Scholars and courts have divided views on whether presidential supervision enhances the legitimacy of the administrative state. For some, that the President can supervise administrative agencies is key to seeing agency action as legitimate, because of the President's accountability to the electorate. Others, however, have argued that such supervision may simply taint, rather than legitimate, an agency action.

The reality is that presidential supervision of agency rulemaking, at least, appears to be both significant and opaque. This Article presents evidence from multiple presidential administrations suggesting that regulatory review conducted by the White House's Office of Management and Budget is associated with high levels of changes in agency rules. Further, this Article documents the comparative silence regarding the effect of that supervision. The Office of Management and Budget and the agencies generally do not report the content of supervision by presidential offices. They also do not report whether a particular agency decision is consistent with presidential preferences. Silence about content, this Article suggests, threatens to undermine the promise of presidential influence as a source of legitimacy for the administrative state.

American nonprofit organizations receive favorable tax treatment, including tax exemptions and tax-deductibility of contributions, in return for their devotion to charitable purposes and restrictions not to distribute profits. Recent efforts to extend some or all of these tax benefits to for-profit companies making social investments, including the creation of the new hybrid nonprofit/for-profit company form known as the Low-Profit Limited Liability Company, threaten to undermine the vitality of the nonprofit sector and the integrity of the tax system.

This Article introduces an alternate conception of voting as veto-based on "negative preferences" against a voter's least preferred outcomes-that enriches voting theory and practice otherwise dominated by a conception of voting as a means of expressing a voter's ideal preferences. Indeed, the familiar binary choices presented in American political elections obscure the pervasiveness of negative preferences, which are descriptively salient in voting under all types of circumstances. Negative preferences have been overlooked, despite their theoretical and practical importance across many domains, leaving important questions unexplored in the literature. The Article develops a normative and positive account of voting as veto that identifies the costs, benefits, and critical tradeoffs in the formal recognition of negative preferences.

In March 2008, the Supreme Court decided Snyder v. Louisiana, the latest in the line of progeny of Batson v. Kentucky. This Note demonstrates that Snyder is part of a historical pattern of Supreme Court decisions concerning the use of peremptory challenges in which the Court has moved away from permitting the unfettered use of the peremptory challenge in favor of stronger Equal Protection considerations. Snyder alters the requirements for trial judges in deciding Batson challenges by requiring them to provide some explanation of their reasons for accepting a prosecutor's justification of a peremptory challenge. Snyder is the latest step in the historical pattern of trying to create a more enforceable standard to prevent racial discrimination in jury selection and in keeping with this pattern should be broadly interpreted going forward.

In the days following Hurricane Katrina, as lawlessness and violence spread throughout New Orleans, the White House considered invoking the Insurrection Act so that members of the U.S. military could legally perform law enforcement functions inside the flooded city. This Note contends that the White House's decision not to invoke the Act was substantially driven by federalism concerns-in particular, concerns about intruding on Louisiana's sovereignty. But, this Note further contends, in focusing so heavily on these state sovereignty concerns, the White House largely ignored the other side of the "federalism coin"-namely, enabling the federal government to act where national action is desirable. To address future situations where the president may desire to deploy troops domestically for law enforcement functions but may be hesitant to do so for fear of intruding on a state's sovereignty, this Note urges Congress to create a procedural mechanism whereby the president may go to a specially-created judicial body and seek a "warrant" to deploy members of the military for domestic law enforcement. This procedural mechanism would not be entirely new-indeed, the Second Congress of the United States imposed a similar "judicial certification" requirement on the president's ability to deploy the military domestically for law enforcement functions. The procedure suggested here, however, would supplement and not replace the president's current Insurrection Act powers.