Touro Law Review BLOG

Summary:

Professor Randy E. Barnett is a well-known professor at Georgetown University Law Center. Among other things, he has argued before the United States Supreme Court, written a number of books and many law review articles, and taught Constitutional Law and Contracts for decades. Barnett’s academic accomplishments make it all the more interesting that his first job after law school was working as a prosecutor in the Cook County State’s Attorney’s Office in Chicago during the late 1970s and early 1980s.

In Felony Review: Tales of True Crime and Corruption in Chicago, Barnett provides a fascinating account of his time in the State’s Attorney’s Office. In this podcast with Associate Dean Rodger Citron, Barnett discusses why he became a prosecutor, what he learned as a Harvard Law student to prepare for the job, and the many things he learned about professional ethics, charging defendants, and trying cases during his time in the office. As Barnett explains, the title of the book comes from his stint in the Felony Review Unit, a specialized office responsible for reviewing felony charges before they could proceed to court. The unit’s greatest contribution to law enforcement may have been its screening out cases that lacked sufficient evidence to go forward – as Barnett describes, the unit rejected approximately 40 percent of the requests for felony charges that it received.
This podcast will be of great interest to attorneys practicing criminal law, students thinking of becoming prosecutors or defense attorneys, and the professors who teach them.

Learn more about Professor Barnett: 

Randy E. Barnett is the Patrick Hotung Professor of Constitutional Law at the Georgetown University Law Center and the Faculty Director of the Georgetown Center for the Constitution. He is the author of numerous books, includingA Life for Liberty: The Making of an American Originalist, The Original Meaning of the Fourteenth Amendment: Its Letter and Spirit, Restoring the Lost Constitution: The Presumption of Liberty, and Our Republican Constitution: Securing the Liberty and Sovereignty of We the People. A recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship in Constitutional Studies and the Bradley Prize, Professor Barnett has also argued before the U.S. Supreme Court in Gonzalez v. Raich and represented the National Federation of Independent Business in its constitutional challenge to the Affordable Care Act in NFIB v. Sebelius.

By Gavin R. Goldstein

I. INTRODUCTION
If you agree that there has not been an end to racial discrimination
that justifies undermining the Voting Rights Act, then you should
be supporting the right of the State of Israel to exist for the same reasons.

Read or download the full text of the article below.

Summary:

Few works of American literature have enjoyed the cultural longevity of Charles Portis’s True Grit, which has been adapted into two successful films – the first, released in 1969, starred John Wayne, while the second, made by the Coen brothers, appeared in 2010. This Touro Law Review podcast with Professor Robert Cochran, the author of Haunted Man’s Report: Reading Charles Portis, explores the enduring appeal of the 1968 novel. In True Grit, Mattie Ross recounts the story of how, as a young Arkansas woman, she avenged the murder of her father with the help of a fearsome U.S. Marshal, Rooster Cogburn, and a vain Texas Ranger named La Boeuf. Mattie hires Cogburn because, she says, she needs help from a man with “true grit.”

In his discussion with Associate Dean Rodger Citron, Professor Cochran examines True Grit through the lens of law and literature, exploring the novel’s depiction of justice at the border between Arkansas and what was known in the 19th century as the Indian Territory. Among other things, Cochran discusses the way in which Portis’s research into Judge Isaac Parker informs the novel’s depiction of the struggle to establish the rule of law in a violent frontier world. Cochran also describes Mattie’s remarkable legal knowledge and negotiating skills. He concludes with thoughts on how True Grit reflects Portis’s broader concerns about American culture, violence, and the thin line separating civilization from chaos.

Learn more about Professor Cochran: 

Robert Cochran is a professor of English at the University of Arkansas, the current director of the Center for Arkansas and Regional Studies, and the editor of the University of Arkansas Press’ Arkansas Character series. He is the author of numerous books, including Haunted Man’s Report: Reading Charles Portis, Vance Randolph: An Ozark Life, and, with Suzanne McCray, Lights! Camera! Arkansas!: From Broncho Billy to Billy Bob Thornton. Haunted Man’s Report was reviewed favorably in The New York Review of Books.

By Taurus Myhand

I. INTRODUCTION

Chatrie v. United States resolves a question the Supreme Court left open in Carpenter v. United States: whether law enforcement conducts a Fourth Amendment “search” when it compels a technology company to disclose location data drawn from millions of users rather than a single carrier’s records. The Court answers yes, holding that Google Location History is more revealing than cell-site data, that duration does not determine constitutional protection, and that the third-party doctrine does not reach data users experience as their own. Yet the decision resolves less than it appears to. By remanding the particularity question to the Fourth Circuit, the Court leaves geofence warrants—and the broader family of “reverse warrants” they inspired, including keyword searches, AI data demands, and mass video surveillance—without a governing standard for how narrowly such warrants must be drawn. Existing scholarship, including doctrinal mapping offered by amici in the case itself, treats this as a warrant-drafting problem to be solved through incremental particularity rules. This essay traces the case from the 2019 bank robbery through the Supreme Court’s decision, situates the ruling within the Carpenter line of precedent, and considers its implications for the broader universe of “reverse-search warrants,” including keyword searches, AI data requests, and video surveillance demands. It closes by previewing the author’s forthcoming dissertation, which argues that geofence and reverse-search technologies function as mechanisms of population-level social control rather than mere investigative tools.
Keywords: Fourth Amendment, geofence warrants, reverse warrants, digital privacy, third-party doctrine, mass surveillance, particularity requirement.

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By Sarah Otman

I. INTRODUCTION

The Freedom of Information Law (FOIL) rests on a simple premise: government records belong to the public. But that premise collides with one of the law’s oldest protections, the attorney-client privilege. In New York Civil Liberties Union v. New York State Office of Court Administration, the New York Court of Appeals confronted whether the Office of Court Administration (OCA) properly denied a FOIL request for an internal guidance memoranda provided to state judges. The majority and dissent agreed that OCA’s blanket privilege claim fails; they divided on whether remittal serves any purpose once that claim is rejected. Although the Court correctly rejected OCA’s blanket assertion, its decision to remit for document-specific review, rather than order immediate disclosure, reflects the more cautious and institutionally appropriate path for reconciling governmental transparency with confidential legal advice, precisely because it resolves no more than the record before it requires.

Read or download the full text of the article below.

Summary:

On the last day of the 2025-26 term, the Supreme Court issued its decision in United States v. Barbara, the birthright citizenship case. As has been long settled, under the Fourteenth Amendment, with limited exceptions, any child born in the United States is a citizen of the United States. Chief Justice John Roberts’s majority opinion decisively upheld the district court’s judgment invalidating President Donald J. Trump’s executive order seeking to restrict the scope of birthright citizenship. 

Chief Justice Roberts’ opinion was joined by four other justices regarding the Fourteenth Amendment and five other justices regarding federal nationality law. Ultimately, six justices wrote opinions in the case. In this Touro Law Review podcast, Professor Rachel Rosenbloom analyzes the Court’s decision and explains the significance of each justice’s opinion.

Learn more about Professor Rosenbloom:

Rachel Rosenbloom is a Professor of Law at Northeastern University Law School, where she teaches and writes in the area of immigration law and policy. Professor Rosenbloom’s scholarship has focused on the intersection of criminal law and immigration law, the possibilities and limits of transnational legal advocacy in advancing the rights of deportees, and the role of race and immigration in the historical development of US citizenship law. Professor Rosenbloom authored an amicus brief in Trump v. Barbara. Her most recent article is entitled “Litigating Birthright Citizenship In The Shadow Of World War II: The Continuing Relevance Of A Forgotten Case” and can be found on SSRN.

Prior to joining the law faculty, Professor Rosenbloom was a fellow at the Center for Human Rights and International Justice at Boston College, where she was the supervising attorney for the center’s Post-Deportation Human Rights Project. Her legal career includes practicing union-side labor law at the Boston firm Segal Roitman. From 2002 to 2004, she served as a law clerk to the Hon. Morris E. Lasker in U.S. District Court.

Summary:

Every law student engages with the Constitution, the Bill of Rights, and the Civil War Amendments in the Constitutional Law course. Few, however, know the story of two seventeenth-century ships that sailed from Europe and landed in America and subsequently shaped the way in which the Founders and their successors understood the nation’s history.

Professor David S. Reynolds explores this history in his most recent book, Two Ships: Jamestown 1619, Plymouth 1620, and the Struggle for the Soul of America. Two Ships tells the story of the arrival of the White Lion in 1619, which brought the first enslaved Africans to Virginia, and of the Mayflower in 1620, which carried the Pilgrims to Plymouth. As Reynolds recounts, the ships became dueling symbols in the American imagination.

In his discussion with Associate Dean Rodger Citron, Reynolds tells the story of each vessel’s voyage and explains how they became linked in the history of the colonies and then the United States. As Reynolds explains, one of the most striking features of Two Ships is how the history of the two ships has been cast and recast in response to the political and cultural context of each era. The discussion concludes with Reynolds’ thoughts on what this history means for the United States as we approach the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence.

Brought to you by the Touro Law Review

Learn more about Professor Reynolds:

David S. Reynolds is a Distinguished Professor at the City University of New York (CUNY) Graduate Center, holding appointments across the English, History, and Biography & Memoir programs. An award-winning historian, he has authored or edited 17 books exploring the intersections of American literature, politics, and culture. His landmark titles include the Bancroft Prize-winning Walt Whitman’s America, the Lincoln Prize-winning Abe: Abraham Lincoln in His Times, and Beneath the American Renaissance, winner of the Christian Gauss Award.