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

Satisfying the demand for “climate justice” is a profound challenge, given the disconnect between the states and populations most vulnerable to climate impacts and those most responsible historically for producing the greatest share of GHG emissions. Likewise, there is a need to ensure equitable access to the technologies and other resources necessary for both mitigation and adaptation. Another point of contention is how quickly and comprehensively to act. While the fundamentals of climate science have been well-established for decades, there is ongoing debate over how urgently the world must respond. Even assuming a consensus for urgent action, there is the political difficulty of apportioning the arguably burdensome demands of emissions reductions, requiring certain jurisdictions and populaces to suffer short-term local economic costs in exchange for incompletely defined, long-term collective benefits.

This chapter describes and evaluates the most significant multilateral efforts to grapple with climate disruption. It focuses on the 1992 UN Framework Convention on Climate Change, and its key ancillary agreements—the 1997 Kyoto Protocol and the 2015 Paris Agreement. This analysis includes both multilateral developments and their parallel processes and legal constructs within the United States.

The Multilateral Climate Regime

Antitrust law regulates the consolidation and abuse of economic power. One of its core tasks is to ensure that market success is not rigged in favor of undeserving winners against excluded competitors at consumers’ and workers’ expense. But for their entire enforcement and doctrinal history, antitrust regulators and courts have built a legal infrastructure that assesses the exercise of economic power and its adverse effects as if that power and its effects were “color blind.” In fact, corporate concentration, firm dominance, and anticompetitive conduct not only contribute to structural racism, but the very tools regulators use to combat those harms can reinforce racial inequality and disparately impact people of color.

This Article is a framing project, providing a comprehensive overview of antitrust law’s relationship to racial inequality. Its goal is to identify the core problem areas and mechanisms by which antitrust has contributed to racial subordination in order to invite both a reckoning and suggestions for antiracist reforms. It first explains how firms’ dominance and anticompetitive conduct have rigged market access in ways that create and perpetuate racial inequality. It then situates a novel data set of antitrust cases addressing race since the passage of the Sherman Act within the broader antitrust canon to detail how antitrust enforcers’ and courts’ “color-blind” approach to competition concerns have not only ignored the realities of racial inequality but also reinforced them. Finally, it proposes a suite of reforms as first steps to integrating analysis of race into antitrust enforcement, from market definition and merger review analyses to assessments of the anticompetitive effects and procompetitive benefits of firm conduct.

Antitrust and Race

In 2010, Congress passed the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act and its companion, the Health Care and Education Reconciliation Act (collectively, the Affordable Care Act, ACA, or Obamacare). President Obama signed the ACA into law on March 23, 2010. Within minutes, Florida and twelve more states filed a complaint that would ultimately result in the US Supreme Court’s first “Obamacare” decision: National Federation of Independent Business (NFIB) v. Sebelius. An unexpected 7–2 majority ruled that the ACA’s Medicaid expansion program exceeded Congress’ spending power because requiring states to either expand or lose all Medicaid funding was unconstitutionally coercive. Nevertheless, expansion could continue as an optional program that states could accept or reject without jeopardizing their pre-ACA Medicaid funding.

NFIB can be analyzed—and criticized—through any number of lenses including political philosophy, bioethics, constitutionalism, and more. A more fundamental criticism rests on the pragmatic concern that a majority of the justices have little understanding of—and a surprising lack of curiosity about—the lived experience of many Americans with the complex and fragmented market for health care. This is particularly troubling for women who have more to gain than their male counterparts from a reformed health care system, and more to lose should it falter. As Professor Elizabeth Weeks, writing as Justice Weeks, forcefully reminds us, women are disproportionately lower income, uninsured, and burdened by medical debt. Moreover, discriminatory practices by insurers have long disadvantaged women expressly by gender rating and limiting coverage for maternity care, and implicitly, for example, through preexisting condition exclusions. Thus, in her opinion concurring in part and dissenting in part, Weeks opines, Medicaid expansion and the individual mandate concern more than commerce, taxing and spending; at their core, they protect an individual’s civil rights to coverage and care. Weeks cites works by feminist legal theorists, including Martha Albertson Fineman and Catherine MacKinnon to support her arguments. Her civil rights analysis also evinces her feminist approach.

A remaining question with particular import for women is: What kind of care and coverage do these civil rights protect? Feminist thinking, implicit in the civil rights analysis of Weeks, assists in finding an answer.

Commentary on National Federation of Independent Business v. Sebelius

YouTube is an important platform for user-generated content and serves as a positive space for creativity on the internet. Nevertheless, there are some glaring problems with the way YouTube handles copyright infringement. Congress enacted the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) before the internet had taken shape into the vast and complex body we know today. Copyright holders are given far more leniency than the creators accused of infringement, largely due to a subjective good faith standard imposed by the courts. This article proposes the good faith standard in § 512(c) of the DMCA be amended to incorporate an objective standard instead of the harmful subjective good faith standard.

Intellectual Property and Technology Forum

Keeping the Good Faith: YouTube, Fair Use, and the DMCA

In the wake of the Supreme Court’s June 2022 ruling in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, personal data has become a means of investigating and prosecuting individuals who seek or provide abortion services. With little federal oversight into the collection and disclosure of users’ personal data, third parties have significant latitude to sell or profit from sensitive information. The recent use of location and personal data implicates the privacy of millions of individuals and raises significant questions around health care and technology laws in states where abortion is now illegal. In the absence of sweeping federal regulations around data collection and disclosure, states ought to enact stronger legislation to protect their citizens from the exploitation of their most sensitive data.

iSpy Someone Getting an Abortion: The Use of Personal Data in the Post-Dobbs Era

Stare decisis may not be an “inexorable command,” but it certainly commands a substantial amount of the Supreme Court’s time and attention. Nowhere is this truer than in the fraught context of the Court’s abortion jurisprudence. In its landmark 1992 decision in Planned Parenthood of Southeastern Pennsylvania v. Casey, a narrowly divided Court connected the continued constitutional protection for abortion rights to the perceived necessity of adhering to its earlier decision in Roe v. Wade. Since then, the Court’s abortion decisions have often featured sharp divisions over the proper understanding and application of stare decisis.

In a prior Article, I suggested a framework for extracting precedential guidance from plurality decisions that focused on identifying the universe of future cases that fall within the domain of overlapping agreement shared between the various judgment supportive opinions in a case. The Court’s decisions in Ramos and June Medical provide an occasion to revisit and extend that framework by illustrating how courts applying this “shared agreement” approach should think about plurality decisions in relation to prior majority-supported precedent.

The shared agreement approach provides a way of thinking about plurality precedent that helps to identify plurality decisions that overturn or alter prior precedent and to distinguish them from decisions that leave preexisting precedent untouched. In particular, the shared agreement approach recognizes the ability of plurality decisions to alter precedent only in those circumstances where a majority of Justices whose votes were collectively necessary to the judgment in the original case agree that the earlier precedent should be overruled. Where, by contrast, the members of the judgment-necessary majority disagree about prior precedent, the willingness of a subset of the majority to overrule an earlier decision leaves the precedential status of the earlier decision undisturbed.

Welcome to LIRA@BC Law!

Featured Collections

The Alledger

Boston College Law Review

Boston College Law School Faculty Papers

Boston College Law School Lectures and Presentations

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The Multilateral Climate Regime

Antitrust and Race

Commentary on National Federation of Independent Business v. Sebelius

Keeping the Good Faith: YouTube, Fair Use, and the DMCA

iSpy Someone Getting an Abortion: The Use of Personal Data in the Post-Dobbs Era

Plurality Decisions and Prior Precedent

Welcome to LIRA@BC Law!

Featured Collections

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Recent Additions

The Alledger