Abstract: The U.S. government has steadily constructed a restrictive corpus of immigration policy toward its border with Mexico, characterized by rigid border patrol and removal procedures to deter the arrival of migrants without valid documentation. Complementary to these objectives, the Trump administration’s Migrant Protection Protocols (MPP) invoke Section 235(b)(2)(C) of the Immigration and Nationality Act to temporarily return migrants arriving at the southwestern border to Mexico to await their immigration hearings. The MPP has sustained controversy for failing to provide due process to migrants and subjecting them to unsafe humanitarian conditions upon return to Mexico, plausibly amounting to violations of the international legal principle of non-refoulement. This article traces existing criticisms that the MPP neglects to provide sufficient safeguards against refoulement to a critical legal lacuna within Section 235(b)(2)(C) and the Immigration and Nationality Act at large. The article comprehensively examines federal statutes on temporary return and credible-fear screenings in relation to guidelines by the UN High Commissioner for Refugees and the Committee Against Torture for states to implement their non-refoulement obligations. Those findings dictate the article’s primary contention: Section 235(b)(2)(C) lacks durable procedures to assess migrants’ fear of persecution or torture in the contiguous territory to which they face return. Opinions by the Inter-American Court of Human Rights and European Court of Justice on related return policies are subsequently synthesized to present a viable jurisprudential basis for amending Section 235(b)(2)(C) to standardize basic fear-screening procedures as a critical safeguard against refoulement.

Abstract: 8 U.S.C. §1326 criminalizes reentering the United States by previously deported migrants. In practice, Section 1326 facilitates the arrest and detention of unauthorized immigrants—an overwhelming majority of whom are Hispanic men—who are frequently held in overcrowded and unsanitary detention facilities. Consequently, people charged under Section 1326 have been challenging the law under the Arlington Heights standard, which requires plaintiffs alleging an Equal Protection violation to demonstrate that a facially neutral law was enacted, at least in part, with discriminatory intent. Plaintiffs pursuing such constitutional challenges have marshalled evidence from Congressional records, legislative history, and secondary sources to establish discriminatory motive and disparate racial impact. Plaintiffs found success in United States v. Carrillo-Lopez, 555 F. Supp. 3d 996 (D. Nev. 2021), where the U.S. District Court of Nevada held that Section 1326 was unconstitutional. Yet, when the case was appealed to the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals, the court reversed the lower court’s ruling, finding that Carrillo-Lopez failed to demonstrate Section 1326’s discriminatory intent. United States v. Carrillo-Lopez, 68 F.4th 1133 (9th Cir. 2023). This article argues that the Ninth Circuit’s analysis was flawed in two significant respects. First, the court improperly excluded Section 1326’s first enactment in 1929 from its historical inquiry. That is, the court analyzed Section 1326 by separating the statute from the Undesirable Aliens Act of 1929 which birthed the concept of illegally entering the United States. Second, the court misapplied Arlington Heights by fragmenting the evidence rather than considering its cumulative weight. This article discusses how the court deviated from the binding precedent in the Supreme Court case Washington v. Davis (1976) and the persuasive authority of an intercircuit court case North Carolina State Conference of NAACP v. McCrory (4th Cir. 2016). In either case, this article argues that the Arlington Heights standard requires the court to synthesize the evidence and observe patterns of discrimination, rather than analyzing each piece of evidence on its own. Through critical examination, this article illustrates how the Ninth Circuit distorted the Arlington Heights standard, selectively constructed Section 1326’s history, and failed to hold accountability for a law with a discriminatory origin and racially disparate effects.

Abstract: Legal violations in the context of emerging technologies consistently challenge the status quo, highlighting the often glaring discrepancies between the law and the societal standards that have evolved, and no subsect of law more ubiquitously captures that than intellectual property. Unlike other traditional forms of property, data exists in a unique space, defined by its widespread relevance in every networked system. The accumulation of data drives technological innovation, and as Large Language Models (LLMs) and other forms of artificial intelligence begin to redefine the ways in which individuals interact with technology, the value of data has scaled dramatically. The applications in which data is used, displayed, and accessed are highly variable, constituting the medium as unlike any other form of property. The source from which the data derives does define some level of clarification from a copyright perspective, but when it comes to its manipulation and derivation within artificial intelligence, the legal language becomes drastically unclear as to how to address these operations. As it stands, both intellectual property law under Title 17 and regulatory policy like the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act (CFAA) are significantly outdated, failing to account for the advances that have occurred within the digital ecosystem, especially in regard to first the accumulation of data to train LLMs, and second the manipulation of data to generate outputs in LLMs. The legal environment of artificial intelligence has been placed at the forefront of skepticism, with systematic disparities becoming all the more apparent in the advent of these models’ deployment as part of a networked ecosystem.

Abstract: This article examines the regulatory and socioeconomic consequences of the Supreme Court’s decision in Murphy v. National Collegiate Athletics Association (2018), which invalidated the Professional and Amateur Sports Protection Act (PASPA). The main legal problem the Court addressed was whether PASPA was in violation of the tenth amendment's anti-commandeering doctrine and if so, should parts of the law be severed from those in violation of the doctrine. In the Court’s 6-3 ruling, they found PASPA to be in violation of the anti-commandeering doctrine, striking down the entirety of PASPA rather than severing the unconstitutional provisions. This article will demonstrate and quantify how the court’s incautious decision dismantled an established federal legal framework that once regulated online sports gambling. Beyond the legal holding of the case, this article will also assess the impacts of the Murphy decision in regard to the socioeconomic impact it has had on Americans across the nation. The article provides an evidence-based analysis on the post-Murphy America, detailing rising rates of personal bankruptcy, credit degradation, and public health issues, including gambling addiction and suicide. Additionally, this article explores the shift in professional sports leagues from opposing gambling to actively partnering with sportsbooks, leading to a broader societal normalization of sports betting. Ultimately, this article contends that several solutions are required at the federal level to create a more modernized framework to protect Americans from the growing risk of online sports gambling.

Abstract: The Supreme Court's legitimacy has long rested on the assumption that justices apply legal principles consistently, independent of political preference. Yet this assumption is increasingly difficult to sustain. As affective polarization has intensified in American politics, the Court's most consequential decisions have begun to reflect the same identity-based divisions that define partisan conflict more broadly. The reflection of these divisions in decisions raises a serious question about whether constitutional interpretation is still functioning as a genuine constraint on judicial will. This article argues that the current Supreme Court’s reasoning in cases involving polarized decisions demonstrates the influence of affective polarization on constitutional judgement, visible not in overtly partisan language but in the selective application of interpretive methodology across cases. Instead of looking at the impact of polarization through the lens of appointment politics or voting patterns, this article will focus on how polarization operates within the Court’s own legal reasoning through the framing of constitutional questions, the treatment of precedent, and the inconsistent application of interpretive tools across ideologically charged disputes. This article examines three recent Supreme Court decisions, Dobbs v. Jackson Women's Health Org., 597 U.S. 215 (2022), Mahmoud v. Taylor, 606 U.S. 522 (2025), and United States v. Skrmetti, 605 U.S. 495 (2025), each involving a subject at the center of contemporary partisan conflict. The analysis shows that across all three cases, the Court applied interpretive methodologies with greater rigor when foreclosing progressive constitutional claims and relaxed those same methodologies when recognizing or expanding conservative ones. The Court’s contrasting uses of methodologies cannot be explained by doctrinal necessity alone, but rather suggests that affective polarization is shaping which legal arguments the Court treats as credible and which interests it recognizes as constitutionally significant, undermining the neutrality that judicial legitimacy requires.

Abstract: In the physical world, helping to commit a crime makes someone a defendant. Online, it makes them immune. This confusing state of liability resulted from a series of misinterpretations of one law: Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act. The act’s intent was to bolster the then-growing internet by allowing any kind of internet service provider to both host and moderate content without exposing itself to liability. If a company has no place in the provision of content, then it would hold no part in the consequences for that content. The legislature, though, did not specify what provision is. Instead, the judiciary has been left to decide whether a company participated in the development of content on its platforms. This article contrasts the diversity of answers to that question and diagnoses their cause: that courts struggle to elucidate what makes a company a publisher rather than a distributor, and so have repeatedly expanded what behaviors are protected. The immunity granted by Section 230 has become so vague that it can be used to protect deliberate criminal behavior. That vagueness will worsen as the law attempts to handle algorithms that filter and promote content online. This is because of the recent overturning of Chevron U.S.A., Inc. v. NRDC, Inc. that requires any lack of clarity in legislation to be resolved by the judiciary rather than field experts. However, because “provision” is too simple a phrase to encompass the actions that online agents can take relating to content, it demands interpretation by the very experts now cut out of the picture. The flawed handling of Section 230 is a warning sign that the legal system is too sluggish to keep up with new technology. This analysis suggests that the inflexibility at issue can be fixed, and proposes a framework that permits the adaptability necessary for reasonable legislation.

Abstract: This article examines that although there is no comprehensive federal privacy law in the United States, California has a robust state privacy framework. Known as the California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA) and later amended as the California Privacy Rights Act (CPRA), the state made digital rights a central focus of its data protection legislation. The CCPA/CPRA describes fundamental digital rights as the right to know what personal data a business collects about consumers, the right to have that data deleted, and the right to opt out of the sale of consumers' data to third parties. The intent of the law is not necessarily being translated into concrete, effective enforcement measures. The legal question addressed in this paper is whether the enforcement of the CCPA/CPRA is effective. This question is of utmost significance given the persistence of data breaches, fraud, scams, and privacy violations despite the enactment of these laws. California residents face deportation, evictions, and financial loss as a result of data theft, and will continue to do so until the execution of the CCPA/CPRA improves. While current scholarship identifies that brokers and businesses are not complying with California’s data protection measures, and some argue for stronger measures, no feasible solution has yet been proposed. Some claim that measures that are not enforceable at a greater scale and do not take into account the wide array of businesses that collect data in California. This paper argues that current CCPA/CPRA enforcement is ineffective and that a necessary measure to improve its application is to impose monetary penalties based on a benchmark measure of consumer harm.

Abstract: Unions have not had an easy history in America. They began as a mechanism to facilitate anarchic revolts against the inhuman working conditions and repressive power of businesses in the Industrial Revolution, and were treated in kind. However, populist law makers eventually began to see the resistance of unions against business as an integral part of the regulation of the economy after the Great Depression. Congress passed, FDR signed, and the Supreme Court upheld (in NLRB v. Jones & Laughlin Steel Corp (1937)) the National Labor Relations Act (NLRA) of 1935, a premier New Deal law that helps control and protect unions from the often violent incursions unionization or striking brought from employers. It precisely dictates the rights and procedures of workers, unions, employers, and how the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) will facilitate that within the private sector. However, the NLRA remains constrained by the era it was made in. Since then, no new legislation has been passed to help unions, and unionization membership rates have been consistently declining since the late 1970s.Contrarily, public support for unions is approaching levels not seen since the 1950s, at 70% approval. The dichotomy and irony between rising popularity and lowering membership rates is the result of corporate powers hindering unionization through any and all avenues available to them, often with outright disregard for the protections supposedly guaranteed by the NLRA. Up to 88% of young workers say they wish to join a union, yet feel they can’t due to fear of powerful corporations, who are charged with violating workers’ protections in 41.5% of union elections, firing a unionizing worker in 19.9% of elections, and spend $400 million annually solely on consultants dedicated to preventing unionization. Nationwide, near-monopolistic companies such as Amazon, McDonald’s, Starbucks, and app-based work are especially notorious in how adamant they are to stop unionization due to their business strategy relying on employing large numbers of low-paid workers. Examples like these and overall trends in unionization highlight the current weakness of both unions and the NLRB in current practice, and thus, an inquiry must be made into what structural deficiencies the NLRA has, including an analysis of the wounds left by both the anti-union Taft-Hartley Act, its amendments, and Supreme Court cases including Epic Systems Corp. v. Lewis (2018), Janus v. AFSCME (2018), and Starbucks Corporation v. McKinney (2022). Additionally, consideration will be given to how might those deficiencies be repaired, such as legislation that makes more punitive and forceful government action possible against corporate tactics. Such measures are present within a similar law, the Fair Labor Standards Act of 1938, and a suggested bill, the PRO Act.