Increasingly, companies competing in the artificial-intelligence (AI) industry engage in "reverse acquihires" to hire key AI personnel from startups without formally acquiring the startup. In a reverse acquihire, the two firms do not merge, nor does one firm formally acquire the other. As a result, some have assumed that reverse acquihires are not subject to Section 7 of the Clayton Act, the principal antitrust statute governing mergers. But statutory text and context reveal that Section 7 does reach reverse acquihires because they are acquisitions of the intangible asset of human capital.
Let's say the "laws" are the rules that actually constrain power, organize government, and coerce people. That is, let's define the law as the system of rules we experience, and not just the system of rules our statutes, precedents, and founding documents describe. Just now, during the second Trump presidency, the gap between the law as it is written and the law as we experience it is obvious even to lay observers. Yet the dominant ways of thinking about law-textualism and originalism-are so focused on the proper interpretation of our legal texts that I fear we have lost sight of the limits on those texts' capacity to guarantee the rights, obligations, and principles they enshrine. The law as the Founding generations experienced it also differed from the law described in legal texts. The term "Founding" suggests, misleadingly, that Americans made a decisive political commitment to the style of government described in the Constitution. For some of the Constitution's central features-including the delineation of federal and state prerogatives, separation of powers, and federal judicial authority-ratification was the beginning of a process of constitutional change, not the end. Because law in practice differed from the law on the page, we cannot know the content of the original Constitution by reading its words, by knowing what the text would have meant to English-speaking contemporaries, or by reference to early judicial interpretation. This Atkins Feature discusses how early American law differed from text and why, and what early American history teaches us about when we should expect texts to create governing law and when we should expect text and law to diverge. Those lessons should make us cautious about the weight we place on written law. That is not to say text does not matter. But a simplistic insistence that text defines the system of rules we experience-that it can constrain power in the face of changing norms or protect our system of government-is dangerous.
The Atkins Feature provides an established legal scholar, selected by a vote of the full masthead of the Yale Law Journal, the opportunity to publish a piece of scholarship equal in ambition to the honor's namesake. The Atkins Feature aims to rouse pathbreaking scholarship predicated on the tradition of imaginative thinking in the Journal's pages by the ranks of Robert Cover, Randall Kennedy, Reva Siegel, and the Atkins Feature's inaugural author, Farah Peterson. This Introduction to the Atkins Feature provides a window into the life and times of Jasper Alston Atkins, one of the Journal's first black editors and whose memory has, today, been limited to footnotes and truncated remembrances. This Introduction recovers three cases Atkins litigated in the spheres of voting, antisegregation, and education to appreciate the legacy of someone who, by any measure, is a great figure in our nation's history. Remembering Atkins's contribution to American letters through this Feature, we hope to contribute to the transformation of the law in much the way Atkins himself did: with boldness of imagination and integrity of spirit.
Every year, states send thousands of state prisoners and foster youth to live in confinement across state lines. These transfers create wide-ranging logistical, regulatory, and legal complications. As a result, state prisoners and foster youth are left uniquely vulnerable to abuse and neglect. This Note introduces the sociolegal theory of interjurisdictional haze to illustrate the layered confusion experienced by people transferred out of state. I first provide an account of the ways relevant laws differ between states, reflecting the legal protections one might lose when transferred. I then detail why modern choice-of-law theory is fundamentally incompatible with cases involving out-of-state wards. Taken together, I present the theory and injustice of interjurisdictional haze in three levels-the personal, the institutional, and the legal-and propose solutions.
. A quiet transformation in American policing has produced a constitutional rupture that has escaped judicial recognition and democratic control. Through federal deputization and joint task forces, police officers wield overlapping federal and state authority under broad delegations often operationalized through informal executive agreements with limited public oversight. These arrangements empower local officers to enforce federal priorities and place local personnel and operations under federal supervision without clear lines of public attribution and accountability. A deputized city officer may participate in a federally directed raid yet be insulated from constitutional tort liability, criminal prosecution, civilian oversight, and departmental discipline. Conversely, a federal agent embedded in a local police department may carry out arrests using city credentials and infrastructure yet remain beyond the reach of state law and municipal accountability. This enforcement regime, which this Article terms "cross-sovereign policing," has emerged as a persistent lapse in the law's remedial and oversight frameworks. This Article provides a comprehensive account of cross-sovereign policing, showing how this trend has unraveled the doctrinal, institutional, and democratic foundations of public control over government-sanctioned force. It demonstrates how cross-sovereign policing can fracture attribution, foreclose legal remedies, and displace democratic governance. This intervention unfolds on three levels: conceptual, doctrinal, and institutional. Conceptually, the Article shows how crosssovereign policing destabilizes attribution, eroding crucial guardrails that make improper exercises of public authority visible and actionable. Too often, officers act under overlapping authority with no sovereign held to account. This result subverts federalism's "double security" function and can turn a system meant to restrain power into one that shields this authority from meaningful oversight. Doctrinally, this collapse undermines the civil remedies and state criminal-enforcement tools meant to check unlawful coercion. Courts have denied relief under & sect; 1983, the primary civil remedy for constitutional violations by state officials, by concluding that deputized officers act under federal law. Courts have rejected Bivens claims in these settings as a new context outside the shrinking scope of the implied federal cause of action. And Supremacy Clause immunity, originally a shield for federal officers against state interference, has been invoked and applied in cross-sovereign contexts to displace state prosecutions based on asserted federal authority. Institutionally, cross-sovereign partnerships can circumvent internal and civilian oversight by displacing or narrowing the application of local legal constraints on police conduct. In response to these shortcomings, this Article advances the "accountability-federalism frametional attribution test for & sect; 1983; a new federal cause of action for constitutional violations committed under color of federal law; and a historically grounded narrowing of Supremacy Clause immunity. Institutionally, it recommends fiduciary disclosure duties, public registries of deputized officers, conditional-cooperation statutes, interstate compacts, and state constitutional-tort re-gimes. Together, these reforms seek to rebuild the constitutional and legislative architecture nec-essary to restore legal and democratic responsibility for cross-sovereign policing.
