On January 20, 2021, Kamala Harris was sworn in by Justice Sonia Sotomayor as the nation’s first woman Vice President. This occasion, marked by women of color holding two of the most crucial roles in the federal government, would have been unthinkable to many for most of United States history. While the political efforts necessary to reach this moment have been studied in great depth, the legal challenges to women’s officeholding have been overlooked and even denied. Relying on extensive historical research, this Article is the first to examine how women advocated for more than a century for the legal right to hold public office through state-level litigation, constitutional amendments, legislative lobbying, and public commentary. From the 1840s through the 1940s, women in many states were excluded from holding even minor public offices because of state constitutional language and judicial holdings. Opponents of women’s officeholding feared that permitting women to assume posts would deprive men of their rightful opportunities, radically alter gender norms, and fuel the fire of the women’s suffrage movement. The nation’s first women lawyers were particularly active in challenging officeholding restrictions, with results varying by region and reflecting distinct legal, political, and social cultures. In some states disenfranchised women could assume only a narrow range of offices related to education, children, and charity, while in other locations they could hold a wide array of appointed posts and even elected positions for which they could not vote. After women were enfranchised through either state constitutional provisions or the Nineteenth Amendment, their officeholding eligibility remained contested in jurisdictions that did not expressly authorize it. Recovering the history of women’s legal right to hold public office challenges three major conventional wisdoms. First, it undermines the commonplace claim in scholarship on women’s legal and political history that officeholding was not a meaningful part of women’s advocacy or experiences until after ratification of the Nineteenth Amendment in 1920. This Article’s account instead shows that proponents of women’s rights have long demanded women’s access to public posts, and women held positions for more than a half century prior to the federal suffrage amendment. Second, this Article challenges prominent scholarship—mostly focused on interpreting the Reconstruction Amendments—that treats officeholding and suffrage as inevitably paired. Foregrounding women’s history and state-level advocacy emphasizes the legal possibility and practical reality of severing these rights. Third, and relatedly, the Article calls for more attention to state constitutional law and regional variation. The women’s officeholding story clearly demonstrates how focusing on one geographical area, providing a single national account, or limiting analysis to the federal level obscures essential developments in securing rights.

Dignity is a famously contested concept, suggesting its deployment as a legal principle should be closely scrutinized. This Article sets out a functional and contextual analysis of dignity as an organizing principle underpinning rape law, which I term “sexual dignity.” Based on sexual violence theory, I trace the “democratization” of sexual dignity over time, as dignity and attendant rights of autonomy and equality have gradually extended from man to the (qualified) woman to women as a group, and identify an emerging contemporary feminist consensus on the meaning of sexual dignity. This framework is then applied to a critical review of how judges across common law jurisdictions understand and use dignity in decisions on rape. The caselaw of sexual dignity illustrates that dignity is a usefully capacious concept for exploring and condemning the multiplicity of rape’s harms and wrongs. However, uncritical engagement with sexual dignity can be harmful, with implications both for rape law and for the regulation of sexual behaviour generally. As such, I argue that robust and reflective engagement with sexual dignity is both necessary and productive.

This Essay lays out an economic substance approach to regulating special purpose acquisition companies (SPACs) as sales of stock for cash. The approach presented here charts an alternative to the SEC’s recent rule proposal that better reflects the economic reality of SPAC transactions and is more firmly grounded in the structure of our existing securities laws. While the SEC’s approach does address certain gaps in the current rules, its primary drawback is that it still treats SPAC mergers as a special type of business combination that requires its own regulatory regime. We already have a regime for sales of stock to the public for cash. The SEC should adopt rules that simply apply this regime to the stock sale for cash that, in economic substance, occurs in SPAC mergers. Merging with a SPAC has become a popular alternative to an initial public offering (IPO) as a path for going public. Data has consistently shown that public investors often fare poorly in SPAC mergers, compared to the “sponsors” controlling SPACs, who frequently realize outsized gains. One recent study found that SPAC merger investments made by the public underperformed the market by close to 60% at the median after twelve months while SPAC sponsors earned median market-adjusted returns of almost 200% over the same period.

When the SPAC boom began in the summer of 2020, a common way to explain the phenomenon was to say that SPACs were something new. SPACs raised $83 billion in 20201—nearly double the total raised in the previous ten years—and another $97 billion in just the first three months of 2021.2 They spread so rapidly that the public had little way of making sense of them other than to think that they represented a novel innovation, a kind of contagion for which American finance had no previous immunity. The SPAC boom started at almost the exact moment the American public began locking down against COVID-19—starting a process of viral replication in the financial markets to mirror the one happening in cities. But like COVID, SPACs were not altogether new—they evolved from creatures that came before. And like a real virus, SPACs are now living through a cycle of spread, response, and equilibrium that has also played out for its evolutionary ancestors. The essays in this online symposium take stock of some aspects of this cycle and offer suggestions for how to deal with it. As the legal scholar and former SEC official Henry Hu has argued, the cycles of novelty and innovation in finance are actually quite old.3 What pass as “innovations” are often just modifications that merely liberate existing practices from regulation by pulling them out of their regulatory categories. These innovations grow in popularity and then eventually produce the same problems the old regulations were designed to address, until the new innovations invite new regulations and new skepticism. By repeating many of the failures and successes of other innovations that came before, SPACs are taking this old cycle and making it old again.

The Supreme Court's recent decisions that the President has an unconditional or indefeasible removal power rely on textual and historical assumptions and a “removal of context.” This article focuses on the “executive power” part of the Vesting Clause and particularly the unitary theorists' misuse of Blackstone. Unitary executive theorists overlook the problems of relying on England’s limited monarchy: the era’s rise of Parliamentary supremacy over the Crown and its power to eliminate or regulate (i.e., make defeasible) royal prerogatives. Unitary theorists provide no evidence that executive removal was ever identified as a “royal prerogative" or a default royal power. The structure of their historical comparison is flawed: the Constitution explicitly limits many royal powers, such war, peace (treaties), and the veto, so that the President is weaker than the king, but they still infer from Article II other unnamed “executive powers” (like removal) that would make a President stronger than a king.

Legal reasoning and legal discourse take place within historical traditions that develop over time. Law is characterized by the authoritative presence of those historical traditions. This observation vindicates the basic positivist insight that law is ultimately grounded in social facts. These social facts include the history of the legal tradition, the work and shared understanding of legal scholars, and the moral reasoning of legal participants—all of which have been mistakenly left aside by many legal positivists and their usual focus on coercive institutions. I use the Hart-Dworkin debate as a starting point for reclaiming the notion of law as a historically grounded practice. The Hart-Dworkin debate highlights that philosophical reflection about law becomes impoverished without history. A closer look at history shows that both Dworkin and Hart were partially right. As Dworkin argued, law is not only a matter of purely source-based legal rules, but also incorporates principles with weight and a less straightforward connection to social facts. However, the ubiquity of legal principles and their operation show that a socially grounded conception of law, as the one defended by le al positivism, is entirely consistent with the existence of legal principles.

In October 2021, Senator Elizabeth Warren and several cosponsors introduced a revised version of the Stop Wall Street Looting Act. First introduced in 2019, the proposed legislation targets a range of perceived abuses by private equity firms ranging from the carried interest tax “loophole” to the lack of risk-retention requirements for securitized debt. Among several new proposals to stop the “looting” of portfolio companies is one of particular interest to bankruptcy practitioners: giving unsecured creditors’ committees the exclusive right to bring or settle certain lawsuits in bankruptcy.

Article 57(2) of the First Additional Protocol to the Geneva Conventions requires parties to an armed conflict to “do everything feasible to verify” their objects of attack and take “all precautions” to minimize civilian casualties and unintentional damage to civilian property. This obligation has been interpreted in international law to require state parties to set up an “effective intelligence gathering system” that would properly identify targets using all technical means at the disposal of the combating forces. But existing law has failed to define what “effective intelligence” looks like. Quite the opposite. Modern history is filled with examples of intelligence errors that resulted in calamitous civilian casualties. In this paper, I look at five such case studies, spanning various historical periods, geographical zones, and belligerent parties. Examining these cases, this Article makes the claim that faults in wartime intelligence production are not inevitable as is often presumed and that it is for a lack of specific regulation within the treatises of international humanitarian law (IHL) that they occur at the rate that they do. Tribunals and military manuals guide us to rely on the “reasonable commander” test in determining the lawfulness of a particular strike. Yet, in the process we overlook the fact that any reasonable commander will turn to her “reasonable intelligence agency”—the contours of this standard are conspicuously under- defined. This paper takes a first step at proposing such a standard, a new duty of care, based on both historical analysis and emerging best practices. In so doing the paper proposes a path forward for addressing the accountability gap that permeates contemporary IHL as it relates to state responsibility for wartime errors and mistakes.

Arguments in the field of U.S. foreign relations law typically proceed from the inside out: Legal actors focus on internal (domestic) sources of authority to reach conclusions with significant external (international) implications. The text and structure of the Constitution, case law, assessments of institutional competency, original meaning, and historical practice thus dominate debates about treaty- making, war powers, diplomatic authorities, and related matters. This tendency reflects generic assumptions about the legitimate modalities of legal analysis and helps to ensure that the law reflects national values. Yet inside-out arguments overlook a critical fact: the practical merits of U.S. foreign relations law often depend on whether and how this law is understood abroad. In other words, the nature and extent of foreign governmental knowledge of U.S. foreign relations law significantly affect the law’s ability to advance U.S. national interests, but there is neither theoretical nor empirical scholarship on the stakes or condition of such knowledge. Nor are there official U.S. policies to ascertain or account for this form of foreign knowledge. In these circumstances, American legal actors cannot fully apprehend whether the law is well designed and applied to achieve its purposes. This Article elaborates on these issues to develop an “outside in” approach to U.S. foreign relations law. The Article begins by explaining the value of meta- knowledge—domestic knowledge of foreign knowledge—of U.S. foreign relations law. The Article then uses original empirical research to generate meta- knowledge. That research includes an immersive case study on Japan, where I collected academic publications, searched newspaper archives, obtained government records under Japan’s freedom-of-information act, and interviewed dozens of scholars and government officials to triangulate Japanese understandings of U.S. foreign relations law. The Article concludes by laying out an agenda to cultivate additional meta-knowledge, reevaluate the law’s practical merits in light of epistemic conditions, and optimize foreign sophistication through legal and policy reforms.

The century-long separation of banking and commerce enshrined in U.S. law has weakened in recent decades. The academic literature has thus far focused mainly on conceptual benefits and costs of the trend, arguing that the integration of banking and commerce might lead to efficiency gains through diversification in a greater number of distinct business lines, but that it also might impair the safety and soundness of the banking system, weaken market integrity, and lead to an excessive concentration of economic power. Our Article contributes to the debate by empirically examining an important episode in the U.S. commodities market following the 2008-2009 financial crisis, when financial institutions sought to take advantage of depressed commodity prices by amassing unprecedented metals inventories. From 2010 through 2014, as financial institutions held over half of the total U.S. aluminum stock in Detroit warehouses, the time it took to remove metal from warehouses increased from days to years and the regional price of aluminum skyrocketed—a surreal phenomenon because aluminum is one of the most actively traded commodities in the world and is used in the production of industrial goods from beverage cans to cars and airplanes.