The privacy pendulum is swinging in favor of greater Fourth Amendment protections after a string of recent Supreme Court cases culminating in the 2018 ruling in Carpenter v. United States. This precedent-shifting case places the Fourth Amendment in a digital privacy landscape long occupied by one player: the Stored Communications Act. The Carpenter opinion enters the field of digital privacy at a time when certain disputes, particularly those concerning the Fourth Amendment, still engulf the Stored Communications Act. This Note analyzes one of these disputes-the issuance of extraterritorial warrants in accordance with the SCA-in light of the potential for expanded Fourth Amendment protections post-Carpenter. After determining whether a risk to current precedent exists, this Note advocates for a revision to the Federal Rules of Criminal Procedure to bring a stop to litigation with potentially disastrous outcomes.
Senate File 2251 ("SF 2251") crucially reformed Iowa Medicaid by extending Medicaid coverage for pregnant women from sixty days postpartum to twelve months postpartum. However, the bill simultaneously reduced the qualifying income threshold for pregnant women, cutting approximately 1,700 pregnant and postpartum women and children per month out of Medicaid coverage. This population now earns too much to qualify for Medicaid coverage in Iowa but may not be able to otherwise afford health insurance. This Note argues that the reduction in income eligibility level under SF 2251 is unnecessary, dangerous, and fundamentally at odds with Iowa's "vital interest" in human life expressed in Planned Parenthood of the Heartland v. Reynolds ex rel. State. Addressing the harm inflicted by SF 2251 requires renewed legislative action. This Note proposes that the Iowa legislature bridge the coverage gap SF 2251 created by reforming its Children's Health Insurance Program to extend coverage to the pregnant and postpartum women and children who were unjustly left behind.
The Individuals with Disabilities Education Act, a landmark civil rights statute, bestows extensive rights to parents to protect their children against educational discrimination based on disability. Interpretations of the federal statute by lawmakers and courts suggest that all parents can use those rights to protect children living with disabilities equally. While previous literature has established that class affects a parent's ability to advocate, few have looked at the Black parental experiences across the class spectrum, with very little attention paid to Black class-privileged parents. This is surprising; the sociological and legal literature suggests that class-privileged parents have all the resources-economic, social, and cultural capital-to actively "cultivate" their children as they move into adulthood. But class-privileged Black children with disabilities in predominantly White schools are still, after fifty years, being miseducated through disparities in diagnosis, inappropriate placements, and harsh discipline. Black class-privileged parents have turned to a crop of professional Black mothers working as non-attorneys with children in special education who have translated their experience advocating for their own child into businesses. I conceptualize their advocacy work through the frame of what I term "cultivating motherwork." "Cultivating" draws on the sociological literature that recognizes a parenting style that works to actively mold children into adulthood. In special education law, cultivation is the goal; an individually tailored education program that follows a child from elementary education through the transition to adulthood. "Motherwork," a lens developed by Black feminists to describe the ways in which Black women have always been both workers and mothers, recognizes the connection between raising a Black child and Black people as a group. Black motherworkers advocate for Black children within a structure where Black children's flourishing is inextricably connected to anti-Blackness. Black motherworkers understand and navigate the dialectic connection between race and disability and engage in racialized and gendered identity work needed to overcome stereotypes that may affect their advocacy effectiveness. Through the frame of motherwork, this Article turns a critical race eye on the ability of rights rhetoric to secure needed resources that are available under the special education civil rights framework. Motherworkers must navigate race-based gaps in parent-school trust, often through deploying rights and class-based professional expertise in situations that swing between formality and informality. This Article contributes to broader discussions about formal equality in civil rights enforcement and the unique interaction between race, gender, and rights in legal educational advocacy.
Export-control laws have long regulated information created outside of the U.S. government. Legal scholars have paid little attention to these national-security laws, and have not recognized that the government uses them specifically to assert a right to suppress information held in patent applications and trade secrets. In this Article, I present a new history of the relationship between export controls and intellectual property ("IP") to show how the government regulates IP transfers, and how the state uses IP laws to national-security ends. Export-control laws regulate IP by controlling how people in the United States and beyond can share or use inventive information. Today, the government is deploying export controls to govern key IP and the trillions of dollars in global commerce that depend upon it. Reckoning with the history and contemporary application of export controls compels us to revise our understanding of how the government regulates invention. First, export-control laws show how the government attempts to regulate the national-security risks created by inventive information. Scholars have argued that IP laws promote invention but fail to address the harms caused by inventive information. U.S. history reveals that the government has used export controls for more than a century to regulate the national-security risks of inventive information, creating a regulatory counterpart to IP laws that scholars have overlooked. Second, this history shows how IP laws extend government power over information. Scholars have argued that firms use IP to weaken state capacity and discretion. Not so when it comes to information the government deems central to national security. In this domain, IP laws incentivize firms to create, track, control, and report information in ways that are amenable to government regulation.
Puerto Ricans have a relationship with the United States that is historically unparalleled. They have been citizens of the United States since 1917, served in every major conflict since World War I, and have been influential members of American culture, politics, and society. Yet, Puerto Rico is not fully part of the United States. The island of 3.2 million people- more than the population of eighteen states-is a U.S. territory. This means the federal government wields its complete and largely unrestrained plenary power over the Island, often treating Puerto Ricans differently than the rest of the United States. This differential treatment is acutely demonstrated in the social welfare context. Puerto Rico is one of the poorest areas of the United States, with forty-three percent of the population living below the poverty line (sitting right behind the poorest state, Mississippi). Despite this reality, Congress discriminates against Puerto Rico in social welfare programs such as Medicaid, Supplemental Security Income ("SSI"), and the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program ("SNAP"). In some instances, federal legislators provide people on the Island with less funding, and in other instances, they outright exclude them. This Article uncovers the analytical underpinnings of a legally sanctioned social welfare regime that consciously refuses to provide assistance to some of the country's neediest individuals. We argue that the federal government maintains and cultivates a selective disregard for other people's poverty- those, like Puerto Ricans, who inhabit the dark agoras of our constitutional regime. Such legal and economic neglect has its origins in the halls of Congress and has been approved by federal courts on numerous occasions. More specifically, we highlight an under thematized mechanism for this exclusion: the Supreme Court's invocation of legal doctrines that are deferential to Congressional discrimination-plenary powers, rational basis review, and territorial incorporation. This framework was recently laid bare in the Supreme Court case United States v. Vaello Madero, which approved a federal statute excluding American citizens living in Puerto Rico from SSI. Although social welfare programs were meant as a social safety net for our aging and disadvantaged community members, federal officials across all three branches of government have facilitated the exclusion of minoritized communities from that scheme. But Vaello Madero was about more than a constitutional challenge to a discriminatory statute. The case invoked fundamental questions of constitutional interpretation, territorial governance, and social welfare. The case and the questions it posed should trouble people across ideological perspectives-from originalists like Justice Gorsuch, who highlighted the constitutional infirmities tied to the treatment of Puerto Rico, to conservative and liberal proponents of federalism, to advocates for racial and economic justice on the left. On the precipice of pending cuts to social welfare programs, this Article offers some normative suggestions on how advocates and the public might reimagine social welfare in ways that align with our democratic commitments.
