Harvard Law & Policy Review

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The Equal Rights Amendment: Making Our Union More Perfect

By: Ally Coll & Michelle Kallen    In January 2020, Virginia became the 38th state to ratify the Equal Rights Amendment (ERA). Thirty-eight should have been the magic number: Article V of the United States Constitution, which lays out the process for Constitutional amendments, provides that a proposed amendment becomes part of the Constitution as soon as it is ratified by ¾ of the states. But advancing women’s legal rights in the United States has never followed an easy or …

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Agency Names Do Not Constrain Agency Powers

By: Ryan H. Nelson   In January, the Supreme Court quashed the best thing our government had done to fight the pandemic.  In a 6-3 opinion, the Court paused implementation of the Biden Administration’s workplace vaccine-or-test-and-mask requirement for larger private employers until its legal challenges resolved. Granting such a drastic provisional remedy requires a determination that the challengers are likely to prevail at the end of the litigation.  The Court’s majority believed …

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SB 8 Reveals the Difference Between a Private Vigilante Law and a Private Attorney General Statute

By Poppy Alexander and Chris McLamb*   During the oral arguments heard by the Supreme Court last week regarding Texas’s anti-abortion statute (SB 8), a significant part of the back-and-forth was devoted to whether the law can be compared to a whistleblower statute. SB 8 enlists private citizens to report other citizens for exercising their constitutional rights––a far cry from whistleblower laws that enlist private citizens to go after fraudsters who cheat the government and the …

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SB 8’s Unnoticed “Sword of Damocles” Provision

By David S. Cohen*   Texas’s Senate Bill 8 (SB8) is, to use a technical legal word, bonkers. And I’m not even talking about the substance of the bill, which is a clearly unconstitutional ban on abortions at six weeks of pregnancy, which is long before viability. Rather, the law is bonkers because of all of the procedural irregularities built into it. Consider the following abnormalities: …

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Asylum, Interrupted

By Haiyun Damon-Feng*   One of the cruelest and most devastating Trump-era immigration policies was the Remain in Mexico policy, formally titled the “Migrant Protection Protocols” (MPP).[1] MPP upended decades of established asylum law and practice, forcing asylum seekers to wait in Mexico pursuant to a bilateral agreement between the U.S. and Mexico—where many were kidnapped, raped, tortured, or otherwise exploited or killed for their vulnerability as migrants—while they pursued …

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Restoring the Right to Seek Asylum: The Case for Rescinding Removal Orders Issued Under the “Remain in Mexico” Policy

By Haiyun Damon-Feng*   In January 2019, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) began implementing the inaptly named “Migrant Protection Protocols” (MPP), often referred to as the “Remain in Mexico” policy. MPP is a coercive, inhumane, and likely unlawful U.S. immigration policy that marked a stark departure from U.S. asylum law and procedure. Asylum is a humanitarian protection available to people fleeing persecution in their home countries, including people who have suffered …

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