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Amidst a raft of major Supreme Court decisions, a relatively quiet concurrence has planted the seeds for what may precipitate a major transformation in American constitutional law. Writing for himself in Box v. Planned Parenthood, Justice Thomas chided the Court for declining to review a decision invalidating an Indiana law that prohibited abortions undertaken “solely because of the child’s race, sex, diagnosis of Down syndrome, disability, or related characteristics.” Arguing that the challenged law was merely Indiana’s modest attempt to prevent “abortion from becoming a tool of modern-day eugenics,” Justice Thomas proceeded to elaborate a misleading history in which he associated abortion with eugenics, racism, and a broader campaign to improve the human race by limiting Black reproduction. While many decried his selective and inaccurate invocation of the history of eugenics, Justice Thomas’s ambitions for the concurrence likely went beyond the historical record. Indeed, in drafting the concurrence, Justice Thomas may have been less concerned with history than with the future — and specifically the future of abortion rights and the jurisprudence of race. As this Article explains, the concurrence’s misleading association of abortion and eugenics may well serve two purposes. First, it justifies trait-selection laws, an increasingly popular type of abortion restriction, on the ground that such measures serve the state’s interest in eliminating various forms of discrimination. But more importantly, and less obviously, by associating abortion with eugenic racism, the concurrence lays a foundation for discrediting — and overruling — Roe v. Wade on the alleged ground that the abortion right is rooted in, and tainted by, an effort to selectively target Black reproduction. Under the principle of stare decisis, a past decision, like Roe v. Wade, cannot be overruled simply because a majority of the current Court disagrees with it. Instead, a “special justification” is required. Justice Thomas’s association of abortion with eugenics constructs the case that racial injustice is the “special justification” that warrants overruling Roe. In this regard, the Box concurrence builds on past decisions, like Brown v. Board of Education, as well as more recent cases, like Ramos v. Louisiana, in which the Court overruled past precedents, in part, to correct racial wrongs. If undertaken, the Box concurrence’s latent strategy will be devastating to abortion rights, but as this Article explains, its deleterious impact goes beyond eviscerating Roe v. Wade. Under the concurrence’s logic, race may serve dual purposes in shaping the Court’s jurisprudence. As an initial matter, race — and the prospect of redressing racial injustice — furnishes the Court with a potent justification for reconsidering settled precedent. But it also provides the Court with an opportunity to articulate new law that affirms and entrenches the Court’s preferred conception of race and racial harm. In this regard, the Box concurrence is not merely an invitation to recast abortion as an issue of racial injustice; it is an invitation to entirely reconceptualize the meaning of race, racial injury, and racism.

This Article presents findings from the most comprehensive empirical study to date on how the federal courts of appeals have applied Chevron deference—the doctrine under which courts defer to a federal agency's reasonable interpretation of an ambiguous statute that it administers. Based on 1,558 agency interpretations the circuit courts reviewed from 2003 through 2013 (where they cited Chevron), we found that the circuit courts overall upheld 71% of interpretations and applied Chevron deference 77% of the time. But there was nearly a twenty-five-percentage-point difference in agency-win rates when the circuit courts applied Chevron deference than when they did not. Among many other findings, our study reveals important differences across circuits, agencies, agency formats, and subject matters as to judicial review of agency statutory interpretations. Based on prior empirical studies of judicial deference at the Supreme Court, however, our findings suggest that there may be a Chevron Supreme and a Chevron Regular: whereas Chevron may not have much of an effect on agency outcomes at the Supreme Court, Chevron deference seems to matter in the circuit courts. That there is a Chevron Supreme and a Chevron Regular may suggest that, in Chevron, the Supreme Court has an effective tool to supervise lower courts' review of agency statutory interpretations. To render Chevron more effective in creating uniformity throughout the circuit courts, the Supreme Court needs to send clearer signals on how courts should apply the deference standard.

It is a great honor and a great pleasure to have the opportunity to say a few words about one of the most consequential scholars of civil procedure and the federal courts in the country. No one can do justice to the breadth of Professor Burbank's more than forty-year span of work, and I know better than to try. A remarkable group of scholars and practitioners has gathered for this 'festschrift', and I will leave it to them to highlight his particular contributions to different aspects of the law.

This Article reports the findings of the largest and most comprehensive study to date of the role qualified immunity plays in constitutional litigation. Qualified immunity shields government officiais from constitutional claims for money damages so long as the officials did not violate clearly established law. The Supreme Court has described the doctrine as incredibly strong—protecting \"all but the plainly incompetent or those who knowingly violate the law.\" Legal scholars and commentators describe qualified immunity in equally stark terms, often criticizing the doctrine for closing the courthouse doors to plaintiffs whose rights have been violated. The Court has repeatedly explained that qualified immunity must be as powerful as it is to protect government officials from burdens associated with participating in discovery and trial. Yet the Supreme Court has relied on no empirical evidence to support its assertion that qualified immunity doctrine shields government officials from these assumed burdens. This Article is the first to test this foundational assumption underlying the Supreme Court's qualified immunity decisions. I reviewed the dockets of 1,183 Section 1983 cases filed against state and local law enforcement defendants in five federal court districts over a two-year period and measured the frequency with which qualified immunity motions were brought by defendants, granted by courts, and dispositive before discovery and trial. I found that qualified immunity rarely served its intended role as a shield from discovery and trial in these cases. Across the five districts in my study, just thirty-eight (3.9%) of the 979 cases in which qualified immunity could be raised were dismissed on qualified immunity grounds. And when one considers all the Section 1983 cases brought against law enforcement defendants—each of which could expose law enforcement officials to burdens associated with discovery and trial—just seven (0.6%) were dismissed at the motion to dismiss stage and thirty-one (2.6%) were dismissed at summary judgment on qualified immunity grounds. My findings enrich our understanding of qualified immunity's role in constitutional litigation, belie expectations about the policy interests served by qualified immunity, and show that qualified immunity doctrine should be modified to reflect its actual role in constitutional litigation.

Local courts are, by far, the most commonly used courts in our justice system. Cases filed in local courts outnumber those filed in federal court by a factor of over two hundred. Few litigants who receive local-court judgments appeal the matter further. The justice we possess is thus largely the justice created by local courts, but they are largely absent from the law school curriculum. We know astonishingly little about them. This Article begins to remedy that absence by providing a structural account of local courts that situates them as distinct institutions within the justice system. Because local courts are influenced by all levels of government—federal, state, and local—they exhibit a radical diversity—not just between states but within them, and not just in the way that they operate but in their organizing principles. The Article links the many problems experienced by local courts—chronic underfunding and a lack of oversight cause problems that run deep—with the state and federal structures that shape local-court function and administration. On the state side, the Article analyzes hand-coded, raw survey data from the National Center for State Courts to describe the interactions between local courts and administrative bodies within state judicial branches. Although states differ, administrative distance between state and local institutions joined with the rarity of appeals from local-court judgments makes local courts meaningfully independent from the state system. Federal law compounds this independence by sheltering local courts from external scrutiny. Judicial federalism doctrines like preclusion, abstention, and habeas corpus require federal courts to defer to the legal and factual findings of local courts. Federal enforcement doctrines like standing and immunity protect local courts from legal reform efforts. The Article then reevaluates our theories of judicial federalism in light of the diversity and problems of local courts. It argues that the values of judicial federalism invoked by both courts and scholars rely on the fiction that state courts are monoliths. In fact, the reality of state courts—including the diversity and relative obscurity of local courts—frustrate these values. Instead, the Article argues that the more valuable conceptual function of local courts is not normative but rather descriptive: they provide us with an understanding of the justice we have, not the justice we aspire to or the justice required by law. They—and not federal courts—are the starting points from which we should define and evaluate our system of justice.

International comity is one of the principal foundations of U.S. foreign relations law. The doctrines of American law that mediate the relationship between the U.S. legal system and those of other nations are nearly all manifestations of international comity—from the conflict of laws to the presumption against extraterritoriality; from the recognition of foreign judgments to the doctrines limiting adjudicative jurisdiction in international cases; and from a foreign government's privilege of bringing suit in the U.S. courts to the doctrines of foreign sovereign immunity. Yet international comity remains poorly understood. This Article provides the first comprehensive account of international comity in American law. It has three goals: (1) to offer a better definition of international comity and a framework for analyzing its manifestations in American law; (2) to explain the relationship between international comity and international law; and (3) to challenge the myths that international comity doctrines must take the form of standards rather than rules and that international comity determinations should be left to the executive branch.

This Article empirically illustrates that legal doctrines permitting police officers to engage in pretextual traffic stops may contribute to an increase in racial profiling. In 1996, the U.S. Supreme Court held in 'Whren v. United States' that pretextual traffic stops do not violate the Fourth Amendment. As long as police officers identify an objective violation of a traffic law, they may lawfully stop a motorist-even if their actual intention is to use the stop to investigate a hunch that by itself does not amount to probable cause or reasonable suspicion. Scholars and civil rights activists have sharply criticized 'Whren', arguing that it gives police officers permission to engage in racial profiling. But social scientists have struggled to empirically evaluate how 'Whren' has influenced police behavior. A series of court decisions in the State of Washington presents an opportunity to test the effects of pretextual-stop doctrines on police behavior. In the years since the 'Whren' decision, Washington has experimented with multiple rules that provide differing levels of protection against pretextual stops. In 1999, the Washington Supreme Court held in 'State v. Ladson' that the state constitution barred police from conducting pretextual traffic stops. However, in 2012, the court eased this restriction on pretextual stops in 'State v. Arreola'.

Few legal metaphors enjoy more prominence than that of a legal issue \"percolating\" through the lower courts until the Supreme Court is ready to resolve it. Just two Terms ago, for example, the Court declined to answer a question presented in 'Box v. Planned Parenthood of Indiana and Kentucky, Inc.', reasoning that further percolation would aid it in developing the scope of constitutional protections for a woman's right to choose. In 'Trump v. Hawaii', Justice Clarence Thomas wrote to express dismay that nationwide injunctions are \"preventing legal questions from percolating through the federal courts.\" Similarly, Justice Neil Gorsuch wrote in 'Department of Homeland Security v. New York' that nationwide relief undermines \"the airing of competing views that aids [the] Court's own decisionmaking process,\" a view shared by many critics of the lower courts' use of nationwide injunctions in recent years. A common presumption is that percolation is valuable. This Article questions that presumption. Its thesis is that, at best, percolation's benefits will outweigh its costs under limited and contingent conditions-conditions not likely to replicate themselves across a broad range of cases. In advancing that thesis, the Article makes four contributions to the literature on federal court practice and procedure. First, as a historical matter, it shows that interest in percolation's value is a relative latecomer to the jurisprudential scene. Second, as an analytical matter, it distinguishes between informational and institutional accounts of percolation's value. Informational accounts highlight percolation's potential to provide useful information to enhance the Court's decisionmaking as to a particular legal issue. Institutional accounts, by contrast, see the percolation process as beneficial to the effective functioning of the federal court system as a whole. With this important but largely unrecognized distinction in mind, the Article makes a third contribution by showing that both accounts are subject to significant limitations. In particular, both the informational and institutional accounts of percolation's value are highly issue-dependent and context-specific. Therefore, as a prescriptive matter, this Article makes a fourth contribution by highlighting a set of practices that the federal courts or Congress might adopt in response to the limited nature of percolation's informational and institutional benefits.

Canons of statutory interpretation are sometimes said to promote continuity and stability in the law. Yet it is widely acknowledged that canons themselves often change. The presumption against extraterritoriality is a prime example. It evolved from a rule based on international law, to a canon of comity, to a tool for finding legislative intent. The presumption then fell into disuse for nearly forty years until it was reborn in EEOC v. Arabian American Oil Co. (Aramco) and substantially revised in Morrison v. National Australia Bank Ltd. This Article makes three contributions. First, it describes the evolution of the presumption against extraterritoriality over two centuries, providing a detailed account of change in an important canon of interpretation. Second, the Article describes the new, post-2010 presumption, arguing — contrary to the conventional wisdom — that the current version of the presumption is superior to previous ones. Third, the Article addresses the problem of changing canons. It argues changing canons constitute a form of dynamic statutory interpretation, which imposes certain responsibilities: to justify the changed canon in normative terms, to explain the need for change, and to mitigate the transition costs.

After the electoral victories of 2015, PiS transformed the CT from an effective, counter-majoritarian device to scrutinise laws for their unconstitutionality, into a powerless institution paralysed by consecutive bills rendering it unable to review new PiS laws, and then into a positive supporter of the enhanced majoritarian powers. In a fundamental reversal of the traditional role of a constitutional court, it is now being used to protect the government from laws enacted long before PiS rule. Whatever else constitutional courts around the world are expected to do, there is no doubt that their first and primary function is to ensure adherence to a constitution and its protection against legislative majorities. In Poland, the Tribunal became a defender and protector of the legislative majority. This changed role, combined with general distrust of the CT and concerns about legitimacy of its judgments, explains also the extraordinary drop in the number of its judgments. For all practical purposes, the CT as a mechanism of constitutional review has ceased to exist: a reliable aide of the government and parliamentary majority has been born.