Modern firms acknowledge the advantages in acting ethically. For some time, the goal of shareholder profit maximization has shared the stage with objectives that benefit a broader group of stakeholders. Such benefits can be attractive to not only employees and consumers, but increasingly to investors as well. Whether it is called corporate social responsibility, sustainability, or ESG (Environmental, Social, and Governance), firms now routinely plan and report such ethical efforts.

However, the notion of the ethical firm cannot escape the business operation itself. Some firms present ethical quandaries by the very nature of the products they sell or the stakeholders they engage. If a business creates unavoidable harm to society, ethical strategies may only go so far to ameliorate the overall impact. So-called “controversial” industries or “sin stocks” include traditional morally problematic endeavors like tobacco, alcohol, and gambling but may also include industries with an evolving assessment of harm such as fossil fuel production or mining. Arguably, ethical approaches are even more important here, as safer or more responsible strategies can help legitimize the very existence of such firms.

In this Article, we consider an emerging controversial industry as a context for increasing firm legitimacy: cannabis “edibles.” For years, cannabis products have existed at the margins of the legal marketplace but are now poised to go mainstream. In particular, cannabis edibles allow for easy and discrete access to an enjoyable experience and have the potential to provide significant medical benefits. But edibles also create extremely serious harm, particularly to vulnerable populations like children. This Article considers the unique issues presented by edibles as the largest growing product in the emerging cannabis market and proposes a path forward for an ethical firm to mitigate (some of) its sins. Our proposal envisions an important role for firms and regulators and suggests that firms work within regulation as well as independently.

This Article examines the enduring legacy of Elk v. Wilkins, 112 U.S. 94 (1884), a Supreme Court decision that interpreted the Fourteenth Amendment’s Citizenship Clause to exclude Native Americans from birthright citizenship. By relegating Native citizenship status to a statutory privilege rather than a constitutional right, Elk created a framework that has since been weaponized to challenge birthright citizenship for the children of undocumented immigrants. This Article demonstrates how Elk’s flawed reasoning—particularly its narrow reading of “subject to the jurisdiction thereof”—continues to shape legal and political efforts to erode the Fourteenth Amendment’s guarantees.

Drawing on Justice Harlan’s dissent in Elk, the legislative history of the Fourteenth Amendment, and the text of the Citizenship Clause, this Article argues that Elk was wrongly decided and that the jurisdictional requirement was never intended as a tool for exclusion. The Reconstruction Framers designed the Citizenship Clause to ensure equal citizenship for all persons born on U.S. soil, regardless of ancestry or parental status. Justice Harlan’s dissent provides a blueprint for this inclusive reading, rejecting the notion that allegiance at birth determines jurisdiction.

This Article calls for the explicit repudiation of Elk and its continued misuse in modern birthright citizenship debates. The Fourteenth Amendment’s promise is clear: for anyone born in the United States who subjects themselves to its jurisdiction, birthright citizenship is a constitutional right, not a congressional privilege.

Juvenile sex offender registration was never a natural fit for the youth justice system, but in the digital age, it has become deeply harmful. What began as a paper-based precaution has evolved into a sprawling digital regime that permanently brands adolescents at the most formative stage of life. This Article examines how technological change has turned registration into a publicly searchable network of stigma—amplified by data aggregators, search engines, neighborhood apps, and real estate platforms—that makes youthful misbehavior both permanent and inescapable.

Drawing on insights from developmental neuroscience and criminology, the Article explains why adolescent sexual misconduct is often impulsive, peer-driven, and rarely predictive of future offending. Yet federal mandates like the Sex Offender Registration and Notification Act (SORNA) continue to impose offense-based registration on youth as young as fourteen, ignoring evidence about adolescent development and undermining the juvenile justice system’s rehabilitative aims.

The modern registry’s reach imposes novel harms that traditional legal frameworks have not fully addressed. Public access fuels ongoing exclusion, identity foreclosure, and algorithmic discrimination, locking youth into stigmatized identities and exacerbating racial and socioeconomic disparities. These harms ripple outward to destabilize families and communities.

Empirical research confirms that juvenile sexual recidivism is rare and that registration fails to improve public safety. Instead, it misallocates resources and inflicts long-term damage. This Article urges a rethinking of juvenile registration policies, calling for reforms grounded in developmental science, technological awareness, and evidence-based alternatives such as confidential monitoring, risk-based assessments, and therapeutic intervention.

When it comes to submitting tax returns and paying taxes, most taxpayers understand the nature of their civic duties and do so dutifully, if not willingly. However, many taxpayers fail to grasp why the IRS has such an elongated time period—namely, three years—to audit their tax returns and propose an assessment. Indeed, when the IRS exercises its oversight authority, records may no longer be available, and memories may be dulled.

Since the original institution of the three-year tax assessment limitations period nearly a century ago, tremendous technological strides have been made. Indeed, over ninety percent of income tax returns are currently electronically submitted. The IRS can readily employ AI and other detection modes to identify those tax returns requiring an audit. Given such technological advancements, Congress should shorten the general statute of limitations period to two years. Instituting this reform would yield many salutary benefits to the tax system at little or no revenue cost.

 A criminal defendant’s right to trial by an impartial jury is enshrined in the Constitution. However, this right cannot be realized if juror implicit bias remains unchecked. Indeed, jurors’ implicit bias has been shown to affect decisions as fundamental as who is guilty. Recognizing the problem of implicit bias affecting jurors, the American Bar Association created a taskforce aimed at addressing the issue. One of the solutions the taskforce proposed was a model implicit bias jury instruction. In recent years, seventeen jurisdictions have crafted criminal jury instructions that address implicit bias.

This Article contains the first thematic analysis of all known criminal implicit bias jury instructions, examining the various trends, strengths, and shortcomings of these instructions. The Article also reviews two experimental tests of such instructions, which have suggested they are potentially ineffective. It proposes past efforts may have been ineffective because the instructions neither clarify how implicit bias is applicable to the particular defendants, actors, or situations nor emphasize the consequences of making judgments affected by implicit bias.

To date, no instructions have considered intersectionality theory. This Article proposes that an intersectional implicit bias jury instruction can uniquely emphasize connections between implicit bias and structural power and history.

As executive and legislative efforts currently seek to end many programs relating to diversity, equity, and inclusion, it is urgent that bias intervention not be eschewed by the courts. Strategies such as implementing effective interventions in the criminal trial to mitigate juror implicit bias remain crucial.

Generative artificial intelligence (“AI”) is straining the boundaries of long-established secondary liability doctrines in copyright law—including contributory infringement, vicarious liability, inducement, and statutory safe harbors. Courts and policymakers have yet to adapt these doctrines to the challenges that AI’s massive scale, decentralized development network, and opaque “black box” architectures pose, creating considerable legal uncertainty. In response, leading AI providers increasingly rely on contractual solutions—embedding warranties, indemnifications, liability caps, and other provisions into user agreements—seeking to allocate infringement risks preemptively. These evolving contractual approaches both draw upon and diverge from classic doctrines, offering novel insight into how the pressure of generative AI is causing companies to recalibrate their liability rules.

This Article provides a structured analysis of how emerging contractual liability arrangements grapple with generative AI’s unique challenges. It advances and applies a four-dimensional framework—Control Threshold, Liability Scope, Preventive Measures, and Risk and Benefit Distribution—to illuminate three distinct contractual models through which AI providers allocate copyright liability. First, under the User-Centric Model, AI users bear most of the legal risk; they must indemnify the provider and confront minimal provider-side accountability. Second, the Balanced Model adopts a more reciprocal stance, coupling user diligence with provider-led safeguards and partial indemnifications. Finally, the Provider-Centric Model envisions the AI provider as a gatekeeper that proactively manages datasets and offers comprehensive indemnities grounded in robust licensing infrastructures. Each model’s internal tensions reflect the ways that private ordering both resonates with and reshapes copyright liability rules.

Building on these observations, this Article proposes ways for courts and policymakers to refine secondary liability doctrine in light of generative AI’s novel attributes. It highlights the need for ex-ante compliance mechanisms, empirically guided liability caps, and differentiated obligations tailored to each actor’s capacity to mitigate infringement risks. Such strategies can conserve enforcement resources, foster responsible innovation, and guard against an unfair shift of legal burdens onto those with limited oversight capacity. Yet this Article also cautions that certain contractual provisions—particularly those that impose broad indemnities on users or unduly limit accountability of AI providers—might diminish deterrence and distort the efficient allocation of preventive responsibility, calling for government intervention. In doing so, this Article demonstrates how contract-driven private ordering can extend or subvert established tort-based frameworks of copyright liability in the landscape of AI governance.