Amid growing concern about threats to America’s democracy, Gould considers the push for formally enacting constitutional norms into law. He explores the practical and legal barriers — and concludes codification can be a tool, but isn’t a panacea. “Law can certainly help strengthen constitutional norms,” Gould writes. “But constitutional norms depend on more than just better laws. Better politics are required as well.”

A White House executive order aimed at promoting greater economic competition cited a forthcoming paper from Narechania showing customers served by monopoly providers — roughly 20% of the country — pay more for worse internet service than when they’re in a competitive market. Narechania also lays out various ideas for how to regulate monopoly providers, in particular broadband carriers, in order to better protect consumers.

Atkinson explains how public pension funds increasingly rely on questionable investments in risky subprime debt that tends to concentrate in and among historically marginalized communities. Her article notes how the tenuous socio-economic condition of such marginalized borrowers is now a source of wealth accumulation for workers, and argues that retirement security has shifted into the hands of private financial markets.

In these fraught times, commentators often decry the United States’ “political tribalism,” with some citing American Indian Tribal governance as antithetical to democracy — a thesis that also appears within federal Indian law. In a recent article, Davis says this has had dire consequences for tribes, and that Indian Tribalism is compatible with democracy, largely because it leans heavily on discourse and negotiation.

The first casebook on the California Constitution uses essays and case excerpts to make the law accessible to students. Carrillo and his coauthor illuminate the state constitution’s relationship to the federal and other state constitutions, and the provisions that establish the design of California’s state and local governments, protect individual rights, and govern areas such as elections, public finance, and water rights.

People in need often belong to stigmatized groups. Linos helped lead an experiment through a text-to-give campaign in Greece, which showed that while donations did not increase by appealing to the in-group (a Greek child), they were halved when referencing a stigmatized out-group (a Roma child). Her article discusses similar results from other studies and implications for providing public goods in a time of rising nationalism.

Civil defendants may not be subject to grossly excessive punitive damage awards. Calling for a similar test to guard against grossly excessive criminal punishments, Roth and her co-author note that “it seems odd that large corporations committing civil wrongs enjoy greater protection against over-punishment than criminal defendants, given the devastating effects of mass incarceration, particularly on communities of color.”

Goldstein and her co-authors examine the decision to include a question about citizenship status on the 2020 census and its implications. Their article probes the impact on data quality if some residents refuse to participate and others decline to report a Hispanic household member to avoid potential prosecution, and how that could affect the way federal funds are allocated and congressional districts are apportioned.

Volpp juxtaposes the “Migrant Justice Platform,” a set of policy recommendations by a coalition of immigrant rights activists to overhaul the U.S. immigration system, with President Biden’s campaign plan. She describes how the Platform aims to expand our collective political imagination, and outlines how limiting reform pursuits to what is deemed politically pragmatic or reasonable restricts the chance for transformative change.

Farber explores how the Trump Administration invoked emergency powers to serve key parts of his policy agenda — including the travel ban, border wall funding, and tariffs on many imports — as well as the responses of the courts. His article assesses how future presidents could use such actions as precedents, the risks of normalizing the use of emergency powers, and the forces that may prod presidents in that direction.

The #MeToo movement prompted businesses nationwide to create or revise their sex-based anti-harassment policies, complaint procedures, and training programs. Edelman and her co-author describe why most of those actions protect employers from liability more than they protect employees from harassment. Their article says courts often fail to distinguish between strong compliance and merely symbolic policies and procedures that do not protect employees.

While trade secret law is now viewed as a major category of intellectual property (IP) law, Katyal also sees the law being pushed past its traditional, market-competitive boundaries. Her article asserts that trade secret law increasingly doesn’t just protect IP against misappropriation, but often is used for concealment — raising major concerns and distorting the flow of information that should be available to the public.

The co-authors lament how the American Law Institute set about restating U.S. copyright law in 2015, highlighting its failure to adapt the restatement model (built for common law subjects) to statutory law and the distinctive method of interpreting statutes. Tracing the history of ALI restatements, they contend that the copyright law restatement produced “incoherent, misleading, and seemingly biased results that risk undermining the legitimacy of the eventual product.”

Amid the search for strong self-regulation models in a gig economy, Fisk and Salter examine longstanding assumptions about playwrights’ independent contractor status. Using previously unavailable archival sources, they show that antitrust law has needlessly complicated collective negotiation between stage producers and writers and argue for a reconsideration of antitrust, copyright, and labor law regulating theatre work relationships.