Corporate targets of union “comprehensive campaigns” increasingly have responded by filing civil Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act (RICO) lawsuits alleging that unions’ speech and petitioning activities are extortionate.  These lawsuits are the descendants of the Supreme Court’s unexplained treatment of much labor speech as less worthy of protection than other types of speech.  Starting from the position that speech that promotes democratic discourse deserves top-tier First Amendment protection, I argue that labor speech—which plays a unique role in civil society—should be on an equal footing with civil rights speech.  Thus, even if union advocacy qualifies as legal extortion, the First Amendment should trump civil RICO enforcement, with two limited exceptions:  speech that is actually malicious, and speech that imminently threatens to force an employer to choose between breaking the law and suffering significant economic harm or shutting its doors altogether.

   In Samantar v. Yousuf, 130 S. Ct. 2278 (2010), decided in June 2010, the U.S. Supreme Court held that the Foreign Sovereign Immunities Act (FSIA), the federal immunity statute, does not protect foreign government officials sued in U.S. courts.  The decision resolved longstanding splits among the circuits and between the circuits and the Executive Branch on an issue that is key to international relations and hotly contested around the world:  When are government officials immune from suit in the courts o f a foreign state?  The Court remanded to the lower court to determine whether common law immunity protects foreign officials such as the defendant, a former official of Somalia who has been sued for torture and summary execution.

   With little guidance from the Supreme Court, the lower courts are now charged with developing common law standards to determine when a foreign official is immune from suit in the United States.  Suits for human rights violations will be particularly contentious, as the courts seek to reconcile the competing demands of sovereign immunity and human rights norms.

   The courts will not be able to simply adopt common law principles applied before the FSIA was enacted in 1976, because both international and U.S. norms governing accountability for human rights violations have changed dramatically since that time.  Instead, courts should look for guidance to international and domestic immunity principles and doctrines developed in U.S. human rights litigation.  When foreign officials violate clearly defined, widely accepted international law norms, they act outside of their lawful authority and are not entitled to immunity.

   In 2010, the U.S. Courts of Appeals for the Third and Ninth Circuits joined the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Eleventh Circuit in upholding the constitutionality of blanket strip search policies in correctional institutions.  As a result, more government officials across the country can strip search arrestees and pretrial detainees as a matter of routine procedure without any reasonable suspicion that the detainees have contraband.  These detainees include individuals without criminal histories who are arrested for traffic or other minor offenses, and who have done nothing to suggest that they are attempting to smuggle contraband into correctional facilities.

   This Note recognizes that an objective legal analysis can be informed by relevant social science findings and relies on an interdisciplinary approach in analyzing the constitutionality of strip search policies.  Research has consistently found that strip searches are invasive, humiliating, and traumatizing even when conducted professionally and according to protocol.  At worst, strip search policies allow corrections officers to abuse their power and systematically perpetrate sexual violence toward detainees.  Ultimately, this Note argues that blanket strip search policies are unconstitutional and that courts must only uphold strip searches when there is an individualized, reasonable suspicion that a detainee is concealing contraband.

   In today’s economy, the effects of a bad credit report are devastating to consumers.  Individuals with poor credit history are often crippled in their ability to purchase even the smallest item, and consequently turn for help to credit repair organizations advertising services that cure bad credit.  Frequently, however, these organizations merely accept high fees from customers already in dire fin ancial straits, without improving their financial standing.  To combat these predatory practices, Congress passed the Credit Repair Organizations Act (CROA), which imposes several requirements on credit repair organizations.  One such provision mandates that credit repair organizations give a form to each consumer that clearly explains their specific rights before any contract is signed.  This required disclosure form notifies consumers that they have “the right to sue” a credit repair organization that violates any provision of the CROA.  References to this right, however, appear nowhere else in the statute.

   Many credit repair organizations include mandatory arbitration clauses in their contracts with consumers.  As a result, consumers who have received a form notifying them of a “right to sue” may be told, by both companies and courts, that they may not seek redress in a court of law.  Circuit courts have split on the enforceability of these arbitration agreements.

   In the context of both consumer protection law and recent arbitration jurisprudence, this Note examines the purported collision between the CROA and the longstanding Supreme Court policy in favor of enforcing arbitration agreements pursuant to the Federal Arbitration Act.  After examining the passage of the CROA and the history of arbitration as a mechanism for dispute resolution, this Note analyzes the divergent approaches taken by the U.S. Courts of Appeals for the Third, Ninth, and Eleventh Circuits in addressing this conflict.  Ultimately, this Note recommends that courts enforce these arbitration clauses in order to preserve the viability of arbitration as an effective method of dispute resolution.

   The plain view doctrine is based on the practical logic that an officer need not turn a blind eye to evidence that is immediately apparent as incriminating when he is lawfully present, where the object can be seen, and where he has a legal right to access that object.  However, in the context of digital searches, this basic logic is stretched to a point that directly conflicts with the original purposes of the Fourth Amendment.  The immense amount of data present on computers makes these searches much more intrusive.  Officers employ search methods and techniques to access files that involve more investigation than the plain view doctrine ever intended.  The problems presented by new technology to placing reasonable limits on the scope of otherwise valid Fourth Amendment searches have caused many courts to defer to traditional methods of analysis, rather than prompting courts to devise a new approach that could better reflect the realities of how police conduct these searches.  Certain courts—which this Note designates “traditionalist”—find no reason to change what is a physical doctrine in the digital context, but rather allow it to progress incrementally.

   This Note argues that courts have made no progress towards appropriately defining reasonableness in the context of digital searches, and that they should be imposing a heightened particularity standard for digital warrants, as well as additional prophylactic steps, as the U.S. Courts of Appeals for the Ninth and (to a lesser extent) Tenth Circuits have suggested. The traditionalist interpretation encouraged law enforcement authorities and training manuals to take advantage of this lax position, and plead general concerns common to all computer cases to justify broad search warrants.  Moreover, the same general concerns that convince magistrates to draw such general warrants lead district court judges to defer to an investigator’s discretion.  To remain consistent with the original spirit of the Fourth Amendment, as a bar against unfettered police discretion and arbitrary governmental action, courts must adopt a new approach.

   The Alien Tort Statute (ATS) provides foreign plaintiffs with the sole means of obtaining jurisdiction in U.S. courts for alleged human rights abuses.  These plaintiffs increasingly seek to hold corporations accountable for complicity in some of the most notorious violations of international law occurring overseas.  Prior to 2010, U.S. courts routinely entertained ATS claims against corporations without question.  Yet, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit in Kiobel v. Royal Dutch Petroleum Co. recently held that the ATS does not provide foreign plaintiffs redress against corporate entities.  The Second Circuit relied solely on international law in making this finding.

   This Note examines whether international or domestic law should control a court’s determination of which defendants may be held liable under the ATS.  This Note analyzes the established choice of law principles for determining what constitutes a “violation of the law of nations” and the recent split between circuits on who can be liable for such a violation.  From this discussion, this Note advocates a new approach to choice of law principles based on the difference between conduct and remedies under the ATS.  The U.S. Supreme Court undoubtedly requires lower courts to consider international law in determining whether a defendant’s conduct violates international law.  Once this is established, domestic law provides the means for holding that defendant—whether an individual or corporate entity—accountable.

    This Note examines the appropriate regulatory framework for the distribution of commercial video content over broadband networks.  As online video providers such as Netflix and Hulu expand, they are beginning to compete directly with the video services of major cable and telecommunications companies.  Frequently, these companies also serve as a customer’s Internet service provider, leaving them in the position of carrying these competitive services over their broadband networks.  This conflict has led to calls for regulation that would protect nascent online video services from feared anticompetitive actions by the major providers.

     In April 2010, against the backdrop of this expanding conflict, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit in Comcast Corporation v. FCC dealt a blow to the Federal Communications Commission’s (FCC) ability to regulate in this arena.  There, the circuit court invalidated the FCC’s jurisdictional approach to regulating broadband Internet.  Although the FCC has subsequently reasserted its jurisdiction over broadband, the fallout from Comcast has rekindled debates as to whether broadband is best governed by proscriptive FCC regulation, or whether oversight of this marketplace should be left to the general antitrust authorities—the Department of Justice and the Federal Trade Commission.  This Note discusses the jurisdictional challenges to broadband oversight faced by each agency, and assesses the substantive and procedural merits of FCC and antitrust governance regimes.  It then argues that, given the uncertainty regarding its authority, the FCC should abandon its efforts to regulate broadband video distribution in the absence of clear market harms.  Finally, this Note proposes that this dynamic and rapidly evolving marketplace should develop outside the bounds of proscriptive regulations, with antitrust serving as a backstop if market intervention proves necessary.

     In an effort to crack down on offshore tax evasion, the United States is implementing a new set of information reporting and withholding requirements on foreign banks and other foreign entities.  These provisions, known as the Foreign Account Tax Compliance Act (FATCA) provisions of the Hiring Incentives to Restore Employment (HIRE) Act, require thirty percent withholding of the entity’s U.S.-source income, unless they disclose specific information regarding their customers’ identities and account balances.  While this may be an effective way to force foreign institutions into compliance, it also raises questions about how it will function within existing tax reporting systems, where the function of withholding serves a materially different purpose.

     The FATCA reporting and withholding provisions depart from the norm of using withholding as a tax enforcement mechanism, and instead use it as a coercive compliance measure.  This Comment looks to current domestic and international withholding systems as a point of comparison for this new regime.  By examining the objectives and operation of these existing systems as compared to those of FATCA, it becomes clear that withholding income serves a drastically different purpose.  Existing systems utilize withholding as a means of ensuring that taxes will be paid, while FATCA implements it as a way to force foreign banks to comply with a set of reporting requirements.  Considering this is the first time withholding appears to be used in this way, it is prudent to ask whether this is a desirable use of withholding in our current international taxation system.  This Comment posits that, without significant revision to account for conflicts arising with pre-existing obligations, converting the accepted concept of withholding into a drastically different punitive measure is both undesirable and unacceptable.