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Constitutional Law

Penalty Box: The Eighth Amendment’s Role in the FBAR Penalties Game

A sharp disagreement has emerged among federal circuit courts regarding the application of the Eighth Amendment’s Excessive Fines Clause to penalties for failing to file a Foreign Bank Account Report (FBAR). This has created legal uncertainty for individuals with foreign financial interests. The resulting circuit split leads to disparate

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The Free Exercise of Religion as a Privilege

In the span of a decade, the Supreme Court has restructured the Free Exercise Clause entirely. It has removed the counterweight of disestablishment; it has sought parity between religion and secularity by means of strict scrutiny analysis turning on a principle of nondiscrimination; and it has opened the way to

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Sex and Control in Redeemer Georgia

Examining Georgia’s 1876 abortion law through the lens of history, law, and morality—linking it to Reconstruction-era racial politics, shifting medical norms, and constitutional change. Abortion became a tool to control labor, gender roles, and moral narratives in post-Civil War Georgia.

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How to Start (or Stop) a War on Crime: A Conceptual Cookbook

Beginning in the early 1990s, the Executive Branch began an era of enforcement of federal firearms crime that was different in kind and degree from the prior seventy-five years. The federal crime policies of the 1990s and 2000s led to a significant increase both in the total number of federal

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Lochner, Lawrence, and Liberty

Many of the states of the United States have statutes, constitutional provisions, and court decisions that deny individuals the right to have a family, specifically a spouse and children, based on sexual orientation. Advocates have made a wide variety of arguments attacking such restrictions. Scholars and litigants frequently argue that

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The End of Innocence? Federal Habeas Corpus Law After In re Davis

“This Court has never held that the Constitution forbids the execution of a convicted defendant who has had a full and fair trial but is later able to convince a habeas court that he is ‘actually’ innocent.” Justice Scalia may already be well known for a strict approach to statutory

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