George Rutherglen
“Don’t look back. Something might be gaining on you.” – Leroy “Satchel” Paige
Recent allegations and revelations about the past conduct of high officials have raised questions that could have been addressed under the statute of limitations. How far back can we go in the search for misdeeds in an individual’s past history? Does the likely deterioration of evidence limit the scope of the inquiry? Or conversely, does the magnitude of the alleged wrong extend it? What do we make of the verdict that if past wrongs were committed, they were committed too long ago to make a difference now?
Abigail R. Moncrieff
In the renaissance of statutory interpretation theory, a division has emerged between “new purposivists,” who argue that statutes should be interpreted dynamically, and “new textualists,” who argue that statutes should be interpreted according to their ordinary semantic meanings. Both camps, however, rest their theories on jurisprudentially ambivalent commitments. Purposivists are jurisprudential realists when they make arguments about statutory meaning, but they are jurisprudential formalists in their views of the judicial power to engage in dynamic interpretation. Textualists are the inverse; they are formalistic in their understandings of statutory meaning but realistic in their arguments about judicial power. The relative triumph of textualism has therefore been an importantly incomplete triumph of formalism, and it has left judges and scholars alike in a position of jurisprudential incoherence. This article demonstrates the ambivalence of modern interpretive theory and then offers some initial thoughts on the harms of this ambivalence to the rule-of-law values that both sides are trying to advance.
Spencer Mizerak
“Those who labour in the earth are the chosen people of God, if ever he had a chosen people, whose breasts he has made his peculiar deposit for substantial and genuine virtue. It is the focus in which he keeps alive that sacred fire, which otherwise might escape from the face of the earth.” – Thomas Jefferson
New Jersey, whose official nickname is the Garden State, has a long and profound history of being agrarian and providing for the agricultural needs of nearby New York City and Philadelphia, as well as the State itself. However, as the United States has shifted away from an agrarian utopia as many founding fathers, such as Thomas Jefferson, envisioned so has New Jersey. Today, New Jersey is the most densely populated state in the Union and is losing farmland at an alarming rate. Although the New Jersey Legislature has taken steps to abate this issue, the results have been far from ideal. What New Jersey truly needs is comprehensive agriculture reform that addresses the issues that New Jersey farmers uniquely face in a rapidly changing world.
Alaina Billingham
For better or worse, technology has transformed the economy, with the development of the “gig economy” serving as a hallmark of this transformation. The gig economy defines the recent labor phenomenon in which companies do not directly provide services to customers, but rather mediate between workers who actually provide services and customers who receive these services. Using an internet platform as the intermediary, the gig economy companies connect customers to workers who then perform short-term assignments for the customers. Despite spanning many different types of labor, the gig economy can be catalogued into five fundamental categories: “buying things, hiring people to do things, sharing things, borrowing things, and exchanging things.” The second category, “hiring people to do things,” is especially popular thanks to the innovation of “ride-sharing.” “Ride-sharing” is a service in which a customer can use a gig-economy company’s mobile application to request a driver to transport them to a requested destination. The rapid financial success of one dominant ride-sharing business, Uber, highlights the popularity of such gig-economy companies.
Amanda Cipriano
The frequency of school shooting in the United States is rising at an alarming rate and in addition, cyberbullying is further harming and victimizing schoolchildren. School districts across the country recognized this fact and sought to prevent these incidents of harm by hiring third-party surveillance companies to monitor the online, off-campus speech of their students. These companies provide school districts with the means to look for harmful online content in an effort to prevent future injury to students, whether the damage be mental or physical. These services, while arguably intrusive on a student’s privacy, have the potential to actually save lives and do not go beyond constitutional limits. This Note will analyze the constitutionality of these companies’ services and how school districts that utilize them can better protect the livelihood of their students.
Derek J. Demeri
Over the last several years, public discourse around sex work has dramatically increased. New York State and Washington, D.C. have both introduced legislation to decriminalize prostitution during the 2019 legislative sessions; the California public voted down Proposition 60 in 2016, which would have opened up egregious civil liability to adult film performers; and countless civil society organizations have recently, and publicly, committed to ending the human rights violations that those involved in the sex trade experience. Despite this attention towards legal reform, sex workers have – and will continue to – experience rampant discrimination in non-sex work employment. This Note argues that discrimination against sex workers is sex discrimination under Title VII. Specifically, because most sex workers are women, any policy of refusing to hire or retain sex workers will have a disparate impact based on sex and is, therefore, an impermissible employment practice under federal law.
Rutgers University Law Review