Whitehead pled guilty to burning personal property and to felony animal cruelty. The crime of burning personal property carried a sentence of six to eight months in prison; however, the crime of felony animal cruelty brought only a sentence of probation, with a possible sentence of four to five months in prison if the terms of probation are violated. This trivial sentence sparked a wave of controversy and debate. Citizens sent letters and emails to state legislators, resulting in Susie’s Law. This new law increases penalties for certain animal cruelty acts in North Carolina.

Recent cases such as Brown v. Pena and Graham v. Florida demonstrate the utility and wisdom of judicial nudges when penal politics are mired in incapacitation stagnation. Ultimately, however, guides and constraints governing the political branches are needed for sustainable change.  The Article analyzes the potential of what it terms “rehabilitation pragmatism” to anchor reforms. Rehabilitation pragmatism is cautious and selective in choosing beneficiaries and attentive to the need for evidence of efficacy, cost-effectiveness and success. The Article argues that as we turn to such data-driven approaches in decision-making, the distribution of benefits and burdens across historically disadvantaged groups should be an important component of efficacy assessments. Performance measures should take into account human and community as well as fiscal costs. The Article also advocates penal impact analysis to curb the tendency to enact a thicket of criminal laws without consideration of systemic costs.  Penal impact analysis provides for front-end examination of the fiscal consequences of criminal legislation, curbing the pathological politics of crime.

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Fortunately, North Carolina has not experienced a crisis of judicial independence or integrity. While there may be no perfect way to select judges, judicial elections in North Carolina have ensured that the judiciary remains independent of the other branches of government and that judges remain directly accountable to the people. The merit-based proposal championed by Professor Carrington and the State Bar Association removes that accountability, giving an unelected nominating committee of legal elites the authority to determine who will serve as judges in North Carolina. As a result, voters should be cautious before amending a provision of the North Carolina Constitution that has served them well for more than 140 years.

The Ghent system is a voluntary system of unemployment insurance in which labor unions administer publicly subsidized insurance funds and, along with employers and the state, participate in unemployment insurance policymaking. The Ghent system helps overcome three separate problems in collective employment relations that existing labor law in the United States attempts to resolve in evidently ineffective ways, which the EFCA had sought to reform. First, the Ghent system encourages employers to recognize and bargain with unions by providing workers with incentives to join labor unions prior to and independent of the employers’ recognition of the union. Second, voluntary, union-administered unemployment insurance provides an alternative “selective incentive” that reduces free riding on collective union goods. Finally, union and employer collaboration in unemployment insurance policy generates efficiency gains that underwrite cooperative labor relations and reduce employer resistance and workplace adversarialism. In exchange for generous unemployment benefits, unions yield on employment-protection rules, giving employers more flexibility in the workplace—a bargain referred to as “flexicurity.” The Article concludes by drawing policy lessons from the Ghent system analysis. A “progressive-federalist” strategy of unemployment insurance reform at the state level may be more feasible than federal labor law reform because of the broad deference states enjoy under the federal Social Security Act, but non-legislative lessons can also be applied, as several contemporary and U.S. examples illustrate.

The Article begins by examining the unsuccessful effort to create a broad, internationally-enforceable human right to property during the second half of the twentieth century. Despite this failure, international property law doctrines have evolved in specialized contexts over recent decades. The Article demonstrates that these doctrines stem from four sources: (a) regulation of the global commons; (b) coordination of transboundary property rights; (c) adoption of global policies to prevent specific harms; and (d) protection of the human rights of vulnerable groups.

Finally, the Article argues that the time has come to recognize international property law as a discrete subject, and thereby promote its coherent evolution in future decades. The Article discusses the value of recognizing international property law, explores an international definition of “property,” and analyzes how international property law can be enforced.

This article defends the ministerial exception and tries to flesh out its various rationales in a systematic and comprehensive fashion. It suggests that the ministerial exception may be profitably thought of not as a single indivisible whole, but rather as the overlap of several different discrete immunities, each backed by different justifications. It divides the ministerial exception into three components—a relational component, a conscience component, and an autonomy component. Examining each component separately, this piece tries to offer a richer explanation as to why we have this thing called the ministerial exception.

This piece comes at an opportune time. Nearly forty years after the birth of the ministerial exception in the lower courts, the United States Supreme Court has finally agreed to hear its first ministerial exception case. The case is EEOC v. Hosanna-Tabor, and the Court will have to decide both whether the ministerial exception exists and what it covers. After looking at the ministerial exception in general, this piece concludes by offering some thoughts on the issues presented in Hosanna-Tabor.

This Article explains the state laws that create this problem and why there are no obvious solutions. The Article then surveys the state court decisions on same-sex divorce. In light of this jurisprudence, the Article examines the limited scholarship on how judges should treat divorce petitions from same-sex couples. The Article concludes that judges can often grant those divorce petitions, but that they must pay more attention to the state laws regulating same-sex unions than current scholarship suggests. Although legislative solutions to the same-sex divorce problem have been almost completely ignored, this Article argues that legislatures are in the best position to solve the problem. Specifically, this Article suggests that states that recognize same-sex marriage should allow any same-sex couple married in the state to divorce there, whether or not the members of the couple reside in the state at the time of the divorce. This Article further argues that Williams v. North Carolina, 325 U.S. 226 (1945) does not bar this simple solution, as other writers have assumed. The Article ends by summarizing the most practical solutions to the same-sex divorce problem for judges, legislators, and same-sex couples.

Against this backdrop, this Article explores the ways in which fair use can be revitalized to protect the public interest. It argues for repudiating the narrow-minded characterization of fair use as a mere individual right. The Article then proposes that fair use should instead be redefined as a collective right held by the public, which facilitates and enhances their participation in communicative actions in what I call intangible public space. From this perspective, Section 107 of the Copyright Act should be read as conferring a collective right to fair use upon members of the public.  Moreover, this Article shows the power of the collective right to fair use in generating a set of new legal techniques to enrich copyright adjudication and policy-making discourse for protecting the public interest in the digital age.