathan, in his recent essay, “Hyperlocal Responses to the SALT Deduction Limitation,” published in the Stanford Law Review Online, argues that this… Continue reading →
The Foreign Sovereign Immunities Act (“FSIA”) is the primary domestic statute codifying foreign sovereign immunity—the immunity that foreign nations enjoy in U.S. courts. With scattered exceptions, questions involving foreign immunity outside of FSIA are matters of federal common law. Those questions include foreign-official immunity, whose importance has increased dramatically as the international travel of foreign… Continue reading →
The creation of the federal courts was an exercise in nation-building. Delegates to the Constitutional Convention worried that unduly expansive federal jurisdiction would suggest mistrust of, and eventually eclipse, state courts. An elusive quest to ensure impartiality pulled in the opposite direction, with the specter of state-court bias against out-of-state defendants animating the desire to… Continue reading →
In trying to promote innovation and competition in pharmaceutical drugs, America has allowed the pharmaceutical industry to increase prices well beyond what other developed countries pay and the market should bear. While a majority of Americans say that prescription drugs have made their lives better in the last ten years, nearly 80% find the price… Continue reading →
The United States remains the world’s largest foreign-aid donor yet lacks a coordinated system of guidelines and protections to ensure that the aid does more good than harm. Professor Naomi Roht-Arriaza investigates this problem in “Safeguarding Development: Risk Reduction in U.S. Government Foreign Aid and Investment Facilitation Beyond the Current Patchwork,” a new paper published… Continue reading →
As all lawyers remember fondly from civil procedure, personal jurisdiction under the modern “minimum contacts” approach protects defendants from being haled into remote forums with which they have no substantial connection. It normally has no significance for plaintiffs. Plaintiffs, after all, consent to litigation in the forum by bringing suit there. But is that always… Continue reading →
For the last 40 years, the desire to reduce the power of the regulatory state has been one of the central policy goals of the Republican Party. In some specific policy areas, this desire has been shared by Democratic politicians. Accordingly, starting in the 1970s numerous pieces of deregulatory legislation have been passed, for better… Continue reading →
