In the Media

By Jamal Greene
We often see Justice Stevens described as the leader of the “liberal” wing of the Supreme Court in his last years on the bench, but nothing defined him so much as his independence. . . . As the world around him became increasingly divided, he continued to believe he could persuade his colleagues through the sheer power of his good sense.

To understand more about this crisis, I called Elora Mukherjee, a professor at Columbia Law School and the director of the school’s Immigrants’ Rights Clinic. She has been working on the Flores settlement, an agreement that outlines how the U.S. government must care for unaccompanied migrant children, since 2007. Mukherjee has represented and interviewed multiple children and families. She was at the Clint detention facility in Texas last week, along with a group of lawyers and doctors, to interview the children held there.

By Tim Wu
This week, nine states and the District of Columbia, led by New York’s attorney general, Letitia James, filed suit in federal court in New York to block the merger. With this move, the states have jumped the gun on the federal government, which has yet to fully approve or reject the deal. And if the states win in court, as they seem likely to, the merger is dead. Inadvertently, this corporate blunder has created a new role for the states in merger review: acting as a backstop in cases of gross dereliction of duty by the federal government.

By Ronald Mann
Yesterday’s decision in Return Mail Inc. v. U.S. Postal Service offers the justices’ answer to yet another of the drafting weaknesses of the 2011 patent-reform statute commonly known as the AIA (officially christened the Leahy-Smith America Invents Act).

By Tim Wu and Stuart A. Thompson
“Big tech” companies like Google and Facebook are, in reality, the products of hundreds of mergers. Each root below represents a company acquired by a tech giant at a particular moment in its history. A vast majority of these acquisitions, funded by public markets, have received minimal media coverage and limited regulatory scrutiny. But that is changing, given new concerns about consolidation in the tech industries.

By Ronald Mann
Yesterday’s decision in Taggart v. Lorenzen will not go down as one of the major decisions of the term, but it should provide some useful guidance in an area as to which the Supreme Court has not previously spoken: the standards for punishing creditors that violate the discharge that bankruptcy provides to debtors.

By David Pozen, Eric Talley, and Julian Nyarko
Elected officials from both parties appeal routinely to the nation’s foundational document. But, far from serving as a symbol of “unity and common purpose,” the Constitution has come to enable, or even exacerbate, partisan strife. In political debates such as the Trump tax tussle, it often feels as if the United States has two legal charters, one for Republicans and another for Democrats.

In 1989 Kimberlé Crenshaw Professor of Law at Columbia University and UCLA coined the term Intersectionality. . . . Kimberlé Crenshaw joins Tina Daheley with Phyll Opoku-Gyimah, Head of Equalities and Learning at Public and Commercial Services Union and Co-founder of UK Black Pride to explain how the term has developed, how it has been misunderstood and why it’s important.

By Michael Burger
As the Green New Deal continues to attract attention on both the left and right, a key element has been missing from the conversation: What the law behind all these big ideas might actually look like.