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Acting Assistant Professor of Law, New York University School of Law. JD, New York University. PhD, Boston College Lynch School of Education & Human Development.

Many thanks to Rebekah Levine Coley, Lael Hiam Chester, Randy Hertz, Martin Guggenheim, Perry Moriearty, Rachel Rosenbloom, and Ryan Sakoda for helpful comments on earlier drafts, as well as participants in the Northeastern School of Law Junior Scholars Conference. Thank you also to my research assistant at Boston College, Jacob Lensen, and the editors at the Cornell Law Review, who provided excellent editorial assistance. All errors are my own.

Any views expressed are those of the author and not those of the U.S. Census Bureau. The Census Bureau has reviewed this data product to ensure appropriate access, use, and disclosure avoidance protection of the confidential source data used to produce this product. This research was performed at a Federal Statistical Research Data Center under FSRDC Project Number 2931 (CBDRB-FY24-P2931-R11936 and R12112).

This Article presents novel empirical research showing that one in seven U.S. children have had a household member prosecuted by the state in the last ve years. Using unique data derived from millions of administrative and Census survey records from multiple states and decades, I show that for an estimated eleven million U.S. children each…

Military Sexual Trauma Survivors’ Second Battle

Eleanor T. Morales

Assistant Clinical Professor of Law at Wake Forest University School of Law.

The author has had the honor of representing several Military Sexual Trauma survivors in her capacity as Director of the Veterans Legal Clinic at Wake Law. This Article is dedicated to those clinic clients. I am incredibly grateful to Alyse Bertenthal, John W. Brooker, Meghan Brooks, Yelena Duterte, Elizabeth G. Kubala, Dana Montalto, Rebecca Morrow, Sidney A. Shapiro, and Ronald Wright for their thoughtful feedback. Many thanks to Emily Norris for excellent research assistance.

Service members face an increased risk of sexual assault and harassment in the U.S. military when compared to American civilian society. Yet, Congress recently dialed back its efforts to help military sexual trauma (MST) survivors. Congress cut access to Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) health care for a subset of MST survivors—those who receive bad…

Damage Award Taxation And Distributive Justice

Manoj Viswanathan

Joseph W. Cotchett ‘64 Professor of Law and Co-Director, Center on Tax Law, University of California College of the Law, San Francisco (formerly UC Hastings).

I am grateful to Benjamin Alarie, Lisa Chen, Michael Doran, Heather Field, David Gamage, Angie Gius, Brant Hellwig, David Levine, Dave Owen, Gregg Polsky, Sam Rosloff, Doug Stevick, Holden Taaffe, Larry Zelenak, and participants in workshops at the University of Toronto, UC Law San Francisco, Duke University, and the University of Virginia for their helpful feedback on earlier drafts. Special thanks are owed to Francis Shih for his truly outstanding research assistance.

Damage awards are often intended to make plaintiffs whole, yet their tax treatment often undermines this goal. Plaintiffs frequently face unfavorable tax consequences that reduce the net value of their awards, leaving them worse off relative to the position they would have occupied absent the defendant’s wrongful conduct. Despite their significant impact, the tax costs…

Post-Jarkesy Administrative Jury In NLRB

Heeseung Noh

J.D. Candidate, Cornell Law School, 2026.

Many thanks to Michael T. Anderson for inspiring me to look for solutions to the current predicament of labor law in legal history, to Professors Angela Cornell and Jed Stiglitz for providing a strong foundation for this research, to the Cornell Law Review editors for their patience, and to Gabrielle for unwavering support.

The 2023–2024 Supreme Court term marks a watershed moment in American administrative law. In a trilogy of pivotal rulings—Loper Bright Enterprises v. Raimondo, Corner Post, Inc. v. Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System, and SEC v. Jarkesy—the Court decisively curtailed longstanding doctrinal foundations supporting agency autonomy. While Loper Bright garnered national attention for…

Hold The Whistle, Start Training: Circumventing Distortion Of Sarbanes-Oxley Whistleblower Protections Through Common-Sense Employee Education

Brendan W. Klein

J.D., Cornell Law School, 2026; B.S. in Industrial and Labor Relations, Cornell University, 2023.

The author expresses his gratitude to John Crain, whose encouragement and mentorship inspired this Note. The author also thanks Professor Stewart J. Schwab for his feedback, and the editors at the Cornell Law Review for their diligence and hard work in bringing this Note to completion.

Section 806 of the Sarbanes-Oxley Act protects employees of publicly traded companies from retaliation by their employers for reporting conduct that they reasonably believe constitutes shareholder fraud or a violation of U.S. securities law. This protection empowers employees with knowledge of past, ongoing, or likely future fraud to “blow the whistle” by sharing that information…

Turning Over New Leaves: Achieving Equity Through Cannabis Licensure Reform In New York

Frederick B. Jackson

J.D., Cornell Law School, 2026; B.A., Hobart and William Smith Colleges, 2024; Online Editor, Cornell Law Review Vol. 111.

The author would like to thank Professor Leslie Danks Burke for her helpful feedback and the editors of Cornell Law Review for lending their talents to this Note. The author would also like to thank Joel and Sarah Jackson for their unwavering support throughout this process.

New York’s Marihuana Regulation and Taxation Act (MRTA) promised an equity-centered model of cannabis legalization, but its Social and Economic Equity (SEE) and priority licensing programs have fallen far short of their goals. This Note argues that low licensing rates, predatory financing structures, pervasive illicit markets, and severe rollout delays have undermined justice-involved entrepreneurs and…

Unconstitutional But Not Unconstitutional Enough

Katherine Steefel

Incoming Associate Professor of Law, University of Kansas School of Law (Fall 2026).

I am grateful to Alan Chen, Kevin M. Clermont, Nancy Leong, Seth Packrone, Judge Roberto Ramírez, and the participants of the University of Denver Sturm College of Law 2025 Summer Scholarship Workshop for their helpful comments and feedback. This Article benefited from excellent research and citation support from Claire Johnson, Avery Landt, Aili Miyake, Lauren Rowell, and Jeremy Werner. Finally, I would like to thank the editors of the Cornell Law Review for their careful editing.

When one imagines a judge deciding whether a statute violates the U.S. Constitution, the natural question that comes to mind is whether the statute violates the constitutional doctrine raised. And that is precisely what the U.S. Supreme Court considers. But—as this Article demonstrates in an original fifty-state survey—this approach is far from universal. In forty-four…

Shadow Forensics: Uncovering 911 Call Analysis

Christopher Lau

Clinical Associate Professor, Co-Director, Wisconsin Innocence Project, University of Wisconsin Law School. 2026 Scholarly Papers Competition Finalist.

For feedback and engagement, thank you to Valena Beety, Teneille Brown, Edward Cheng, Catherine Crump, Eve Hanan, Daniel Harawa, Randy Hertz, Alexis Hoag-Fordjour, Nathan Rouse, Maneka Sinha, Sonja Starr, and Lisa Washington. Thank you as well to workshop organizers and participants of CrimFest, Decarceration Law Professors Workshop, N.Y.U. Clinical Law Review Writers’ Workshop, Chicagoland Junior Scholars Conference, and Vanderbilt University’s Evidence Summer Workshop. For excellent research assistance, thank you to Ismail El-Hassan, Demetri Sweat, and Grace Woo.

Junk forensics have played a central role in wrongful convictions. From bitemark evidence to hair microscopy, from arson investigation to toolmark comparison, courts have repeatedly allowed testimony about techniques and methodologies that have no basis in reliable science. The result has been hundreds of exonerations, and likely thousands more wrongful convictions. One of the newest…

The Public Franchise Tradition as a Limit on Patent Takings

Laura E. Dolbow.

Associate Professor of Law, University of Colorado Law School.

Thanks to David Abrams, Jonas Anderson, Tom Baker, Fred Bloom, Cary Coglianese, Jorge Contreras, Sarah Fox, Tim Holbrook, Mark Janis, Amy Kapczynski, Mark Lemley, Chris Morten, Kali Murray, Tejas Narechania, Dave Owen, Ben Sirolly, Mike Pappas, Eloise Pasachoff, Arti Rai, Blake Reid, Jason Reinecke, Rachel Sachs, Chris Serkin, Sean Seymore, Ganesh Sitaraman, Harry Surden, Polk Wagner, Melissa Wasserman, and Christopher Yoo and to participants in the ABA Administrative Law Spring 2024 Conference, the Penn Carey Law Ad Hoc Workshop, the Marquette Junior Scholars Works-in-Progress Workshop, the NPU Workshop, the Power in the Administrative State Workshop, the Rocky Mountain IP Workshop, the Colorado Law Works-in-Progress Workshop, and the 2025 Intellectual Property Scholars Law Conference for helpful comments and conversations. Thanks to Amanda Donoghue and Tori Hawekotte for excellent research assistance.

A longstanding debate exists over whether patents are forms of “private property” that the Takings Clause protects. Recently, in a different context, the Supreme Court stated that a patent is a specific form of property: a public franchise. Several scholars have argued that the public franchise characterization means patents are not protected by the Takings…

Copyright’s Invisible Hand: Subsidizing America’s Cultural Institutions

Guy A. Rub

Vincent J. Marella Professor of Law, Temple University Beasley School of Law.

The doctrine of copyright exhaustion conceals a substantial and underappreciated subsidy at the heart of American copyright law. For more than a century, it has operated as a deliberate congressional scheme transferring billions of dollars in value to cultural institutions, such as libraries, museums, and galleries. This Essay reconceptualizes copyright law as a system of…

The Beginnings Of The One Big Beautiful Bill Act: Placing The 2017 Tax Cuts And Jobs Act In Historical Perspective

Amanda Borwegen & Ajay K. Mehrotra

J.D. 2025, Northwestern Pritzker School of Law; B.A. 2019, Washington & Jefferson College. Stanford Clinton Sr. and Zylpha Kilbride Clinton Research Professor of Law, Northwestern Pritzker School of Law; Affiliated Professor of History, Northwestern University; and Research Professor, American Bar Foundation. An earlier version of this essay was presented at the 2025 American Association of Law School Conference. We thank the participants at that conference for their useful feedback, and to those colleagues and friends who reviewed and discussed drafts of this essay including Jennifer Bird-Pollan, Ari Glogower, Christopher Hanna, Andy Koppelman, Philip Postlewaite, Samy Abdelsalam, and Maggie Amen. We are grateful to Noah Taran for excellent research assistance, and to Jeena Patel and the staff of the Cornell Law Review for their assistance. All errors, of course, remain our own.

On July 4, 2025, President Donald J. Trump signed into law the One Big Beautiful Bill Act (OBBBA). This new law was built on the foundations of its immediate predecessor, the 2017 Tax Cuts and Jobs Act (TCJA). This Essay examines the historical roots and contemporary implications of these two laws. It argues that both…