There is a gap in mootness doctrine that allows defendants to strategically "moot" their way out of class litigation. Before a class is certified, a defendant can resolve the named plaintiff's individual claim and then argue there is nothing left to litigate. This tactic, often referred to as "picking off" or "buying off" the plaintiff, can kill a class action before it begins, leaving systemic misconduct unchallenged and the broader class without recourse. Courts and scholars have long recognized this problem. But their responses have remained too narrow and too improvised to address the broader doctrinal opening that makes pick-offs possible in the first place. This Article provides a comprehensive framework for understanding and responding to picking off. First, it identifies the gap in mootness doctrine-what this Article calls the "strategic mootness gap"-that leaves courts without a principled basis for responding to pick-offs even when they recognize them for what they are. Second, it maps the strategic mootness gap, examining not just the forced monetary payments that dominate existing scholarship but also cases featuring injunctive remedies and settlement offers that are "too good to refuse." Finally, this Article proposes a solution: a "picking off" exception to mootness that addresses defendant-driven conduct which undermines the class certification process. This exception provides courts with an analytical framework for identifying when individualized relief improperly forecloses class treatment, while preserving space for legitimate early dispute resolution.
The principle that federal courts exist to provide remedies rather than to vindicate abstract interests is firmly rooted in American jurisprudence and continues to animate doctrines of federal court jurisdiction. But remedies are elusive. Even executing on a money judgment, which is simple enough in principle, has been complicated by technologies that allow judgment debtors to conceal their assets quickly and effectively. This Note argues that federal courts are falling behind developments in capital mobility because they have been constrained by an irrational and unnecessarily narrow view of equity. Since 1999, federal courts have been unable to enjoin litigants from transferring their assets pending the outcome of litigation, subject to narrow exceptions and work-arounds. By examining provisional relief in transnational litigation, this Note exposes the consequences of the Supreme Court's limited view of equity and proposes an avenue for developing effective provisional relief under the Court's precedents. By doing so, it contributes to the growth of academic engagement with substantive equity and its potential to reshape domestic law.
Since the Supreme Court's 2022 decision in Dobbs v. Jackson Women's Health Organization, the landscape of abortion access in the United States has been plagued by uncertainty and growing inequality across geographic, racial, and socioeconomic lines. As many states have passed new laws drastically restricting abortion access, reproductive rights litigators have increasingly turned to state courts and constitutions as vehicles for legal redress. The stories of individual patients who have suffered under these laws have been front and center in this new wave of advocacy, but the experiences of domestic violence survivors have been largely absent from the legal narrative. This Note makes the case for understanding domestic abuse as a reproductive justice issue that is exacerbated by post-Dobbs abortion restrictions. It argues that existing state constitutional law arguments rooted in privacy, equality, and autonomy fail to encapsulate the full scope of the harms suffered by survivors living under abortion restrictions and proposes bringing actions under state constitutional rights to safety to better address those harms. Using early gestational restrictions and parental involvement laws as case studies, this Note lays out a path for bringing such actions.
The over $250 billion video game industry, the largest entertainment industry in the world, has rapidly developed unregulated monetary systems. Gaming companies issue what this Article terms “gaming money”—points earned in play, gift cards, and platform-stored balances—and increasingly enable conversion of these instruments into bank deposits at scale. Although they adopt many of the features of “money,” they evade existing regulatory categorizations while producing familiar problems: rate manipulation, money laundering, and structural opacity and instability for firms in the gaming industry and their counterparties. This Article shows how companies like Microsoft, Sony, and Roblox are not only harming gamers but issuing “shadow money,” evading a host of laws governing money, banking, and finance. Like nineteenth-century canal, railroad, and mining companies, as well as twenty-first-century fintech and cryptocurrency companies, gaming giants engage in private monetary governance. Gaming companies claim to operate “virtual” worlds of entertainment, media, and the arts, beyond the reach of regulators. Yet the law does not ask whether money is “real,” but whether its creation infringes on the state’s monetary sovereignty. Convertibility—the degree to which gaming money is convertible into currency and bank deposits at scale—should determine regulatory jurisdiction and intensity. Sony has now applied for a new national charter to issue stablecoins, signaling that gaming companies are moving toward more sophisticated infrastructure. The stakes are high: Gaming introduces most U.S. children to the very idea of money. Regulation must confront a future that is already here.
