The Fifteenth Amendment is usually an afterthought compared to the Fourteenth Amendment. This oversight is perplexing: the Fifteenth Amendment ushered in a brief period of multiracial democracy and laid the constitutional foundation for the VRA. This Article completes the historical record, providing an unabridged accounting of the Fifteenth Amendment’s adoption.

Introduction. In the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic, sovereign debt in developing countries ballooned to unprecedented levels. According to one estimate from 2021, the global pandemic added $24 trillion to global debt, a number that is estimated to be even higher by the time of this Note’s publication. 1 A second estimate suggests that the global debt burden increased by more in 2020 than in ...

Constitutional torts allow victims of governmental misconduct to seek redress. But the doctrinal regime is in disarray because it vacillates between two conceptions of constitutional rights: rights that “nullify” changes to subconstitutional law and rights that impose “duties” on officers.

This Article excavates the Founding Era approach to expressive freedom, which was grounded in a multifaceted understanding of natural rights that no longer survives in American constitutional thought. This forgotten history undercuts the Supreme Court’s recent insistence that the axioms of modern doctrine inhere in the Speech Clause itself.

abstract. The conventional wisdom is that the Commander-in-Chief Clause arms the President with a panoply of martial powers. By some lights, the Clause not only equips the President with exclusive control over military operations, but also conveys the powers to start wars, create military courts, direct and remove officers, and wield emergency wartime powers.

This Article interprets equity as law about law, or meta-law. Equity specializes in solving complex and uncertain problems, especially those involving multiple parties, conflicting rights, and opportunism. The Article reconstructs this function, diagnoses the ills of current equity, and charts a path forward for equity in our legal system.

HOW TO SUBMIT . The Yale Law Journal is now accepting submissions of Articles, Essays, Book Reviews, and Forum pieces for publication in Volume 135. To submit a piece, please visit our online submission system.If this is your first time using our submission system, please make a new account by clicking “Not a member?” on the login page.

Comment Combatant Status Review Tribunals: Flawed Answers to the Wrong Question

This Essay explores the people’s right to amend state constitutions and threats to that right today. It explains how democratic proportionality review can help courts distinguish unconstitutional infringement of the right from legitimate regulation. More broadly, the Essay considers the distinctive state constitutional architecture that popular amendment illuminates.

the yale law journal 129:1568 2020 1572 of any police officer or flagperson or other person duly empowered to regulate traffic,” yet the statute does not define “lawful order or direction.”17 In 1973, a trial court interpreted the New York provision to allow officers to give com-