The biggest grip I have right now is I feel my essay too structured and dry, and, judging my the essays I read so far, I need to be less formal and more open I guess? The only issue is i'm having conflicting advice. Some people are telling me to be plain and simple while others are telling me to be engaging, as if i'm telling a story. How did you learn about Vassar and what aspect of our college do you find appealing? The aspect of Vassar that allures me the most is the academic and individual freedom the students have.
Not only does the university provide tremendous amount of student support, from their one to one professor relationships to the tutoring services offered, but Vassar allows the students to find and pursue their passions. During my visit there, I was able to exact why the university appealed to me so much.
What began as a seemingly arbitrary interruption to my summer became an opportunity to discover the values of community, collaboration and curiosity that the Vassar student body and faculty share.
Your email address will not be published. Save my name, email, and website in this browser for the next time I comment. Photos Courtesy of Henryk Kessel ' Leave a Reply Cancel reply Your email address will not be published. The case of the Republic of Kiribati demonstrates how a defeatist narrative of such effects undermines sovereignty. This Essay contends that dyadic understandings of economic self-determination, formed in light of earlier anticolonial struggles, are no longer sufficient.
On February 15, , President Trump declared a national emergency at the southern border, sparking a renewed debate on the powers granted to the President in the National Emergencies Act. This Collection considers the use of emergency powers in the United States and delves into potential checks on their invocation. As America goes through a democratic decline, a new problem rears its head: the manufactured crisis.
To stem further degradation of democratic norms, this Essay calls for judges to reject unjustified assertions of unilateral power by carefully reviewing facts and refusing to tolerate lies. Can Congress reclaim a meaningful institutional role in supervising some of the broad national security powers it has delegated to the executive branch? This Essay argues that Congress can do so and explains how an obscure statute—the Calling Forth Act of —provides a roadmap for how it should.
This Essay identifies three reforms that would unload it. The Essays that won the third annual Yale Law Journal Student-Essay Competition each raise concerns with recent developments in immigration law. For centuries, noncitizens serving in the U. Armed Forces during periods of hostilities have been rewarded with a special pathway to citizenship. This Essay explores how two policies enacted since are blocking this pathway and reflects on the implications of this shift for the meaning of citizenship.
For over three decades, immigration judges used administrative closure as a case-management tool to encourage efficiency and fairness. After then-Attorney General Sessions ended this practice, the U. This Essay argues for a legislative solution to revive administrative closure. I argue that the motivational account provides a more natural justification for both consideration and for contract law as a whole. Timbs v. Indiana reaffirms the Constitution's role in determining the bounds of licit punishment.
This Essay weaves together doctrines that are often siloed but answer the same question: what can't governments do as punishment? I argue that the law has begun to build the principle that governments not set out to cause debilitation when they punish.
A new constitutional amendment embodying a substantive intersectional equality analysis aims to rectify the founding U. Historical and doctrinal context and critique show why this step is urgently needed. A draft of the amendment is offered. Should government defendants be able to more easily moot a case than private defendants? This Essay argues that a strong voluntary-cessation doctrine is important to protecting individual rights and explains why—based on both precedent and policy—government and private defendants should be subject to the same strict standard.
They show how New York locks up poor, disabled sex-offender registrants beyond their sentences; long detention is used to deter immigrants in historically anomalous ways; and students face obstacles when seeking to vote. It explores and proposes legal avenues and advocacy efforts that can be used to successfully overcome these obstacles. This Essay examines the early years of U. This history has important constitutional implications for current immigration policy, questioning its use of lengthy detention to deter immigrants from pursuing their claims to remain in the United States.
Superior Court significantly limits multistate class actions in federal courts. As the first bill introduced in the current Congress, H. This Collection critiques small-donor-based public financing, argues for legislation mandating Election Day registration, and defends H. Small-donor campaign-finance reform is supported by participatory, egalitarian, and anti-corruption values. But while reform advocates focus on these values, they ignore the evidence that such reforms might further fuel the ideological extremes in American politics.
Small-donor campaign-finance reform requires confronting possible tradeoffs between internet-based political participation and ideological extremism. Drawing on nineteenth-century federal voting-rights legislation, this Essay argues that challenges to federal authority over elections persist for two reasons. First, the Supreme Court has not fully delineated federal power under the Elections Clause.
Second, Congress has never exercised its Elections Clause power to its full conceptual limits. While legislative reform efforts over the last decade have doubled the number of EDR states, litigation challenging registration deadlines has not yet succeeded, making federal legislation much needed. This Essay proposes a blueprint for a new humane and effective immigration-enforcement system that could follow the dissolution of ICE. It explores the irredeemable defects of ICE and its enforcement paradigm and suggests realistic mechanisms to increase compliance with immigration laws without detention or mass deportation.
Multidistrict-litigation judges have invented a medley of new procedures to adjudicate the mass-tort cases before them. A Court unbound by legal principle is too powerful a weapon to leave around in a democracy; we should start thinking about disarmament.
Cyber-insurance policies often include a hostile-or-warlike action exclusion. The legal system is ill-equipped to handle the litigation that arises from coverage denials under this exclusion.
This Essay explores the difficulties of accurately attributing attacks and adjudicating these insurance-coverage disputes. It concludes with four proposals to improve attribution and adjudication. Intriguingly, these protections demonstrate that trade agreements can lead even powerful governments to make value-laden commitments at odds with their own domestic agendas. Most states require compact legislative districts, but courts have no framework to judge when contorted districts are legally suspect.
This Essay looks at married same-sex couples who, pre- Obergefell , spent time in nonmarital relationships while awaiting the right to wed.
This Essay introduces double-double consciousness as a new way of conceptualizing the psychological ramifications of being a black prisoner. Based on my own experience as a black prisoner, I conclude that double-double consciousness is a mechanism through which the prisoner can maintain dignity despite living in captivity.
This Essay reviews the recent rise of systemic injunctions against money bail systems and a major question they raise: what level of scrutiny applies to allegedly unconstitutional bail systems. It concludes that, in light of history and precedent, strict scrutiny is the appropriate standard. In most states, women are not permitted to have binding living wills during parts of their pregnancies.
Rapid technological change has led some to question whether modern Fourth Amendment doctrine appropriately protects individual privacy. This Collection considers that question across four domains: warrantless electronic surveillance, border searches, law enforcement cross-border data access, and civil litigation in the absence of a comprehensive data-protection regime.
In Carpenter v. United States , the Supreme Court held that a warrant is required when the government collects certain categories of third-party data. This Essay argues that a categorical warrant requirement for electronic surveillance is a mistake, and that, when faced with warrantless electronic surveillance, courts should instead consider whether such surveillance is reasonable. This Essay traces the historical evolution of the border search exception to the Fourth Amendment to argue that CBP and ICE are currently operating outside constitutional constraints and proposes a tiered approach, restricted in scope and requiring increasing levels of protections the more invasive the search becomes.
This Essay argues that that civil litigation between private parties in the data privacy space is shaping important privacy norms. Because no comprehensive data privacy law exists in the United States, litigants must rely on doctrines that are ill suited to the legal questions raised by the mass collection of personal data.
This Essay analyzes the impetus and results of recent initiatives by the United States, European Union, and Australia to regulate law enforcement access to data, highlights their promise and their limits, and offers a way forward that protects speech, privacy, and other rights in the process.
Efforts to change the punishment bureaucracy are at risk of being co-opted by bureaucrats who have created and profited from mass human caging. This Essay seeks to understand the true functions of the punishment bureaucracy and to offer suggestions for dismantling it.
This Essay argues that section waivers in the Medicaid program have increasingly bee misused, opening the door to ideologically motivated cuts or preconditions on coverage, and suggests a response.
This Response to Andrew Woods makes two points. People who have experienced incarceration have unique insights into the criminal system—insights that are often missing from legal scholarship and criminal justice policy.
This Collection begins to bridge that gap. But the better reading is more modest. Instead, they force us to ask what it means to say that youth is relevant to the determination of a just prison sentence. It argues that bar associations should use a conditional - approval process that informs applicants whether the bar intends to admit them before they begin law school. It also explains what risks could stall future reforms and discusses the criteria advocates should use in deciding whether to support future reforms.
This Essay exposes connections between two controversial cases that unsettled two ostensibly distinct areas of constitutional law— Wayfair v. South Dakota and J. McIntyre Machinery, Ltd. United States. This Collection examines Korematsu 's legacy for national security law, race, and equal protection, and explores what Korematsu means today in light of its formal overruling in Trump v. It argues that while Hawaii v.
Trump formally overturned Korematsu , it essentially recreated the doctrine under a new name. Asserting the continued usefulness of legal claims, this Essay asks a critical question: what would it really take to overturn Korematsu and end structures of subordination?
It argues that a true overruling of Korematsu requires a generative interpretation of our Constitution to uphold the inherent dignity of all human beings. What will happen when those discriminated against in the name of national security turn to the courts for legal protection? This Essay refracts this question through the lens of Korematsu , examining how courts will—and should—respond to the dual needs to promote national security and protect fundamental democratic liberties.
This Essay argues against this trend and explains why it is inappropriate to apply the constitutional norms that state-versus-federal conflicts to conflicts between states and municipalities.
The Pope recently pronounced capital punishment impermissible. Counterintuitively, this might make capital punishment less popular but more prevalent. This year, the Yale University Press published a new edition of the classic, incorporating new material by constitutional theorist Philip Bobbitt. The noncitizen parent exists between two often-conflicting legal identities: that of an immigrant and that of a parent.
This Essay argues that state child services should strive to mitigate the tension between these identities and take an active role in shielding these parents from immigration consequences of family-law proceedings. Can President Trump unilaterally withdraw the United States from any and all international agreements to which the United States is a party?
This Collection analyzes the Act, exploring the process by which it was passed, the values that undergird its policies, and how specific provisions will affect the structure of the U. The Tax Act significantly changed the U. The legislation, however, failed to solve existing problems and opened the door to new ones. This Essay addresses these shortcomings, and outlines recommendations for a better approach.
Some have criticized the Tax Act for lowering the corporate tax rate. This Essay argues instead that Congress deserves credit for bringing the U. This Essay reviews these changes and reflects on their likely effect on cross-border financing structures. The Tax Act reflects values that were not openly debated in the legislative process. The American Law Institute is currently engaged in drafting a new restatement on the subject of Conflict of Laws. Listwa, defending the Draft Restatement as an attempt to bring greater predictability and coherence to choice of law through more determinate rules.
Most criminal system reform efforts neglect the collateral consequences experienced by individuals with pending criminal cases.
This Essay argues that meaningful reform requires enhanced protections for current employees and applicants with open criminal cases. Arbitration has begun to take a new form: mandatory arbitration provisions built into corporate charters and bylaws. The debate about the merits of arbitration is well worn, but its application to shareholder claims opens the door to a different set of responses.
This Essay provides one, explaining why the overlapping authority of federal and state actors in this field makes cooperative federalism is a natural fit for addressing these issues. The MeToo movement has prompted a national dialogue about sexual harassment. This Companion Collection, launched in collaboration with the Stanford Law Review , aims to draw lessons from the MeToo movement for activists, scholars, policymakers, lawyers, and judges.
The MeToo movement has spurred a renewed focus on sexual harassment. But often, the narratives that emerge overemphasize sexualized forms of harassment at the expense of broader structural causes. Franchina v. City of Providence may be the first judicial opinion of the MeToo movement.
But it also points beyond the MeToo movement, exemplifying harassment that is motivated by desires to enforce gender roles and why sexual orientation discrimination is sex discrimination under Title VII. Pressure is mounting on companies to take swift disciplinary action regarding alleged sexual harassment.
But our employment law incentivizes employers to tolerate high-ranking harassers while cracking down on inappropriate behavior by the rank-and-file. This Essay suggests a better path forward. The MeToo movement has rightly been praised for breaking long-held silences about harassment.
It has also rightly been critiqued for ignoring unique forms of harassment that women of color face. This Essay calls for a sexual harassment law that embraces intersectional, multidimensional identity.
The MeToo movement has motivated people to speak out about sexual harassment, but many of those speaking remain vulnerable to retaliation. This Essay provides the perspective of an employment lawyer on the shortcomings of sexual harassment law and how state law can afford greater protection. Does our sexual harassment law hinder the larger project of reducing harassment? This Essay demonstrates that the law constrains stories of harassment and hamstrings our calls for reform.
Ultimately, the law, not just public perception, must change if this movement is to have a lasting effect. In Hughes v. United States , the Supreme Court will revisit a thorny question: how to determine the precedential effect of decisions with no majority opinion.
This Essay identifies the complications that arise in addressing this question when biconditional rules are involved and proposes a way to coherently resolve those difficulties.
While Unlocking Antitrust Enforcement offers solutions to our market power problem, Lina Khan highlights the absence of a discussion of what philosophy should guide antitrust law and enforcement. Sandeep Vaheesan contends that Unlocking Antitrust Enforcement is disappointingly modest in scope. Antitrust law is and will be political, and consumer welfare should not be privileged; it is inconsistent with congressional intent and embodies an incomplete understanding of corporate power.
Responding to C. Verstein first argues that motive is amenable to quantification, and this conclusion does not depend on specific views about causation. The Hatch-Waxman Act and the AIA balance exclusive rights of pharmaceutical patent holders with entry of generic competitors.
In the first year of the Trump Administration, a breakdown of intra-executive internal norms and legal processes has led to a remarkable series of losses in the courts. In the five years since Shelby County v. Holder , voting rights litigators have resorted to other claims under the Voting Rights Act.
The election highlighted deep-seated problems in American democracy that voting rights cannot fix. In the wake of Shelby County , voting rights lawyers have pushed to hold jurisdictions fully accountable for their actions by proving claims of intentional discrimination under Section 3 of the VRA.
This Essay explores the importance of this strategic move in the latest generation of voting rights cases. This Essay traces the post- Shelby County development of a two-part Section 2 vote denial liability test.
It also describes the tension as to the necessity of evidence 1 regarding the effect of voting practices on voter turnout and 2 concerning discriminatory intent on the part of a state actor. This Collection studies the meanings, motivations, and challenges of modern dissent. From modern environmentalism to government surveillance, these Essays explore the role of dissent in Ferguson, Standing Rock, the Senate, and sanctuary cities. The Standing Rock protests represent the latest iteration of longstanding tribal dissent against an environmental law framework that overlooks their interests.
Over the past year, cities have emerged as crucial sites of resistance. While dissent is often associated with the judiciary, Senators also dissent to vent frustration, vindicate legal principles, mobilize constituencies, and destabilize the status quo. Through three case studies, this Essay traces the role and purpose of dissent in the Senate, which enriches our broader understanding of the lawmaking process. Revising the Patent Act to increase transparency and accountability in the licensing process would ultimately result in more affordable vaccines for outbreak diseases like Zika.
In , the Yale Law Journal held an essay competition focused on emerging legal problems and challenges in law and technology, broadly conceived. While data breaches continue to roil the headlines, regulation and legislation are unlikely to provide a timely solution to protect consumers. Rather than rely on statutory claims or the privacy torts to protect consumer data, this Essay suggests that courts should recognize how contemporary transactions implicate fiduciary-like relationships of trust.
The widespread use of SaaS applications like Slack has shifted how work is performed in the digital age, with attendant implications for labor law applicability. This Essay shows how SaaS applications deviate from the existing regime and proposes a regulatory scheme that better accords with the modern workplace. This Essay explores the agency costs associated with equal treatment clauses, which require all share classes to receive equal consideration in the event of an acquisition. The federal government should help bridge the spatial gap between that opportunity and disadvantaged populations both from within and outside cities and metro regions.
Sara Pratt contends that established and sustained segregation has impeded mobility. Federal leadership, changes to the Fair Housing Act, different approaches to state and local planning, and ultimately, political will may clear the path for increased mobility across state and regional lines. Michelle Anderson maintains that providing assistance will take more than reducing formal legal barriers to interstate mobility. Meaningful improvements—whether social or geographic—will require a new antipoverty agenda for declining regions, as well as fiscal and environmental responsibility for existing unpaid infrastructure debts.
Government surveillance threatens not only individual privacy but also the freedom to dissent. Yet courts typically evaluate the lawfulness of surveillance solely through a Fourth Amendment lens rather than the First. This Essay briefly sets out how the First Amendment might once again become a bulwark against overreaching government surveillance.
Under the Trump presidency, Immigration and Customs Enforcement ICE officers have been making immigration arrests in state and local courthouses.
The Farm Bill is complicit in crises of public health, the environment, and rural decay. The emerging field of food law and policy can help articulate a better vision for Farm Bills, and as debate around the Farm Bill begins, new law school collaborations are beginning to do just that. Since the Supreme Court recognized marriage equality in Obergefell v.
Hodges , civil rights advocates have increasingly set their sights on transgender rights as the next legal frontier. This Essay explores why, for over twenty-five years, transgender litigants have not invoked the protections of the;and why they now should. The election was marked by an epidemic of "fake news," or false information made to look like credible news reports.
This Collection offers a series of policy proposals and reflections on the origins of fake news and how the dissemination of misinformation online can be addressed. Other spheres of our economy successfully use private accreditation systems to distinguish quality products and services from those that are inferior or fraudulent.
Following the U. Despite the common use of the term, it eludes common definition. When we agonize over the fake news phenomenon, though, we are not talking about these kinds of fabricated stories. Instead, what we are really focusing on is why we have been suddenly inundated by false information—purposefully deployed—that spreads so quickly and persuades so effectively. This is a different conception of fake news, and it presents a question about how information operates at scale in the internet era.
And yet, too often we analyze the problem of fake news by focusing on individual instances, not systemic features of the information economy. This Essay therefore recommends that we must build a realistic theory—based on observations as well as interdisciplinary insights—to explain the governance of private companies who maintain our public sphere in the internet era.
The problem of fake news impacts a massive online ecosystem of individuals and organizations creating, sharing, and disseminating content around the world.
One effective approach to addressing false information lies in monitoring such information through an active, engaged volunteer community.
Wikipedia, as one of the largest online volunteer contributor communities, presents one example of this approach. This Essay argues that the existing legal framework protecting intermediary companies in the United States empowers the Wikipedia community to ensure that information is accurate and well-sourced. Finally, the Essay offers suggestions for other intermediaries beyond Wikipedia to help monitor their content through user community engagement.
This Essay argues that journalists should voluntarily adopt a professional norm against publishing the contents of a hack. The Third Circuit recently held that immigrants in expedited removal proceedings have no constitutional rights regarding their application to enter the United States.
This Essay challenges that conclusion, contending that judicial review over immigration procedures remains an invaluable safeguard in our constitutional system. There is a crisis in access to justice in the United States.
Recent data from the Legal Services Corporation and the University of Chicago confirm that this gap primarily stems from a lack of information about legal rights, remedies, and resources. This information gap can be remedied by increasing public education on these topics and by improving the means of seeking legal assistance.
I argue that information-centered advocacy may be the most effective means of closing the justice gap. Such advocacy may also be the most resource efficient, a critical consideration in a landscape where proponents of access to justice lack the political support to win increased federal funding for civil legal aid.
However, the success of this approach will ultimately depend on a second, more challenging feature of the current American government: fundamental threats to the justice system currently emanating from the executive.
A criticism of nationwide injunctions is that they engender forum shopping, with litigants seeking out a court more likely to be favorable to them in order to obtain sweeping relief. This picture, though, oversimplifies the relationship between venue and the scope of injunctive relief, particularly for lawsuits against federal actors.
Cabining nationwide injunctions would shift the incentives for litigant venue choice. Limitations on nationwide injunctions would place increased weight on early lawsuits in forums in which venue is proper based on the characteristics of the defendant, because any similarly situated litigant can bring suit there.
The debate over nationwide injunctions must take into account the effects of changes to the scope of injunctive relief on the venue choice architecture, and consider both venue and the scope of injunctive relief concomitantly in the institutional design of federal litigation. By Rebecca Y. Kim , Pepperdine University. Hindu Student Organizations. By Prema Kurien , Syracuse University.
Muslim student life did not gain an organized presence in the U. Evangelicals on Campus. By Evelyn M. Perry , Indiana University ; Elizabeth A. Armstrong , Indiana University. Thirteen women—11 evangelical Christians and two sociologists—gathered in a dorm room on a large Midwestern university to eat pizza and discuss college life one spring evening a year or so ago….
By Mark D. Uecker , University of Texas at Austin. While Americans remain among the most religious in the industrialized world, it is widely observed that many of them exhibit cycles of religiosity, the most evident of which occurs in early adulthood….
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