By Christina Ge (CM ’20) There is an inherent distinction between obligations and aspirations. We ought to follow obligations but we strive to achieve aspirations. In a similar way, rights can also be interpreted as obligations or aspirations, or as negative and positive. While some rights in the First Bill of Rights and the Declaration of Independence are inalienable to us by our virtue of...
By Kyla Eastling (CMC ’18) As the results from the presidential election continue to trickle in, there are many questions that remain unanswered. Some of these questions relate to the future, such as what the Supreme Court will look like during the next four years. Others relate to the past, and how historical events may have shaped this election. One of these historical events is the 2013...
By Kyla Eastling (CMC ’18) The Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act, enacted in 2010, was an attempt to regulate and reform the United States’ financial services industry as the economy began to recover from the Great Recession of the late 2000s. Title X of this act created the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB), an agency whose conception is largely attributed to...
By John W. Nikolaou (CMC ’19) ExxonMobil has recently been subpoenaed by a coalition of state attorney generals (AGs) demanding over 40 years of internal company communications to investigate whether Exxon committed fraud by downplaying the impact of climate change. Massachusetts Attorney General Maura Healey has been the most vocal AG of the Democrat-led coalition of attorneys general, known as...
By Kennedy Green (University of Chicago ’18) “We say… to the government of this country and to all the white racist imperialists who compose it, there is only one thing left that you can do to further degrade black people and that is to kill us. But we have been dying too long for this country…We must demand more from the United States Government.” – James Forman[1] This is an excerpt from...
By Emily Zheng (PO ’19) With a possible hearing in the near future regarding this high profile case, Apple and the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) have recently clashed over encryption and the law enforcement’s power—or lack thereof—over technology. The FBI itself has acknowledged that “the law hasn’t kept pace with technology, and this disconnect has created a significant...
By: Zachariah J. Oquenda, CMC ’16 Beginning with Exodus and evolving into its much more complex modern form, civil forfeiture law has existed in a variety of shades of muddled legal gray area for millennia. Today, in U.S. jurisprudence, asset forfeiture comprises a two-track legal system.[i] In one track, a criminal forfeiture proceeding is brought in personam (“against the owner”).[ii] In...
By: John Blattner, CMC ’17 In 1993, the Religious Freedom Act (RFRA) passed through the House of Representatives without a single no vote cast. The act mandated that all laws, even neutral ones, be held to strict scrutiny when they are claimed to burden Free Exercise of religion; that is, the state must show that the law is narrowly tailored to a compelling governmental interest or else...
