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

Correction: The Minderoo-Monaco Commission on Plastics and Human Health

Unitary executive theory has taken hold of the administrative state, motivated by the view that agencies constitute a rogue fourth branch of government. Emboldened by the U.S. Supreme Court, the President has begun to interfere with administrative accountability to important criteria including statutory procedural requirements that impact both public participation and administrative due process, the expectation that agencies engage neutral expertise to implement the law, and the obligations of judicial review. As a result, this Essay argues, rather than constituting a fourth branch that is unaccountable to the President, the administrative state has been encouraged by the President and courts to become unaccountable to Congress. It is possible, however, that congressional and judicial oversight and intervention could encourage administration that is more consistent both with legislative mandates and norms that legitimate the administrative state.

The President's Fourth Branch?

There are multiple ways in which Catholic law schools can provide an education that supports and reflects a Catholic vision. Some schools align more closely to an orthodox view in which text and doctrine are the starting lens. Catholic law schools closer to the secular end of the spectrum play a powerful role by actively building bridges with the secular world. These schools, either implicitly or explicitly, start with values framed in more universal terms -- a moral or ethical worldview that can implement the common good in the secular world. A Catholic law school that emphasizes the universal generally offer multiple doors into their mission: a door through which faith is the dominant motivator; a door through which embracing the universal values is the dominated motivator; and one through which individuals seeking a good education can enter without regard to faith or universal values. Catholic law schools that emphasize universal values should state those values publicly and are always seeking to bring community members into a shared vision of those values. Members of the community who enter through the universal values door are not “guests” but integral members in the university. Under this vision, you are more likely to see student groups and faculty who promote positions that are inconsistent with Catholic doctrine. They are pursuing the central goal of a university, which is a place that facilitates the God-given power of reason to explore questions of the common good. 

Reaching out Through the Universal: The Powerful and Positive Role of a Jesuit Catholic Law School on the Secular Line

Front Matter

In response to the deadly COVID-19 pandemic, the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, federal agencies, and universities have implemented the National Wastewater Surveillance System to detect Coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) ribonucleic acid in wastewater. By monitoring wastewater for SARS-CoV-2, authorities can identify the presence of COVID-19 before individuals display symptoms or have a positive clinical test result in populations ranging in size from colleges to states. The ability to track COVID-19 cases through wastewater monitoring has proven especially useful given the scarcity of clinical tests and high probability that infected individuals will remain asymptomatic for the duration of their infection. Despite its usefulness, this surveillance raises certain legal issues. The U.S. Constitution grants state governments police powers to protect the public health and safety of their citizens. Concurrently, the Fourth Amendment of the Constitution prohibits both federal and state governments from unreasonably infringing on individuals’ privacy. Based on the U.S. Supreme Court’s historical interpretation of the Fourth Amendment, wastewater testing for SARS-CoV-2 may infringe upon these privacy rights. Although there is no on-point caselaw or pending litigation concerning these issues, such litigation may arise in the future, requiring judges to navigate applying Fourth Amendment jurisprudence to unprecedented circumstances. Ultimately, the sampling and monitoring of wastewater by government agencies to test for molecular markers of SARS-CoV-2 would likely not violate the Fourth Amendment provided that sampling does not become too individualized. It is unlikely that these activities would constitute a search, and, even if they did, they would likely fall under the protection of the special needs doctrine. Conversely, wastewater testing implemented by public schools could very well run afoul of the Fourth Amendment due to the high degree of individualization associated with testing the wastewater of smaller population sizes.

Protecting Pipe Privacy: How Sampling Wastewater and Utilizing Biological Data to Control the Spread of COVID-19 May Violate the Right to Privacy Under the Fourth Amendment

The Fifth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution guarantees that “private property” shall not “be taken for public use, without just compensation.” But what does it mean for compensation to be “just”? To find a practical standard for this tricky constitutional mandate, early courts adopted the concept of “fair market value” as descriptive of the Just Compensation Clause’s parameters. Over time, this formulation of the Just Compensation Clause predominated over all others. So much so, in fact, that many courts now refuse to admit evidence on the question of just compensation if it does not comport with one of the three approaches to ascertaining fair market value developed by the appraisal industry: the comparable sales approach, the cost approach, or the income approach. But the Just Compensation Clause was never intended to be interpreted so narrowly. Especially in eminent domain cases, where damages can be ongoing and conditional and thus are not adequately accounted for in the traditional approaches for assessing fair market value. This Article argues that if the Just Compensation Clause is meant to serve as a meaningful deterrent to government overreach, the current interpretation of the Just Compensation Clause must be broadened to allow for the admission of any evidence of commercially relevant information that would be given weight in negotiation. If it is not, our poor and underrepresented communities will continue to shoulder the burden of this constitutional deficiency.

<i>Of all the terms used in the Taking Clause, just compensation has the strictest meaning. The Fifth Amendment does not allow simply an approximate compensation but requires a full and perfect equivalent for the property taken.</i>

—Penn Central Transportation Company v. New York City, 438 U.S. 104, 150 (1978) (Rehnquist, J., dissenting).

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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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Correction: The Minderoo-Monaco Commission on Plastics and Human Health

The President's Fourth Branch?

Reaching out Through the Universal: The Powerful and Positive Role of a Jesuit Catholic Law School on the Secular Line

Front Matter

Protecting Pipe Privacy: How Sampling Wastewater and Utilizing Biological Data to Control the Spread of COVID-19 May Violate the Right to Privacy Unde...

Properly Construing the Just Compensation Clause

Welcome to LIRA@BC Law!

Featured Collections

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The Alledger