Of Backyard Chickens and Front Yard Gardens: The Conflict Between Local Governments and Locavores

“Locavores” aim to source their food locally. Many locavores are also more broadly concerned with living sustainably and decreasing reliance on industrial agriculture. As more people have joined the locavore movement, including many who reside in urban and suburban areas, conflict has emerged between the locavores’ desires to use their private property to produce food—for personal use and for sale—and municipal zoning ordinances that seek to separate agriculture from residential uses. In this Article, I consider the evolution of this conflict and its implications for our systems of land use, local government, and environmental law. Specifically, I investigate the police power rationales for the existence of ordinances that disallow urban homesteading in urban and suburban communities. I then demonstrate that public health, civic virtue, and free market principles can be used to justify the passage of ordinances that would expressly permit these behaviors. Central to this analysis is a discussion of the problems caused by industrial agriculture and the lack of access to locally produced foods—food insecurity, food deserts, obesity tied to processed foods, monoculture-induced environmental catastrophes, harm to animals, and greenhouse gas emissions—all of which could be alleviated, at least in part, through urban agriculture. In recognition of these changing conceptions of harm, some local governments have begun to pass ordinances expressly allowing gardens, chickens, and the sale of produce in residential areas. I conclude by considering what this movement toward loosening restrictions on the use of private property says more broadly about the decline of Euclidean zoning controls and the future of land use law.

I'll Believe it When I C It: Rethinking 501(c)(3)'s Prohibition on Politicking

The United States Supreme Court's decision in Citizens United v. FEC challenged fundamental notions of free speech jurisprudence. While many commentators have focused on the decision's implications for corporate speech, this Comment examines whether the new First Amendment paradigm announced in Citizens United will challenge current speech restrictions on churches and other entities organized under § 501(c)(3). Not only does this Comment propose that such restrictions could potentially be invalidated based on the Court's reasoning in Citizens United, but also that practical factors relating to compliance and enforcement problems inherent in § 501(c)(3) indicate the ban should be amended. This Comment concludes by offering a proposed change to § 501(c)(3)'s politicking ban that would allow a § 501(c)(3) organization to engage in “some” amount of politicking, as long as it was not a substantial part of the organization's overall charitable activity.

Juvenile Criminal Responsibility: Can Malice Supply the Want of Years

Can the young be held accountable for their crimes? At common law, juveniles were entitled to a presumption of incapacity, but were subject to criminal liability on an individualized basis: demonstrated malice supplied the want of years. In Graham v. Florida, the United States Supreme Court rejected this principle and held that juveniles categorically could not be sentenced to life without parole for crimes other than homicide. This Article argues that embedded in the Court's holding is a simplifying assumption about the relative maturity of juveniles and adults and a moral claim about the culpability of homicides and nonhomicides—both this assumption and this claim are demonstrably false in a nontrivial number of cases.

This Article focuses on the facts of some of these cases. One cannot assess the culpability of particular defendants unless one considers, without artful euphemisms or convenient elisions, what they did. And what certain crimes reveal is that there are violent juvenile offenders—fortunately rare—who are at least as mature and culpable as the typical adult violent offender. The Article also considers lower court applications of Graham and finds, in many instances, marked skepticism. The Supreme Court's general theory of juvenile immaturity has failed to impress judges confronting particular cases. The Court's central claim about the relative culpability of adult and juvenile offenders originates from a failure to confront inconvenient facts and a belief that human nature is sufficiently captured by the three standard deviations that surround one's own experience in the world. Lower court judges have access to a wider data set in reaching contrary conclusions.

Breaking the Grip of the Administrative Triad: Agency Policy Making under a Necessity-Based Doctrine

The justification for the modern American administrative state is built on a belief that (1) limited congressional delegation, (2) cabined executive discretion, and (3) properly exercised judicial deference are akin to the system of checks and balances established by the nation's Founders. In this Article, I propose that the time has come to rid ourselves of this legal fiction, particularly as it has developed in two well-known (and highly criticized) lines of administrative cases: the United States Supreme Court's Chevron U.S.A. Inc. v. Natural Resources Defense Council, Inc., jurisprudence and the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit's cases wrestling with the use (or misuse) of nonlegislative rules by agencies. In its place, I propose the creation of a “Necessity Doctrine.” Unlike the constitutional branches of government, agencies are tasked with a much narrower objective within our system: to enable the enforcement of congressional directives through application of expertise, practicality, broad stakeholder input, and inclusion of political considerations. To restore the value of administrative process, we must limit the exercise of that process to those matters that necessitate the use of these bureaucratic tools and deny the urge to rely upon agencies as a surrogate for properly exercised judicial and legislative power.

The Illusion of Amateurism: A Climate of Tortious Interference in the World of Amateur Sports

When a player-agent pays an NCAA-eligible player in violation of NCAA regulations, the agent usually suffers no consequences. Instead, players and the universities they attend are sanctioned, often harshly. Attempts to find a solution to this problem--NCAA regulations, regulations of professional players associations, and state and federal legislation--have thus far been unsuccessful. There is a potential remedy, however: the tortious interference with contractual relations claim. When a gifted student-athlete decides to attend and play a sport at an NCAA-member university, the student-athlete typically receives a scholarship offer from the school and signs a National Letter of Intent. This Comment establishes that these documents together create a binding contractual relationship between the university and student-athlete. Thus, this Comment concludes, by dealing with a student-athlete in a manner that causes the student-athlete to violate his or her contractual obligation to follow NCAA regulations, the agent improperly interferes with this contractual relationship, opening the agent up to liability to the university for tortious interference with contractual relations. Finally, this Comment analyzes why universities largely have not yet taken advantage of this promising claim.

The Downside of Success: How Increased Commercialism Could Cost the NCAA Its Biggest Antitrust Defense

This Comment examines how the evolution of the NCAA, from an organization designed to promote fair competition and integrate intercollegiate sports into higher education, to a tax-exempt entity with annual revenues of over $500 million, could affect its favored antitrust status by the courts. The Comment first discusses how the NCAA has evolved over time. The author then examines how courts struggled to evaluate the organization's antitrust liability, given its role in promoting amateurism, and how a Supreme Court loss ultimately helped shield the NCAA from antitrust liability in its dealings with student-athletes by accepting the preservation of amateurism as a pro-competitive benefit. With this framework in mind, the Comment examines a recently filed antitrust challenge brought by former student-athletes with the potential to penetrate the NCAA's defense and the merits of the lawsuit's approach. Finally, the Article discusses potential less restrictive alternatives the NCAA may choose to implement to avoid this potentially anticompetitive behavior while maintaining amateurism.

Forum and Venue Selection Clauses in Seamen's Employment Contracts: Can Contractual Stipulations Be Used to Defeat a Seaman's Choice of Forum or Venue in a Jones Act Claim?

A split in authority has developed over the enforceability of forum and venue selection clauses in Jones Act claims. While some courts hold such restrictions of a seaman's choice of forum or venue invalid and unenforceable, others find forum and venue selection clauses presumptively valid. Confusing the issue further, several courts have held that while a seaman's choice of forum is protected, and cannot be limited by a forum selection clause, the seaman's choice of venue merits no such protection. This Comment suggests that the last of these approaches—under which a seaman's choice of forum is protected, but choice of venue can be limited by contract—best embodies the congressional intent behind the Jones Act.

Tracing the Origins of Fairly Traceable: The Black Hole of Private Climate Change Litigation

[O]ur emerging problems of the environment and ecological unbalance are worrisome problems indeed, and I am distressed that our law is so inflexible that we find ourselves helpless procedurally to meet these new problems.

-- Justice Harry Blackmun

Convergence in Contort: Landlord Liability for Defective Premises in Comparative Perspective

The relatively recent transformation of landlord-tenant law has imported into the common law landlord-tenant relationship a number of obligations that have been recognized in civil law leases for centuries.Thus the common law's embrace of an implied warranty of habitability closed a long-existing gulf between the two legal traditions' approaches to the obligations of residential landlords. In both traditions today, breach of the landlord's obligation to provide a safe and habitable dwelling gives rise to traditional contractual remedies, including termination of the lease and damages.However, the treatment of personal injuries, property damage, and nonpecuniary losses continues to differ across jurisdictional lines. While American tenants who suffer such losses are largely restricted to a tort theory of recovery, civil law tenants have both contractual and tort theories at their disposal. This Article turns to the civilian tradition to determine whether this concurrent approach to landlord liability better allocates the risk of harm between residential landlords and their tenants.  

A Uniform Framework for Patent Eligibility

There is a need to clarify patent law so as to advance resolution of its most fundamental question--delineating the categories of subject matter that are eligible for patent protection. Coupled with the active role the Supreme Court has taken in examining this precise issue, individuals and nonprofit organizations have galvanized a public discourse through constitutional challenges to the issuance of various biotechnology patents. Despite a statutory framework that has remained constant since 1793, courts have been unable to create a comprehensive test for determining patent-eligible subject matter that accurately embodies the foundational principles that underlie the federal grant of patents. I argue that the proximate cause of the lack of an appropriate framework is the failure of courts to clearly define the statutory categories and the absence of a technology-agnostic method of analyzing whether an invention claims ownership over a “product of nature.” This Article sets forth a uniform framework that addresses patent-eligible subject matter through the creation of a practical methodology that focuses on these two principles. The advantages of the proposed framework are highlighted through the application of the framework to traditional inventions and emerging biotechnologies.