For all the drama surrounding the Commerce Clause challenge to the individual mandate provision of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act ("PPACA"), the doctrinal question presented is simple. Under existing doctrine, the provision is as valid as can be. To be sure, the Supreme Court could alter existing doctrine, and many interesting things could be written about the dynamics that sometimes prompt judges to strike out in new directions under the pressures of cases like this one. But it is not my intention to pursue that possibility here. My own suspicion, for what it is worth, is that the Supreme Court will abide by its previously announced doctrines and uphold the individual mandate. So I mean to engage U.S. Department of Health and Human Services v. Florida as the easy case it is and to explore an underappreciated feature of how it came to be so easy. 

One hates to seem ungrateful. Judges and scholars frequently call for Congress to fix problems in the law of jurisdiction and procedure, and Congress doesn't usually intervene. In that light, the Jurisdiction and Venue Clarification Act ("JVCA"),[1] signed into law on December 7, 2011, ought to be a welcome improvement. And hopefully, on balance, it will be. But in at least one area that it attempts to clarify, the JVCA leaves much to be desired.

Professor Arthur Hellman has called the JVCA "the most far-reaching package of revisions to the Judicial Code since the Judicial Improvements Act of 1990."[2] The Act addresses a variety of removal issues-including unrelated federal and state claims, multiple defendants, removal of criminal cases, and the amount in controversy-and makes several major changes to the law of venue. This essay addresses one of those removal issues: the amount in controversy in a case removed from state court. I argue that there are at least three respects in which the JVCA failed to adequately clarify the law of diversity removal jurisdiction.

The recently enacted Leahy-Smith America Invents Act (“AIA”) represents the most significant legislative event affecting patent law and practice in more than half a century. In addressing the AIA, scholars and policymakers have focused with an almost laser-like exclusivity on the AIA’s imposition of a first-to-file-or-first-to-publicly-disclose system, which replaces an over 200-year-old first-to-invent tradition. This myopia, we suggest, overlooks a part of the AIA that could hold a substantially greater potential to jeopardize American innovation, job creation, and economic competitiveness: the imposition of a mechanism for supplemental examination. 

The Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act of 2010 has stirred considerable controversy. In the public debate over the program, many of its proponents have defended it by focusing on what is sometimes called the “free-rider” problem. In a prior article, we contended that the free-rider problem has been greatly exaggerated and was not a significant factor in the congressional decision to adopt the Act.  We maintained that the free-rider issue is a red herring advanced to trigger an emotional attraction to the Act and distract attention from the actual issues that favor and disfavor its adoption.In a recently published article, Professors Nicholas Bagley and Jill Horwitz responded to our article. For the sake of convenience, we will sometimes refer to the two professors collectively as “the professors.” In addition to addressing the free-rider issue, they also made a number of points in defense of the Act. We will concentrate on responding to those items that we discussed in our prior article and deal with only some of their broader points. While not mentioned by the professors, one matter worth noting is the effect that the cost of implementing the Act may have on the economy. While cost is not the only potentially unfavorable feature of the medical care program that the Act creates, its economic impact should weigh heavily in evaluating its merits.

A major objection to the Act is the belief that it will impose a huge cost at a time when the government should be reducing expenditures. Proponents dispute this objection: based on a set of assumptions as to future events and behavior, the government maintains that the program will generate a surplus. We are not alone in believing that the assumptions on which that projection is made are unrealistic and that the program will greatly impair the economy. For example, the Act requires a reduction in Medicare disbursements and anticipates those savings will offset some of the Act’s costs, yet there are reasons to suspect that the proposed cuts in Medicare will never materialize or will be repealed when the consequence of making them surfaces. While we also will not grapple with that issue, we are deeply skeptical of the government’s contention. For this reason, we choose to refer to the Act as the “Unaffordable Health Act” (or the “Act”).

The Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act of 2010 ("ACA") raises numerous policy and legal issues, but none have attracted as much attention from lawyers as Section 1501. This provision, titled "Maintenance of Minimum Essential Coverage," but better known as the "individual mandate," requires most Americans to obtain health insurance for themselves and their dependents by 2014. We are dismayed that the narrow issue of the mandate and the narrower issue of free riding have garnered so much attention when our nation's health-care system suffers from countless problems. By improving quality, controlling costs, and extending coverage to the uninsured, the ACA means to address many of those problems. And it's about time. The United States has lower insurance coverage rates and lower life expectancy than most developed countries, and our system does poorly on several dimensions of quality. Worse still, we spend much more on health care than any other country-$2.5 trillion, or 17.6 percent of gross domestic product, in 2009. These measures of total spending mask grave distributional concerns: 52 million people went without insurance during some part of 2010.

Section 1501 of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act added section 5000A to the Internal Revenue Code to require most individuals in the United States, beginning in the year 2014, to purchase an established minimum level of medical insurance. This requirement, which is enforced by a penalty imposed on those who fail to comply, is sometimes referred to as the "individual mandate." The individual mandate is one element of a vast change to the provision of medical care that Congress implemented in 2010. The individual mandate has proved to be controversial and has been the subject of a number of lawsuits contending that it is unconstitutional. It is not our purpose in this article to discuss its constitutionality. Rather, this piece focuses on the viability of one of the justifications that often is put forth for the adoption of the individual mandate: the "free-rider" problem.

This Term, the Supreme Court was presented with a prime opportunity to provide some much-needed clarification on a "backdrop" issue of law-one of many topics that arises in a variety of legal contexts, but is rarely analyzed on its own terms. In J.D.B. v. North Carolina, the Court considered whether age was a relevant factor in determining if a suspect is "in custody" for Miranda purposes, and thus must have her rights read to her before being questioned by the police. Miranda, like dozens of other areas of law, employs a reasonable person test on the custodial question: it asks whether a reasonable person would, given the circumstances, believe that she is free to leave. The issue posed by J.D.B., then, was whether age counts as part of a suspect's "circumstances" for Miranda purposes. Unfortunately, the Court's June opinion managed only to compound the confusion and, in an ironic twist, did so while extolling the virtue of providing "clear guidance to the police." This Essay critically examines the J.D.B. opinion, using it as a lens to both critique the traditional objective/subjective distinction and articulate a more honest interpretation of the reasonable person test-one based on the uncomfortable truth that the test is, at its core, arbitrary.

With Stare Decisis and Constitutional Text, Jonathan Mitchell has produced what I think is the most interesting and creative textual defense (or at least partial defense) to date of the use of horizontal precedent in federal constitutional cases. Mitchell's careful analysis of the Supremacy Clause is fascinating and instructive, and he does an impeccable job of drawing out the implications of his premise that the Supremacy Clause prescribes only a very limited choice-of-law rule-a rule that does not, by its own terms, specifically elevate the Constitution above federal statutes and treaties. His innovative and intriguing framework yields four distinct conclusions about the permissible uses of precedent. In brief, under Mitchell's analysis, the Supremacy Clause forbids using precedent (1) to invalidate congressional statutes (because congressional statutes are the supreme law of the land while prior court decisions are not) or (2) to uphold constitutionally challenged state laws (because the Constitution is the supreme law of the land while prior court decisions and state-law interpretations of the Constitution are not). Yet, according to Mitchell, the Supremacy Clause does not forbid using precedent (3) to uphold congressional statutes (because both the Constitution and congressional statutes are equally supreme, and there is no constitutional mandate to prefer one to the other) or (4) to invalidate state laws (because neither prior court decisions nor state laws are supreme, and there is no constitutional mandate to prefer one to the other). The article is an eminently worthy contribution to a vibrant debate, and I am delighted to have the opportunity to respond to it-as well as to clarify some ambiguities in my own prior work on precedent.

The Constitution's original meaning is its meaning to those ratifying the document during a discrete time period: from its adoption by the Constitutional Convention in late 1787 until Rhode Island's ratification on May 29, 1790. Reconstructing it requires historical skills, including a comprehensive approach to sources. Jack Balkin's article Commerce fails to consider the full range of evidence and thereby attributes to the Constitution's Commerce Clause a scope that virtually no one in the Founding Era believed it had.

John P. Bringewatt's recent note makes several important observations about the Supreme Court's opinion in Snyder v. Louisiana. Although he provides reasonable support for the claim that Snyder represents a sea change in Batson jurisprudence, the US Supreme Court's fresh opinion in Thaler v. Haynes (rendered on February 22, 2010) reads the Snyder majority opinion narrowly and suggests the possibility that Snyder is not as potent as it should be. The Haynes per curiam's guarded reading of Snyder signals the need for courts to continue to conduct the bird's-eye cumulative analysis that the Court performed in Miller-El v. Dretke[hereinafter Miller-El II]. If lawyers challenging discriminatory peremptory strikes and trial courts replicate Snyder's single-juror approach but ignore concomitant Miller-El circumstantial evidence of intentional discrimination, Snyder may (counterintuitively) sap Miller-El II of its on-the-ground transformative potential. In other words, lawyers should not rely too much on the "more individualized focus" observed and applauded by the author because a narrow framing of a Batson challenge in the Snyder opinion's image (rather than a wider framing with a focus on the Miller-El factors) may fail in front of courts that view Snyder differently than does Bringewatt. A slightly different interpretation of the historical arc of the relevant cases and a critical reconsideration of Snyder's circumstances foreshadow the outcome in Haynes and reveal nuances that suggest problems with Bringewatt's theory.

A response to Nelson Tebbe & Robert L. Tsai, Constitutional Borrowing, 108 Mich. L. Rev. 462 (2010).

Crediting the perception that the Constitution is a poorly cut puzzle whose variously configured pieces don't match, Nelson Tebbe and Robert Tsai propose that the stand-alone parts of freedom and equality can be merged and mutually enlarged through the act of borrowing. They are mistaken. While Thomas Jefferson wrote that ideas may be appropriated without being diminished and so "freely spread from one to another over the globe," the equality and freedom the Constitution addresses as actualities are constrained by a basic, familiar, and inescapable rule of financial accounting. Just as assets and liabilities must be in balance, freedoms are only acquired at the exacting expense of equality; no amount of borrowing can alter the equation. While as a matter of principle we are all equally entitled to be "let alone," this "most comprehensive right . . . the right most valued by civilized men," is not a one-size-fits-all proposition. While "the poorest man in his cottage" and the richest man in his mansion may both "bid defiance to all the forces of the Crown," the amount of privacy they enjoy as a matter of fact is incomparable. The privacy enjoyed by those unable to afford lodgings of any kind and forced to take refuge in their cars is further diminished as a matter of law, while the "homeless" sleeping out of doors and exposed to the elements enjoy no expectation of privacy apart from what they manage to secure in duffle bags. The Court's express rejection of the claim that the "‘need for decent shelter' and the ‘right to retain peaceful possession of one's home' are fundamental interests which are particularly important to the poor"-like its assertion that education is not a "fundamental right"-follows from the proposition that laws "having different effects on the wealthy and the poor" are not unconstitutional, and from the consequence of that proposition: that the freedoms most valued by Americans are for purchase. The wealthier the man, the more unequal the share he can afford.

In our article, Negligence and Insufficient Activity, we proposed that tort scholarship has overlooked the risk that injurers will behave strategically in setting their activity levels. Whereas the standard literature has predicted that injurers who are subject to a negligence regime will often invest efficiently in care but choose excessive activity levels, we showed that they may do exactly the opposite: injurers may deliberately restrict their activity to avoid investments in socially desirable precaution. After reviewing the conditions that may give rise to the risk of insufficient activity, we examined the ways in which the legal system can minimize the costs of such behavior. We hoped that our article would spark new interest in the interplay between tort liability and levels of care and activity. We are fortunate that three prominent tort scholars have already provided important insights on both our positive argument and our policy recommendations.

These responses vary in their assessments of our contribution to legal scholarship. While some find that our article addresses an "interesting omission in tort law scholarship" and highlights a "missing paradigm" that is "central to negligence doctrine," others consider it a "novel brick on a road that runs in the wrong direction." Nevertheless, and although the responses focus on different parts of the article, they share several important objections to our analysis.

A response to John F. Manning, Federalism and the Generality Problem in Constitutional Interpretation, 122 Harv. L. Rev. 2003 (2009).

Professor John Manning's analysis of the Supreme Court's recent federalism decisions works as a platform to further the cause of textualism. His argument fails to persuade, however, because the textualism he says the Court should embrace in federalism cases is antithetical to the atextual nature of the Court's jurisdiction to adjudicate the constitutionality of legislation. Manning prefaces his work by telling readers that his analysis is not an end in itself. His aim, rather, is to "use the methodology" the cases embrace as "a window into the commonalities, if any, between statutory and constitutional interpretation." But Manning's overly programmatic approach does not so much open this portal as close it shut. His insistence that legislative acts and the Constitution are alike is impossible to square with the theory of our written constitution that has prevailed ever since John Marshall and Alexander Hamilton first propounded it: that the acts of a superior must trump those of every inferior authority.

A response to David Gilo & Ehud Guttel, Negligence and Insufficient Activity: The Missing Paradigm in Torts, 108 Mich L. Rev. 277 (2009).

In Negligence and Insufficient Activity: The Missing Paradigm in Torts, David Gilo and Ehud Guttel argue that negligence law encourages inefficiently high and low levels of activity because negligence law ordinarily does not take activity levels into account. They suggest that the law should impose liability for failing to take safety precautions-even where precautions would not be cost-justified-whenever the threat of this liability negates the incentive for an actor to choose an insufficient level of activity. Until now, the literature on the interaction between liability standards and activity levels has failed to recognize the possibility of inefficiently insufficient activity. I commend Gilo and Guttel for both their insight and their explication of it.

A response to David Gilo & Ehud Guttel, Negligence and Insufficient Activity: The Missing Paradigm in Torts, 108 Mich L. Rev. 277 (2009).

Professors David Gilo and Ehud Guttel have written an important article on the tendency of the negligence rule to produce inefficiently low activity levels. In Negligence and Insufficient Activity: The Missing Paradigm in Torts, the authors claim insufficient activity to be the "missing paradigm" in tort theory. Although I agree with Gilo and Guttel that this missing paradigm is central to negligence doctrine, I disagree with them about how insufficient activity levels arise.

A response to David Gilo & Ehud Guttel, Negligence and Insufficient Activity: The Missing Paradigm in Torts, 108 Mich. L. Rev. 277 (2009).

Within the law and economics field, there often surfaces a near hypnotic attraction to the Hand formula as the one and only tool that drives tort law toward economic efficiency. Hand's intuition was, of course, that the test for efficiency requires a balancing of three variables. The burden of taking particular precautions is compared to the expected loss from some activity, which in turn consists of the likelihood of some particular harm multiplied by its anticipated severity. Liability attaches only where the burden of precautions is lower than the anticipated accident costs. By forcing cost-effective precautions and no others on potential tortfeasors, so the story goes, tort law weeds out desirable from undesirable conduct.

A Response to Ariel Porat, Private Production of Public Goods: Liability for Unrequested Benefits, 108 Mich. L. Rev. (2009).

One of the more intriguing questions in tort law is the case of joint and several tortfeasors and the dilution-of-liability puzzle. When harm materializes and there are multiple potential tortfeasors, the law tends to limit the number of joint tortfeasors, focusing the final burden on a small number of actors. This limitation is achieved by several legal mechanisms, such as a no duty rule, a narrow interpretation of negligence, a restrictive implementation of the causal link (be it the but for test, the proximate cause test or the rule of intervening cause test), and a doctrine of remoteness of damage. Thus, in the typical accident example, if A, B, and C inflicted risk upon D, often times the tort system will filter out A and B and leave only C to carry the final burden. Ariel Porat's outline of the Expanded Duty of Restitution in his article, Private Production of Public Goods: Liability for Unrequested Benefits, provides an interesting and provocative solution to the dilution of liability puzzle.