Division of retired pay is one of the most emotionally fraught elements of military divorce. For the servicemember, retired pay compensates decades of service to his country. For the civilian spouse, it remunerates the same decades of domestic labor that enabled such service. Federal restrictions on division of military retirement have spawned confusion and litigation for more than thirty years. Today, former spouses remain extremely vulnerable to this unique and “dire plight.”

In civilian divorce, state courts apply state law to fairly distribute marital assets. Military retirement and disability benefits, however, fall within the scope of the Uniformed Services Former Spouses’ Protection Act (“USFSPA”). This federal statute hedges the power of state courts by exempting military disability benefits from division upon divorce, thereby limiting property awards to retired pay alone. For example, a former spouse may enter into a property settlement agreement that entitles her to half of the servicemember’s retired pay. But because an eligible servicemember must waive from retired pay amounts equal to his disability benefits, the former spouse might later discover that the value of her property settlement award has been drastically reduced, or even eliminated, as a result of a unilateral decision by her ex-husband to opt for waiver.

In 2017, the Supreme Court of the United States prohibited state courts from ordering a servicemember to reimburse his former spouse in the event of a reduction in her agreed upon property award due to waiver. However, neither the Court nor Congress has considered whether a servicemember may consent to reimbursement as a term of his divorce agreement. The continuing lack of uniformity in subsequent state decisions has exacerbated the very inequity that Congress sought to cure by enacting the USFSPA. Although this Note argues that the USFSPA permits contractual indemnification, further inroads must be made to protect the property interests of the former spouse to the same extent that her civilian counterpart’s interests are safeguarded. The federal government must restore to state courts the power to cure the “dire plight” imposed upon the former spouse of military marriage as a result of the USFSPA.

For forty years, military spouses have sacrificed their economic security and personal well-being to support their servicemember spouse’s military career, only to be thrust into a “dire plight” if their marriage ends in a community property state. The legislative policy that put them in this untenable position has not served federal interests: the military currently faces a recruiting crisis and military spouses’ economic security has not improved since the USFSPA. It is time for Congress and the DoD to reexamine the incentives and benefits provided to servicemembers and their families. Congress and the Court must end the USFSPA’s groundless, inequitable, and inconsistently applied legacy by focusing on making it easier and more appealing to live as a military family. Doing so will serve the “clear and substantial” interests of the military to recruit, retain, and retire a strong military while also improving outcomes for military families. This is a rare opportunity for Congress to be pro-military, pro-women, and pro-family.

The time for race consciousness is over, and the era of enforced colorblindness is upon us. The dawn of this new age is troubling because it closes the door on effective strategies to achieve racial justice, including efforts to grant federal reparations. This Article analyzes the areas in which courts have invalidated race-conscious measures, with a particular focus on recent racial equity efforts by the Biden Administration. Rather than treating the loss of race consciousness exclusively as a loss to the movement for equality, this Article argues for a silver-lining approach. While court-led efforts to remedy the effects of slavery and Jim Crow have produced significant results, the weaknesses of this strategy also became apparent over time. Given that all principles of justice are subject to debate and reinterpretation, the oft-maligned bedrock principle of equality of opportunity (“EOO”) deserves a reassessment by progressives. Its moral weight and general acceptance by the public still provide a clarion call for substantive policies that will benefit minorities and disadvantaged people of all races.

Small businesses face a unique and challenging dilemma in today’s business landscape. On the one hand, they are typically and rightfully considered the more powerful party in their contractual relations with consumers, thus prompting a need to protect consumers against unfair contractual terms. On the other hand, when engaging with larger businesses, small businesses typically find themselves in the position of the weaker, more vulnerable party, possibly in need of greater protection themselves from unfair terms. This Article addresses the inherent dilemma faced by small businesses and argues that the prevailing perception of businesses as sophisticated and experienced, based exclusively on their categorization as “business parties” unjustly disregards the economic and market realities they encounter.

The Anthropocene is the name that scientists have given to our current geological epoch, which references the overwhelming influence of human agency on the Earth and its ecological systems. Adopted as a theoretical tool across multiple academic disciplines, social scientists often employ the term to address deep-rooted political and socioeconomic problems and the symptoms of global inequalities and injustices. Meanwhile, legal scholars have employed the term to address the global environmental harms of human agency and to examine how normative frameworks must fundamentally change and adapt to the times ahead. At the same time, recent scholarship also notes that democracies across the globe are experiencing rapid decay, as populist leaders and autocrats are frequently climate change deniers who weaponize social media to spread disinformation. With this scholarship in mind, the Anthropocene has come to represent the convergence of the global environmental and political crises that now confront us.

Within the environmental and political turmoil of the Anthropocene, disinformation in online spaces is a growing cause of concern. The spread of misleading or patently false information about matters such as the COVID-19 pandemic and climate change poses significant threats to alleviating the harms of each. Indeed, online disinformation undermines public trust in democratic institutions and often adversely affects the already frayed relationship these institutions have with vulnerable populations. Moreover, in a world where communication increasingly happens online, digital disinformation subverts truth and advances the extremist ideas that surge on social media. Yet attempting to mitigate online disinformation implicates concerns over free speech and free association in cyberspace, which in turn affects broader concerns over the sustenance of liberal democracies.

This Article examines online, political disinformation and the corresponding speech issues within the context of the Anthropocene. It asks: If democracies are going to survive the current onslaught of political disinformation in the Anthropocene, how might they adapt? And what will free speech normativity look like in the future? By drawing from the relevant Anthropocene theory across law and the social sciences, and exploring more flexible approaches to free speech norms, it concludes by offering suggestions for mitigating political disinformation and its effects in our current era of global anthropogenic uncertainty.

The U.S. Supreme Court’s takings jurisprudence is shaped by an unusually strong reliance on doctrinalist methods of interpretation and reasoning. From Pennsylvania Coal Co. v. Mahon to Penn Central Transportation Co. v. City of New York to Kelo v. City of New London, the Court heavily consults its past takings decisions or refers to the tests, principles, or standards from those decisions as epistemic guides to draw meaning from the Takings Clause. This long history of takings doctrinalization, however, was abruptly disturbed in Nollan v. California Coastal Commission and Dolan v. City of Tigard. There, Justices Scalia and Rehnquist each crafted, in separate opinions, two sequential parts of the Court’s new federal exaction doctrine by borrowing wholesale from exaction tests created by state supreme courts to guide the Court’s effort to establish an exaction jurisprudence under the Takings Clause.

Notwithstanding this paradoxical moment of “takings federalization”—that is, federal borrowing of state doctrine to inform and shape federal takings jurisprudence—the Court immediately reverted to its doctrinalist roots and habits in subsequent takings cases and, to date, has not returned to the method of consulting state doctrines practiced in Nollan and Dolan. Why is this? What explains this short-lived departure from and rupture in federal doctrinalist methods for the unorthodox reliance on state court doctrines? No scholar has explored this unexplained phenomenon. This Article endeavors to answer these puzzling questions and offer an explanation for why the Court federalized state exaction doctrines in Nollan and Dolan, but nowhere else in its modern takings jurisprudence.

This Article argues that the Supreme Court is unlikely to federalize state takings doctrines unless or until several limited conditions have ripened: the clear absence of federal precedent, the sufficient development and maturity of state court doctrines, and the effective advocacy by litigants and amici curiae to draw attention to the value of consulting state court doctrines as appropriate sources to inform federal takings jurisprudence by litigants and amici curiae. These conditions were sufficiently ripe for takings federalization in Nollan and Dolan. This Article then explores this new ripeness framework by examining the Supreme Court’s recent ruling in Sheetz v. County of El Dorado which found that legislatively-enacted exactions, like administrative takings, are subject to the Court’s federal exactions scrutiny. The Article concludes, however, that the conditions in Sheetz were not ripe for takings federalization. While the Court decided Sheetz to address the division of state court rulings on the question, the Court did not establish new or modify existing exaction jurisprudence by relying upon, borrowing or adopting state court exaction doctrines. The Court simply expanded the reach of its preexisting federal exaction doctrine without borrowing from the states. The application of the ripeness framework to future takings cases, nevertheless, offers scholars and jurists a workable and intelligible framework to guide the Court in determining whether, when, and how to appropriately exercise takings federalization.