Law and literature ranges wide. Scholars use Shakespeare to illuminate issues of justice, Dickens to understand trusts and estates, and J.K. Rowling to explain the law of nations. But an important subset of this field has been hitherto neglected: the study of the names of law's protagonists-law and onomastics.

This Essay takes the first step into this promising arena by identifying a previously unexplored category of cases, which it dubs "legal aptonyms." Many are familiar with aptonyms but lack the vocabulary to describe them. Aptonyms—literally "apt names"—are those proper names that are "regarded as (humorously) appropriate to a person's profession or personal characteristics." Think of Shakespeare's quick-tempered Sir Hotspur, Dickens's acerbic Mrs. Sowerberry, or Rowling's pernicious Draco Malfoy. Although the study of aptonyms is widespread in other fields, it has yet to make inroads into law. Until now.

Forty years ago, in Branzburg v. Hayes, the Supreme Court made its first and only inquiry into the constitutional protection of the relationship between a reporter and a confidential source. This case-decided at a moment in American history in which the role of an investigative press, and of information provided by confidential sources, was coming to the forefront of public consciousness in a new and significant way-produced a reporter-focused "privilege" that is now widely regarded to be both doctrinally questionable and deeply inconsistent in application. Although the post-Branzburg privilege has been recognized as flawed in a variety of ways, commentators and scholars have largely ignored its most fundamental shortcoming: by making the reporter the nucleus of the constitutional inquiry, the Court has unnecessarily complicated an analysis that has a much more natural doctrinal starting point. This Article argues that the Court should abandon its reporter-based approach to confidential source cases and replace it with a constitutional inquiry that focuses on the anonymous source. It suggests that analyzing confidential-source cases based on the anonymous-speech rights of sources rather than on the information flow or newsgathering rights of the reporters will more fully acknowledge the scope of First Amendment interests at stake and will eliminate the need to define who is a "reporter" for purposes of the privilege-a task that has become complicated to a degree of near impossibility as technological changes alter the primary mechanisms for gathering and disseminating news.

This Article argues in favor of standing based on expected value of harm. Standing doctrine has been constructed in a way that is oblivious to the idea of expected value. If people have suffered a loss with a positive expected value, they have suffered an "injury in fact." The incorporation of expected value into standing doctrine casts doubt on many of the Supreme Court's decisions in which it denies standing because the relevant injury is too "speculative" or is not "likely" to be redressed by a decree in the plaintiff's favor. This Article addresses this shortcoming in standing jurisprudence by proposing a theory of expected value-based standing. It argues that the Constitution presents no obstacle to expected value-based standing, that the "injury-in-fact" test requires only a positive expected value, and that the prudential barrier to generalized grievances is the sole obstacle to expected value-based standing.

The Sixth Amendment gives a defendant the right to control his defense and the right to a lawyer's assistance. A lawyer's assistance, however, sometimes interferes with a defendant's control over his case. As a result, the Supreme Court, over time, has had to delineate the spheres of authority that pertain to counsel and defendant respectively. The Court has not yet decisively assigned control over mitigating evidence to either counsel or defendant. This Note argues that counsel should control the presentation of mitigating evidence during capital sentencing. First, and most importantly, decisions concerning the presentation of mitigating evidence are best characterized as strategic, and the Sixth Amendment right to counsel allocates strategic decisions to attorneys. Second, the criminal justice system's need for reliable and legitimate outcomes-a need that reaches its zenith during capital sentencing-outweighs a capital defendant's limited claims to autonomy.

Repossession of secured collateral is a fundamental component of the consumer credit industry. The Uniform Commercial Code authorizes a secured party to engage in self-help repossession of secured collateral under section 9-609, so long as the repossession takes place without "breach of the peace." While that term is undefined, several courts have adopted a counterintuitive rule, holding that a law-enforcement officer's presence during a self-help repossession-regardless of purpose or level of involvement-creates a breach of the peace. The Official Comments to the Code have seemingly endorsed this position as well. This Note rejects the primary justifications courts have offered to justify a bright-line rule and makes clear that an officer's involvement in self-help repossession is unrelated to breach of the peace. The correct approach to law-enforcement-officer involvement in self-help repossessions asks whether the officer's presence constitutes state action. An officer's involvement should only invalidate a repossession where it is deemed state action sufficient to trigger a constitutional violation under section 1983. In such cases, the repossession is not of the sort authorized by section 9-609 and would therefore be wrongful, rather than a breach of the peace. In accordance with this approach, this Note concludes with a proposal for a modified Official Comment to section 9-609.

Sometime this year the Supreme Court will announce its holding in Fisher v. University of Texas at Austin, a case that asks whether colleges may continue to consider race when making admissions decisions. Most Court watchers predict that the five conservative justices will vote to curtail the use of racial preferences. Lost in the weighty discussions about the scope of the Equal Protection Clause and the meaning of the Civil Rights struggle is any clear and concise explanation of how selective colleges actually make admissions decisions and how they work to fulfill the goals of affirmative action. This Essay seeks to fill the gap.

I draw the following conclusions from the two years I worked in the Admissions Office at Princeton University. As part of the job, I interviewed hundreds of high school seniors and evaluated thousands of college applications. I also helped to implement the University’s full battery of affirmative action policies. To put a fine point on it, I routinely pushed to reject white applicants with higher SAT scores and GPAs in favor of less credentialed black students.