Faculty Bibliography

Relying chiefly on the combination of costly, unsystematic, and unreliable FDA monitoring and state negligence actions, the current postapproval system for controlling medical device risks falls far short of assuring optimal levels of safety. The reform proposal we advance comprehensively addresses these law enforcement deficiencies. The contemplated changes are straightforward and simple to implement yet would substantially reduce cost while increasing the effectiveness of both FDA monitoring and civil liability deterrence. Monitoring would be improved by requiring first-party insurers to investigate and report to the FDA the potential existence of a causal connection between the personal injury for which they are funding treatment and the patient’s (insured’s) use of or exposure to a medical device. The FDA would be authorized to enlist DOJ Civil Division enforcement of a federal cause-based strict liability action against the medical device manufacturer. The manufacturer would bear liability in full, with no reduction for risk contributions from the injured patient or other parties and would pay damages in total to the US Government. We explain the regulatory advantages of this new regulatory rule of cause-based strict liability relative to conventional rules of negligence and strict liability.

On November 3, 2020, voters in the state of Alabama approved the opaquely named “Authorize Legislature to Recompile the State Constitution Measure.” As described by the state’s Fair Ballot Commission, the ballot measure would permit the Alabama legislature to “(1) remove racist language” and “(2) remove language that is repeated or no longer applies,” among other things. The racist language in question? In one portion, the constitution still prescribed that “separate schools shall be provided for white and colored children.” Another section, though technically repealed by another amendment in 2000, remained in place memorializing that the “legislature shall never pass any law to authorize or legalize any marriage between any white person and a negro, or descendant of a negro.” Though both these provisions were deemed unenforceable under the federal Constitution following blockbuster Supreme Court decisions, the provisions remained on the books. And even in 2020, the measure to eliminate this language passed only by a margin of 67% to 33%. Proposals to remove the language had twice failed since the year 2000—although the vocal opponents of those proposals objected allegedly not to preserve the language itself, but rather on the grounds that revising the language would have various unintended consequences for taxation or school funding. Alabama’s language may have lasted longest, but many other state constitutions contained similar provisions well into recent history. Today’s state constitutions remain full of sections that can be characterized as “zombie provisions”—clearly or arguably unenforceable clauses and amendments that stick with us, toward sometimes unclear effect and with potentially harmful consequences. The “zombie” phenomenon is becoming more well known in an adjacent context, although zombie-ism appears with (perhaps alarming) frequency in different strands of legal scholarship. Pertinent for our purposes, both judges and scholars have used the term “zombie laws” or “zombie statutes” to describe legislation rendered unenforceable by a constitutional decision or other laws, but that nevertheless “remain[s] on the books.” Even more recently, several scholars have identified judicial opinions as another area pervaded by the undead. Despite widespread rejection of disturbing precedents on topics ranging from slavery to women’s rights, these “artifacts from morally unrecognizable eras” persist and resurface in modern case law, raising questions about whether they should ever have precedential value, the harms continued invocation of these decisions may perpetuate, and how and whether courts should repudiate them. This Essay canvasses the zombie phenomenon in modern state constitutions. Although there are strong parallels to zombie legislation, state constitutions deserve their own treatment. To be sure, in many cases, subject matter addressed in one state’s code can be found in a different state’s constitution, like the multitude of amendments in Alabama’s constitution governing the playing of bingo games in various counties. And like statutes, direct democratic participation shapes the content of many state constitutional provisions. But as sources of law, state constitutions exist somewhere on a spectrum, with statutes at one pole and the federal Constitution on the other. As constitutions, these state documents are meant to apply for long durations and are subject to particular amendment procedures, making them more resistant to change than the average statute (though certainly not as fixed as the federal Constitution). These similarities and differences merit separate discussion of the zombie provisions of state constitutions and what, if anything, should be done about them. This Essay proceeds in three parts. First, it uses the state constitutions to examine the ambiguities in what counts as a “zombie,” identifying both core and more peripheral cases, as well as some constitutional provisions that do not quite qualify as zombies but nonetheless seem potentially worrisome. Next, it considers the harms that zombie provisions may cause, exploring these harms alongside those identified in related contexts ranging from covenants running with land to unenforceable or unenforced statutes. The final Part considers in detail both the arguments for and against removal and the different methods by which zombie provisions might be rejected or removed. Since 2020, there have been several efforts in individual states to remove currently unenforceable state constitutional provisions. This Essay is thus a timely exploration of what makes these provisions problematic as well as some of the nuanced and difficult questions involved in any decision to neutralize them.

This landmark publication—the first of its kind in 30 years—enables advocates to successfully represent veterans who unjustly received less-than-honorable or other stigmatizing discharges. Written by attorneys from the Legal Services Center of Harvard Law School’s Veterans Legal Clinic and Connecticut Veterans Legal Center, this book helps bring honor and life-altering benefits to veterans.

The institutional dialogue among the Committee on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities and other human rights tribunals has led to greater protection of rights. But not all courts and treaty bodies have accepted the Committee’s absolutist position on legal capacity. The chapter illustrates the multiple human rights-based approaches to capacity and decision-making, and describes how the Committee’s absolutism endangers many of the people living with moderate or severe dementia whom it supposedly benefits.

This chapter analyzes two examples in which policy contributes to food waste or creates barriers to food waste reduction and recovery: regulation of expiration date labels on food products, and food safety regulations. It examines several policies that have effectively driven food waste reduction efforts, including liability protections for food donation, tax incentives for food donors, and organic waste ban policies. Universal adoption of standard quality and safety terms could drastically reduce food waste. Policy can drive food waste when there is a lack of clarity about how regulatory requirements apply to food donation. Cost is a significant barrier to food donation for businesses along the supply chain. Increasing awareness and providing guidance for the Emerson Act can reduce barriers to donation stemming from the fear of liability. The chapter focuses on federal policy and provides examples of important state and local policies.

A reckoning for single-family zoning is underway. From Minnesota to California, cities and states are looking for ways to compel the densification of neighborhoods long devoted to large lots and detached homes. The bitter debates occasioned by these efforts expose a common source of homeowner opposition: worries about multifamily housing and, specifically, the apartment building. In that regard, little about land use law seems to have changed. The apartment was cited as an evil in the case that upheld zoning as a legitimate use of the state’s regulatory power nearly a century ago. Beginning the story there, however, misses an important chapter. For decades prior, judges routinely declined to consider apartments undesirable neighboring uses that existing owners could prevent through private law. The legal history of the apartment demonstrates the important interplay between private forms of land use law — nuisance and deed restrictions or covenants — and the ways that these private land use controls influence the evolution of public regulation. This Article uses a forgotten period in urban development to illustrate the critical interactions among forms of private and public law in identifying the proper subjects of land use control. In the early nineteenth century, a tool blending contract and tort proliferated: the nuisance covenant, a promise transmitted through deeds not to engage in specific noxious uses — an expanding list ranging from slaughterhouses to circuses to tenements — or any use deemed noxious in the future. This innovation offered benefits over covenant and nuisance law independently, as drafters were able to tailor the definition of nuisance while preserving flexibility to prevent unanticipated activities. And yet, the arrival of the apartment exposed the strong pull of traditional nuisance law: judges were hesitant to interpret restrictions to ban this new form of housing associated with the middle and upper classes. Lawyers and developers worked to identify apartments as problematic through newly drafted covenants and the concept of near-nuisance, paralleling arguments that would reemerge decades later as the proponents of zoning contended that it was within the state’s police power to limit apartment construction. Nuisance and covenant law influenced how judges and other parties came to see uses as harmful and anticipated debates about the appropriate scope of regulation. This dialogue between private and public law is echoing in the twenty-first century, and private law continues to form an important, lurking limitation on land use reform.

The Supreme Court's June 2020 opinion in Department of Homeland Security v. Thuraissigiam unjustifiably reopens settled questions about the Habeas Corpus Suspension Clause of the U.S. Constitution, and endangers everyone -- U.S. citizens and noncitizens alike.

In ♦51 Imperfect Solutions♦, Judge Jeffrey Sutton depicts some of the virtues and flaws of our dual system of American constitutionalism across four chapters illustrating different models of interaction among the state and federal constitutions and their interpreters. In this symposium contribution, I submit a fifth chapter about property law that varies in some important respects from Judge Sutton’s chapters involving education rights, the Fourth Amendment’s exclusionary rule, forced sterilization, and the First Amendment. Several of Judge Sutton’s chapters are told through parallel federal and state stories. Borrowing this approach, this contribution tells a federal story—from an odd period during the nineteenth century when the federal courts routinely expounded and disseminated state takings law—and a state story—from a fifty-year period in the twentieth century when the states were left to decide whether to follow the federal courts in recognizing regulatory takings but without a specific test to follow. Across these stories, takings law has often been marked by uniformity, rather than state-level variation and innovation—uniformity driven, in part, by the force of other states’ rules. This domino effect is the consequence of both specific features of takings doctrine and organic borrowing. In closing, I offer some tentative thoughts on why property and takings law have tended to yield homogeneity and eliminate ingenuity in this way, even in the absence of definitive federal pronouncements about some of the thorniest puzzles within takings doctrine.

Preemptive rights are thought to protect minority shareholders from cheap-stock tunneling by a controlling shareholder. We show that preemptive rights, while making cheap-stock tunneling more difficult, cannot prevent it when asymmetric information about the value of the offered shares makes it impossible for the minority to know whether these shares are cheap or overpriced. Our analysis can help explain why sophisticated investors in unlisted firms and regulators of listed firms do not rely entirely on preemptive rights to address cheap-stock tunneling, supplementing them with other restrictions on equity issues.

The COVID-19 pandemic presents a number of new and difficult challenges for families, small business owners, and food producers across the country. This Issue Brief provides an overview of the resources available to small and mid-size farms facing such challenges in Mississippi. The first section outlines current benefit programs that these farms can utilize, including loans and unemployment benefits, as a result of the Coronavirus Aid, Relief, and Economic Security (CARES) Act and related federal actions. The second section provides policies that the State of Mississippi could enact to provide additional assistance to farms dealing with the crisis.

It has been approximately 10 years since the Government Accountability Office (GAO) published its report to Congress entitled, FDA Should Strengthen Its Oversight of Food Ingredients Determined to be Generally Recognized as Safe (GRAS), which strongly criticized FDA noting that its “oversight process does not help ensure the safety of all new GRAS determinations.” Congress requested GAO to undertake this audit as a result of concerns that GRAS substances added to foods did not require FDA approval. Since 2010, FDA has addressed only a few of the criticisms regarding its process for establishing a food substance as GRAS. However, several of the most important GAO recommendations remain unaddressed, and most critically, FDA has chosen to remain uninformed about food substances self-determined as GRAS by manufacturers. In its 2016 final rule Substances Generally Recognized as Safe, FDA did not take the opportunity to include a provision for creation of a master list of all GRAS chemicals used in food, nor did the FDA request the authority to do so from Congress. FDA cannot fulfill its statutory obligation for ensuring the chemical safety of the U.S. food supply if it does not know which substances, in which quantities, have been added to foods.

The four chapters in this part, each in its own way, raise and begin to propose answers to the enormously challenging question of society’s responsibilities toward persons with disabilities when it comes to the provision of healthcare. Although all four are one in recognizing and documenting the all too abundant and profound ways in which persons with disabilities are disadvantaged (many of which are not obvious to persons whose lives are not touched by disability), they differ markedly in their proposals to rectify these problems.

While genetic testing may be the gateway to the future of medicine, it also poses challenges for individuals, especially in terms of differentiated treatments on the basis of their genetic characteristics. The fear of unwanted disclosure to insurers and the possibility of genetic discrimination can hamper the recruitment of individuals for clinical research that involves genetic testing. Precision medicine initiatives, such as All of Us, are proliferating in the United States. In order to succeed, however, they must ensure that the millions of Americans recruited to share their genetic data are not penalized with regard to life, disability and long-term insurance coverage. In this Perspective, we discuss several initiatives adopted by countries around the world, such as the United Kingdom and France, that better balance the interests of insurers and research subjects, and explain how the United States might learn from them. We call for regulatory and industry leadership to come together to establish a voluntary moratorium on insurance pricing with the aim of protecting research participants.

Transparency is a concept that is becoming increasingly lauded as a solution to a host of problems in the American health care system. Transparency initiatives show great promise, including empowering patients and other stakeholders to make more efficient decisions, improve resource allocation, and better regulate the health care industry. Nevertheless, transparency is not a cure-all for the problems facing the modern health care system. The authors of this volume present a nuanced view of transparency, exploring ways in which transparency has succeeded and ways in which transparency initiatives have room for improvement. Working at the intersection of law, medicine, ethics, and business, the book goes beyond the buzzwords to the heart of transparency's transformative potential, while interrogating its obstacles and downsides. It should be read by anyone looking for a better understanding of transparency in the health care context.

With public and academic attention increasingly focused on the new role of machine learning in the health information economy, an unusual and no-longer-esoteric category of vulnerabilities in machine-learning systems could prove important. These vulnerabilities allow a small, carefully designed change in how inputs are presented to a system to completely alter its output, causing it to confidently arrive at manifestly wrong conclusions. These advanced techniques to subvert otherwise-reliable machine-learning systems—so-called adversarial attacks—have, to date, been of interest primarily to computer science researchers (1). However, the landscape of often-competing interests within health care, and billions of dollars at stake in systems' outputs, implies considerable problems. We outline motivations that various players in the health care system may have to use adversarial attacks and begin a discussion of what to do about them. Far from discouraging continued innovation with medical machine learning, we call for active engagement of medical, technical, legal, and ethical experts in pursuit of efficient, broadly available, and effective health care that machine learning will enable.

Food date labels such as "best before" and "sell by" are largely unregulated in the United States (U.S.), although new voluntary standards are coming into effect. A U.S. consumer survey was performed in April 2016 to inform policy and education activities related to date labels. The survey was administered online to a nationally representative sample of 1029 adults as part of a biweekly omnibus survey. Survey questions assessed the frequency of discarding food based on date labels by food type, interpretation of label language variations, and knowledge of whether date labels are currently regulated by the federal government. 84% of consumers discard food near the package date at least occasionally. Among date labels assessed, "best if used by" was most frequently perceived as communicating quality, and both "expires on" and "use by" as communicating safety. Over 1/3 of participants incorrectly thought that date labeling was federally regulated, and 26% more were unsure. Respondents ages 18-34 and those with misunderstanding about date labels reported discarding food based on label dates with significantly more frequency than others. Misunderstanding the meaning of food date labels is strongly associated with reports of more frequent food discards. This survey provides new and policy-relevant insights about how Americans use and perceive date labels, and about language used in labeling that may be most effective at communicating desired messages to consumers. As date labeling becomes standardized, this research underlines the need for a strong accompanying communications campaign, and highlights a particular need to reach those ages 18-34.

Is the world facing a serious threat to the protection of constitutional democracy? There is a genuine debate about the meaning of the various political events that have, for many scholars and observers, generated a feeling of deep foreboding about our collective futures all over the world. Do these events represent simply the normal ebb and flow of political possibilities, or do they instead portend a more permanent move away from constitutional democracy that had been thought triumphant after the demise of the Soviet Union in 1989? Constitutional Democracy in Crisis? addresses these questions head-on: Are the forces weakening constitutional democracy around the world general or nation-specific? Why have some major democracies seemingly not experienced these problems? How can we as scholars and citizens think clearly about the ideas of "constitutional crisis" or "constitutional degeneration"? What are the impacts of forces such as globalization, immigration, income inequality, populism, nationalism, religious sectarianism? Bringing together leading scholars to engage critically with the crises facing constitutional democracies in the 21st century, these essays diagnose the causes of the present afflictions in regimes, regions, and across the globe, believing at this stage that diagnosis is of central importance - as Abraham Lincoln said in his "House Divided" speech, "If we could first know where we are, and whither we are tending, we could then better judge what to do, and how to do it."

A Report of the Syrian Refugee Resettlement Project, An Initiative of the Harvard Immigration and Refugee Clinical Program. At a time when the U.S. refugee admissions program is under serious threat and the world’s displaced population is at its highest, this Report sets forth extensive recommendations regarding the United States’ role in protecting vulnerable refugees and compliance with its commitments under domestic and international law that together safeguard people fleeing persecution and fearing return to torture. The Report also identifies key national security reasons for supporting and enhancing the refugee program in keeping with U.S. foreign policy priorities. Additionally, the Report provides an in-depth discussion of the robust, multistep security-assessment mechanisms already in place for screening refugees; offers viable policy solutions to improve the integration of resettled refugees through enhanced collaboration among government agencies, private resettlement agencies, and sponsors involved in domestic resettlement; and demonstrates the positive economic impact of refugee resettlement in the United States. Drawing on the perspectives of longtime domestic refugee resettlement experts, the Report also provides fresh insights into how public private partnerships function in refugee resettlement and the ways in which they can be strengthened.

In 2014, the authors of this article published the first analysis of the development and history of the relatively new academic field of Food Law & Policy (“FL&P”). As we defined the field in that article, FL&P “is the study of the basis and impact of those laws and regulations that govern the food and beverages we grow, raise, produce, transport, buy, sell, distribute, share, cook, eat, and drink.” FL&P was born out of two pre-existing fields: Food & Drug Law and Agricultural Law, but it differs from its parent fields in that it explores legal and policy issues regulation of food by various agencies, at all levels of government, and across the range of agricultural, health, labor, economic, environmental, and other issues that intersect with food. This broader analysis of the food system3 had not been part of the legal academy prior to 2004. For our 2014 article, we developed ten criteria to measure the breadth and depth of a legal-academic field. According to our analysis, FL&P met seven of the ten criteria in 2014, and was firmly entrenched in terms of course offerings, clinical projects, and scholarly writing. Now, four years later, the field meets all ten of our criteria, and its continued growth has solidified its place in legal academia. The present article endeavors to assess and discuss this growth by reviewing the same ten criteria of a legal-academic field and tracking developments in the four years since we collected our initial data. As the article details, FL&P’s newfound strength within each of our ten criteria demonstrates the field has grown strong roots.

"With contributions from leading scholars in constitutional law, this volume examines how carefully designed and limited doctrines of proportionality can improve judicial decision-making, how it is applied in different jurisdictions, its role on constitutionalism outside the courts, and whether the principle of proportionality actually advances or detracts from democracy. Contributions from some of the seminal thinkers on the development of scholarship on proportionality (e.g. Alexy, Barak, and Beatty) extend their prior work and engage in an important dialogue on the topic. Some offer substantial critiques, others defend the doctrine and offer important clarifications and extensions of their prior work. Throughout, the authors engage not only with case law from around the world but also with existing scholarly treatments of the subject. Mathematical treatments are avoided, making the book accessible to readers from both 'soft' and hard' social science backgrounds"-- Provided by publisher.

Presently, in the United States there is a fair amount of speculation regarding the future of food and agricultural laws and policies, given the recent election of a new president. Based on campaign rhetoric and comments since the election, the next four-to-eight years could signal a dramatic shift in a variety of food policy areas, including specific provisions of the Farm Bill, incentives for local food systems and organic farmers, and conservation on farms. Additionally, the new Administration has been exceedingly vocal about immigration reform, which will have significant impacts on the food and farming sectors. 

The concept of a national food strategy is not new. Other countries, facing similar food system challenges, have developed national food strategies to address these challenges in a holistic and integrated manner. These strategies represent an acknowledgement that, like the United States, many countries have an uncoordinated set of laws and policies that impact the food system. The creation of a national food strategy is both an effort to understand myriad laws and policies related to the food system, and a means by which to chart a path forward with a clear set of goals and priorities to guide future decision making. Although the United States does not have a national food strategy, it has developed national strategies in response to other issues of national concern, such as antibiotic-resistant bacteria or HIV/AIDS, where a coordinated response was needed.

While the incoming Administration's food and agricultural policies remain uncertain, the creation of a national strategy can address many existing food system regulatory challenges. Such a strategy could be created in one of two ways. First, the incoming Administration can commit to a national food strategy that may comprehensively address, prioritize, and set goals related to many of the issues important to American voters, including public health, the economy, immigration, the environment, and trade. Alternatively, stakeholders can begin the process--as they have done internationally--to develop their own strategy to present to the next Administration. This Article argues that either of these outcomes is superior to the status quo, yet concludes a national food strategy in the United States will ultimately require governmental engagement to achieve the benefits of long-term, coordinated food system law and policy making.

The Nineteenth Edition is an updated version of this classic casebook, adding new materials on the Supreme Court’s most recent decisions on federal power, free speech, equal protection and religious freedom to its existing comprehensive coverage of separation of powers, federalism, civil rights and civil liberties. This casebook provides a unique combination of clearly structured and lawyerly coverage of the cases with rich historical, theoretical, and philosophical materials that illuminate the development of our constitutional law. In the 19th edition, you will find the latest decisions on gay marriage, street signs and confederate flags, campaign contribution limits, congressional power over voting rights, and religious exemptions from health care mandates, among many others. The note materials and questions in the casebook make it easy to structure classes and promote lively discussion. And comparative examples from the constitutional law of other nations are provided throughout.

Each year, 40% of the United States food supply goes to waste. The growing, transporting, processing, and disposing of this uneaten food costs us $218 billion each year, and two thirds of this lost economic value is due to household food waste. An important driver of household food waste is consumer confusion over date labels. Date labels are those dates that are applied to foods and accompanied by prefixes such as “sell by,” “best before,” and “use by,” among others. A U.K. study found that 20% of consumer waste occurs because of date label confusion. Because date labels are not federally regulated and state-level regulations, where they exist, are inconsistent, consumers face a dizzying array of unstandardized labels on their food products. Many people throw away food once the date passes because they mistakenly think the date is an indicator of safety, but in fact for most foods the date is a manufacturer’s best guess as to how long the product will be at its peak quality. With only a few exceptions, the majority of food products remain wholesome and safe to eat long past their expiration dates. When consumers misinterpret indicators of quality and freshness for indicators of a food’s safety, this increases the amount of food that is unnecessarily discarded. A recent report found that standardizing date labeling is the most cost-effective solution for reducing food waste, and could help to divert 398,000 tons of the food that is wasted each year. We conducted a survey to gain further insights into consumer perceptions of date labels. This survey was fielded online to a demographically representative sample of 1,029 adults from April 7-10, 2016. These questions were part of a CARAVAN® omnibus survey that is conducted twice a week by ORC International. The findings presented here are one piece of a larger analysis of consumer perceptions of date labels.

Approximately 40 percent of food produced in the U.S. is wasted annually. At a time when millions of Americans are food insecure and thousands of farmers struggle to stay afloat, the negative consequences of wasting food extend far beyond the environmental impacts and loss of resources that could have been otherwise allocated. There are great opportunities for food waste reduction at the federal level, but much can be done by states and localities, whose involvement in finding solutions to food waste and food recovery is vital. In recent years, states and localities have taken many steps to reduce food waste and enhance food recovery by providing state tax incentives to food donors, allocating funding to support food recovery and diversion infrastructure, reevaluating how schools handle food waste, and passing laws that ban organic waste from landfills. This article is excerpted from a newly released toolkit from the Harvard Law School Food Law and Policy Clinic (FLPC) titled, “Keeping Food Out of the Landfill: Policy Ideas for States and Localities,” which provides comprehensive information on eight different policy areas that states and localities can consider as they ramp up efforts to reduce food waste. Organic waste (organics) bans and waste recycling laws are one of eight solutions described in the toolkit (see Sidebar for other seven) to keep food waste out of the landfill. In addition to describing existing state and municipal organics bans and waste recycling laws, FLPC discusses why these laws provide promising models for other states and localities, and how they could be implemented and strengthened to increase diversion of food waste from landfills.

We are living in a new sex bureaucracy. Saliently decriminalized in the past decades, sex has at the same time become accountable to bureaucracy. In this Article, we focus on higher education to tell the story of the sex bureaucracy. The story is about the steady expansion of regulatory concepts of sex discrimination and sexual violence to the point that the regulated area comes to encompass ordinary sex. The mark of bureaucracy is procedure and organizational form. Over time, federal prohibitions against sex discrimination and sexual violence have been interpreted to require educational institutions to adopt particular procedures to respond, prevent, research, survey, inform, investigate, adjudicate, and train. The federal bureaucracy essentially required nongovernmental institutions to create mini-bureaucracies, and to develop policies and procedures that are subject to federal oversight. That oversight is not merely, as currently assumed, of sexual harassment and sexual violence, but also of sex itself. We call this “bureaucratic sex creep” — the enlargement of bureaucratic regulation of sexual conduct that is voluntary, non-harassing, nonviolent, and does not harm others. At a moment when it is politically difficult to criticize any undertaking against sexual assault, we are writing about the bureaucratic leveraging of sexual violence and harassment policy to regulate ordinary sex. An object of our critique is the bureaucratic tendency to merge sexual violence and sexual harassment with ordinary sex, and thus to trivialize a very serious problem. We worry that the sex bureaucracy is counterproductive to the goal of actually addressing the harms of rape, sexual assault, and sexual harassment. Our purpose is to guide the reader through the landscape of the sex bureaucracy so that its development and workings can be known and debated.

This essay discusses the development of a Legislation and Regulation course (or Leg-Reg) as part of a 1L curriculum reform that the Harvard Law School faculty unanimously adopted in 2006. The reform was adopted following three years of work by a Committee on Educational Innovations appointed by then-Dean Elena Kagan and chaired by future Dean Martha Minow. The Leg-Reg piece of the new curriculum aims to broaden the 1L program's perspective from the essential, but by today's standards incomplete, focus on private law topics and common law reasoning that had dominated the 1L curriculum since 1873. Leg-Reg instead focuses on statutes and the regulations that implement them. The course emphasizes not only the interpretation of those materials, but also the lawmaking process, institutional context, and political dynamics that shape the production and interpretation of statutes and regulations. This essay discusses several aspects of the Harvard experience with Legislation and Regulation. First, because reforming the 1L curriculum is such a daunting process, the paper provides a brief account of the extensive curricular reform process that successfully produced this and two other new 1L courses. Second, the essay discusses the course's strategy for fitting novel and somewhat different techniques, materials, and concepts into a 1L course. In particular, it will discuss the fact that, while the Leg-Reg incorporates many topics and methods that are touched on only tangentially, if at all, in other 1L courses (such as textual exegesis, legislative procedure, and public choice theory), it does so primarily by asking students (a) to learn and assess concrete, real-world legal decisions and then (b) to build out, through note material, to the broader concepts implicated by the cases. In addition, the version of the Leg-Reg course developed at Harvard is consciously transsubstantive, rather than focused on a particular policy area. Third, this essay elaborates on this pedagogical approach by giving some detail about the way Leg-Reg presents certain key cases on statutory interpretation. Fourth, the essay examines the administrative law (“Reg”) component of the course. In particular, the essay explains how starting with statutory interpretation addresses the often-voiced concern that administrative law is simply too complicated for 1Ls. This part of the essay also discusses the impact of 1L Leg-Reg course on enrollments in Administrative Law and related public law offerings.

"Over a century has passed since the United States Supreme Court decided a series of cases, known as the “Insular Cases,” that limited the applicability of constitutional rights in Puerto Rico and other overseas territories and allowed the United States to hold them indefinitely as subordinated possessions without the promise of representation or statehood. Essays in this volume, which originated in a Harvard Law School conference, reconsider the Insular Cases. Leading legal authorities examine the history and legacy of the cases, which are tinged with outdated notions of race and empire, and explore possible solutions for the dilemmas they created. Reconsidering the Insular Cases is particularly timely in light of the latest referendum in Puerto Rico expressing widespread dissatisfaction with its current form of governance, and litigation by American Samoans challenging their unequal citizenship status. This book gives voice to a neglected aspect of U.S. history and constitutional law and provides a rich context for rethinking notions of sovereignty, citizenship, race, and place, as well as the roles of law and politics in shaping them." -- Back cover.

The establishment of the International Criminal Court (ICC) gave rise to the first permanent Office of the Prosecutor (OTP), with independent powers of investigation and prosecution. Elected in 2003 for a nine-year term as the ICC’s first Prosecutor, Luis Moreno Ocampo established policies and practices for when and how to investigate, when to pursue prosecution, and how to obtain the cooperation of sovereign nations. He laid a foundation for the OTP’s involvement with the United Nations Security Council, state parties, nongovernmental organizations, victims, the accused, witnesses, and the media. This volume of essays presents the first sustained examination of this unique office and offers a rare look into international justice. The contributors, ranging from legal scholars to practitioners of international law, explore the spectrum of options available to the OTP, the particular choices Moreno Ocampo made, and issues ripe for consideration as his successor, Fatou B. Bensouda, assumes her duties. The beginning of Bensouda’s term thus offers the perfect opportunity to examine the first Prosecutor’s singular efforts to strengthen international justice, in all its facets.

The goal of this brief note is to clarify the role of deferral in income taxation by introducing a distinction between pure deferral and counterparty deferral. Pure deferral (such as a current deduction for a capital expenditure) is equivalent to an interest-free loan from the government and, under certain assumptions, to a tax exemption for investment income. Counterparty deferral (such as qualified or nonqualified deferred compensation) shifts taxation of investment income to another party or account, so the advantage depends on the counterparty’s tax rate. Failure to understand these relationships can lead to erroneous conclusions. For example, it is sometimes said that capital gain property will suffer a tax disadvantage if placed in a qualified retirement account because the gain will be subject to full ordinary rates on withdrawal. Similarly, deferral of the employer’s deduction is often said to offset the benefit of deferring an employee’s inclusion of nonqualified deferred compensation. The note demonstrates that both of these statements are erroneous under standard assumptions.

This chapter discusses the field of food law, including both describing existing areas of law pertinent to food law and identifying burgeoning subjects for research within the field. Topics include the history of food safety law in the United States; the regulation of food conducted by the Food and Drug Administration, United States Department of Agriculture, and other federal agencies; increasing food regulation at the state and local level; food and the environment; old and new conceptions of public health, including the growing focus on obesity and diet-related disease; food access, food insecurity and food deserts; and alternative food systems such as local, organic, and sustainable foods.

Food Law & Policy is a flourishing legal field that is fast approaching the tenth anniversary of its inception. The field boasts several key milestones. The first Food Law & Policy course was taught in 2004. The first scholarly journal devoted to the field was created in 2005. And, the first Food Law & Policy legal clinic was established in 2010. Today, interest in the field among legal scholars and law students alike is so widespread that a 2013 news article reported “there may be no hotter topic in law schools right now than food law and policy.” Food Law & Policy incorporates elements from the study of traditional food and drug law as well as elements from the study of traditional agricultural law. It intersects with a new approach to agricultural law studies that involves a more holistic approach including sustainability and a food systems analysis. This article was prepared for the Yale University Food Systems Symposium. It was written by faculty members at several law schools that have made commitments to Food Law & Policy, and it describes their programs and their approach.

This briefing highlights the importance of a child-centered approach in children’s asylum cases by focusing on Mejilla-Romero v. Holder, a recent First Circuit Court of Appeals case presented by the Harvard Immigration and Refugee Clinic at Greater Boston Legal Services.