A Baltimore library refused to admit Louise Kerr to a training program because she was black. Not that it had anything against blacks, but its patrons did. When Kerr launched a civil suit against the library alleging a violation of equal protection of the laws, the courts credited the library’s claim that it had no racist purpose, but Kerr still prevailed—even though the case occurred before Title VII and Brown v. Board of Education. Here a neutral and generally applicable rule (“serve the patrons”), when coupled with particular facts about private parties (the white patrons dislike blacks), yielded an unconstitutional outcome.

From the inception of the administrative state, scholars have proposed various models of agency decison-making to render such decison-making accountable and effective, only to see those models falter when confronted by actual practice. Until now, the “presidential control” model has been largely impervious to this pattern. That model, which brings agency decison-making under the direction of the president, has strengthened over time, winning broad scholarly endorsement and bipartisan political support. But it, like prior models, relies on abstractions—for example, that the president represents public preferences and resists parochial pressures—that do not hold up as a factual matter. 

This Article challenges a foundational assumption about eminent domain—namely, that owners are systematically undercompensated because they receive only fair market value for their property. In fact, scholars may have overstated the undercompensation problem because they have focused on the compensation required by the Constitution, rather than on the actual mechanics of the eminent domain process. The Article examines three ways that “Takers” (i.e., nonjudicial actors in the eminent domain process) minimize undercompensation. 

In 1925, baseball great Ty Cobb said, “The great trouble with baseball today is that most of its players are in the game for the money that’s in it—not for the love of it, the excitement of it, [or] the thrill of it.”

Eighty-one years later, many fans would label Cobb a visionary for having foreseen the major role that money would play not only in Major League Baseball, but in all of professional sports. With high salaries, ticket prices, and profits, professional sports are no longer just a game, but a big business worth billions of dollars. Accordingly, as the financial interests of professional sports have become primary, leagues have been forced to deal with many of our nation’s business regulations.

The extraordinary outbreak of corporate scandals in large public companies like Enron and WorldCom prompted Congress to enact the Sarbanes-Oxley Act of 2002 (“Sarbanes-Oxley” or “SOX”) to thwart corporate fraud and restore public confidence in corporate governance. As the most far-reaching securities regulations since the securities laws originally passed in 1933 and 1934, Sarbanes-Oxley sought to rein in corporate fraud by enhancing disclosure, strengthening auditor and audit committee independence, holding senior management accountable, and imposing tougher civil and criminal penalties for violations.