Beginning in 1981 and continuing into the mid-1990s, The Alledger was the student newspaper of the Boston College Law School. The Alledger published both serious and satirical articles on topics related to student life at the law school. Frequent topics include the arrival and departure of faculty members, profiles of candidates for leadership positions in student government, and previews of lectures given by noteworthy speakers.

The publication consistently poked fun at the law student experience, making professors and classmates alike the targets of good-natured parody. The Alledger featured an annual April Fool’s Day issue which consisted entirely of satirical articles.

The Alledger is a record of the school’s history, offering evidence of an increasingly competitive environment for law schools in the form of extensive coverage of a 1995 dispute related to the U.S. News and World Report law school rankings. The newspaper also recorded changes in the demographics of the student body, as well as frequent discussion of tuition increases and the financial relationship of the law school to the university. Moreover, the humorous and frank tone of The Alledger provides real insight into the lives of law students in the 1980s and 1990s.

The Alledger was digitized from the collection of the Boston College Law School Library. Issues missing from this collection are not owned by the law library; due to frequent inconsistencies in the numbering of issues, the law library is not sure how many issues are missing from this collection.

The Alledger

Boston College Law Review is Boston College Law School's flagship scholarly publication.

The Review, ranked in the top 25 law journals by Washington & Lee, publishes eight issues each year featuring articles and essays by prominent authors addressing legal issues of national interest.

In addition to articles written by outside academics, the Review prints the work of its student staff, many of whom publish notes during their third year. The Review’s second-year staff members also prepare short comments on recent federal circuit court decisions, which may be published in the Review's Electronic Supplement.

Visit the Boston College Law Review website at <a href="http://bclawreview.bc.edu">bclawreview.bc.edu</a>.

Boston College Law Review

Boston College Law Library collects the publications of Law School faculty, and, when possible, makes them available through this collection. Organized by year and tagged with authors and subject areas, this resource reflects the school and the library’s commitment to open access while at the same time serving as a valuable institutional record.

Boston College Law School Faculty Papers

Boston College Law School Lectures and Presentations

On March 12, 2019, the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) shocked the nation when it unveiled an extensive college admissions scandal. Operation Varsity Blues, as the DOJ dubbed its investigation, resulted in fifty-seven people being charged with mail fraud, wire fraud, and variations thereof. Of those charged, fifty-one pleaded guilty and two were convicted by federal juries. Although these numbers suggest that Operation Varsity Blues has been a resounding success for federal prosecutors, many of those implicated are appealing their guilty pleas and convictions. Specifically, many argue that they never committed a crime at all because college entrance exam test scores and college admission are not “property” for the purposes of the federal mail and wire fraud statutes. Though the assertion that the college admissions scandal did not involve illegal conduct may be shocking given the American public’s visceral reaction to it, many worry that the Varsity Blues defendants may indeed be right. After all, when given the opportunity, the U.S. Supreme Court often confines the scope of mail and wire fraud by narrowly construing the statutes’ “money or property” element. In fact, in 2020, in Kelly v. United States, the Supreme Court did so yet again. This Note outlines the statutory and common law background of the mail and wire fraud statutes, specifically with respect to the “money or property” element. It then analyzes judicial interpretations of property under the mail and wire fraud statutes. Finally, this Note argues that the statutes and their interpretations should not doom the federal government’s efforts to prosecute Varsity Blues defendants. This is so because under Carpenter v. United States and its progeny, college admission arguably constitutes an “intangible property right” that satisfies the “money or property” requirement in the federal mail and wire fraud statutes.

Was "Varsity Blues" Actually a Crime? The Supreme Court's Crusade Against the Federal Mail and Wire Fraud Statutes

The Fourteenth Amendment’s Due Process Clause protects rights that, though not in the Constitution, are deemed sufficiently fundamental that they may not be infringed. Although the Supreme Court has explicitly disclaimed a fundamental right to education, it has left open the possibility that some basic level of education might be a fundamental right, as a way of safeguarding constitutional rights to free speech and political participation. In 2020, the Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals in Gary B. v. Whitmer held that the Due Process Clause protects a fundamental right to access literacy. Although the Sixth Circuit’s decision was short-lived and has no precedential value, this Note argues that it presents a formulation of a right to education that respects Supreme Court precedent, acknowledges the importance of literacy and public education in American life, and provides a powerful tool for potential plaintiffs seeking to address educational inequity.

Sufficiently Fundamental: Searching for a Constitutional Right to Literacy Education

The Fourth Amendment of the U.S. Constitution prohibits unreasonable “seizures” and thus renders unlawful police use of excessive force. On one hand, this definition is expansive. In the U.S. Supreme Court’s 2021 Term, in Torres v. Madrid, the Court clarified that a “seizure” includes any police application of physical force to the body with intent to restrain. Crucially, Chief Justice Roberts’ majority opinion emphasized that police may seize even when merely laying “the end of a finger” on a layperson’s body. And yet, the Supreme Court’s Fourth Amendment totality-of-the-circumstances reasonableness balancing test is notoriously imprecise—a “factbound morass,” in the famous words of Justice Scalia.
Such breadth and imprecision in the Court’s Fourth Amendment jurisprudence create a problem: it under-specifies forms of deleterious police conduct. In particular, while scholarship has explored police firearm use, less research has considered the role of police putting “hands on” a civilian and its potential to escalate toward lethal physical encounters. This is regrettable, given that such a “hands on” scenario occurs millions of times a year. At worst, it has escalated into high-profile police killings in cases like those of George Floyd, Eric Garner, Rayshard Brooks, and Michael Brown. Simply put, when police lay “hands on” laypeople, they may hurt or even kill them.
This Article calls this “the problem of physical restraint” and systematically considers this problem in constitutional criminal procedure, law, and policy. As an initial matter, it shows how this problem is inevitable in both reformist and abolitionist agendas. It then shows how judges, policymakers, and police departments alike have overlooked such physical restraint due to legal under-specification, the political economy of policing, and a cultural-historical contingency that includes anti-Asian attitudes. It thus argues for robust intervention—judicial, legislative, and police training—to redress this oversight in pervasive police use of force.

Policing & The Problem of Physical Restraint

The responsible corporate officer doctrine is an accepted basis of liability under many federal statutes, holding individual high-ranking corporate officers criminally or civilly liable for corporate actions or omissions that violate federal law. The doctrine is a blend of statutory and common law, where legislation sets out the underlying framework that courts use to extend and develop the doctrine. Although several federal statutes incorporate the doctrine, it is particularly well developed under federal environmental statutes and has been a potent tool for federal environmental enforcement for over half a century. Indeed, the doctrine acts as a practical means of achieving remediation in situations that would otherwise lack recourse. But states have been slower to adopt the doctrine; only a handful recognize it in the civil environmental context. As a result, the state-level doctrine is often underutilized and consequently lacks academic attention. This Article fills that gap by examining the responsible corporate officer doctrine in its state environmental forms. The Article first traces the doctrine’s federal development and illustrates its role in federal environmental enforcement. It then turns to the doctrine’s nascent but limited development in state courts and argues that the state environmental responsible corporate officer doctrines lack cohesion, clarity, and legitimacy. Building on those observations, this Article then asserts the need to revitalize the state environmental forms of the doctrine and center it on four goals: (1) individual civil liability; (2) liability without a mens rea requirement; (3) uniformity; and (4) broad enforceability. Lastly, this Article looks to two states—Massachusetts and Oregon—as case studies for how a newly revitalized doctrine could be applied.

Revitalizing the State Environmental Responsible Corporate Officer Doctrine

This case turns on the Elections Clause, which states that rules for “the Times, Places, and Manner of holding” congressional elections “shall be prescribed in each State by the legislature thereof.” Petitioners contend that the reference to “legislature” in the Elections Clause means that state legislatures, when adopting these regulations, are unconstrained by substantive limits imposed by the state’s constitution and may act independently of any other branch of the state’s government. Respondents contend that a state legislature is constituted by the state’s constitution and thus constrained to follow requirements it imposes. On Respondents’ interpretation, the state legislature has no authority to act, and arguably no existence, outside the legal framework of the state constitution that created it.

Which of these interpretations is consistent with the original public meaning of the Elections Clause? That question cannot be answered simply by gazing at the text, which does not explain how those words would have been understood when the Constitution was adopted. To settle the matter, we must also ask what the historical evidence shows about how the Clause would have been understood when the Constitution was adopted in light of the public standards of the eighteenth century.

Amicus brief in Moore v. Harper

Professor Greenfield submits this brief to aid the Court in distinguishing between the constitutional claims of businesses and their owners or members.

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The Alledger

Boston College Law Review

Boston College Law School Faculty Papers

Boston College Law School Lectures and Presentations

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Was "Varsity Blues" Actually a Crime? The Supreme Court's Crusade Against the Federal Mail and Wire Fraud Statutes

Sufficiently Fundamental: Searching for a Constitutional Right to Literacy Education

Policing & The Problem of Physical Restraint

Revitalizing the State Environmental Responsible Corporate Officer Doctrine

Amicus brief in Moore v. Harper

Amicus brief in 303 Creative LLC v. Elenis

Welcome to LIRA@BC Law!

Featured Collections

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The Alledger