Dear Reader, The Georgetown Journal of Law & Public Policy proudly presents the first issue of Volume 24. This issue contains one address, six articles, and one student note. Each work explores timely and important legal and policy questions, the explora-tions of which we are confident will be enriching for each of you. The issue […]

Download Risk and Courage in the Law

Loper Bright instructed courts to rework how they review challenges to agency decision making and no longer defer to agency construction of statutes. But one critical question remains—how and when courts should engage in a different type of review: the deferential “arbitrary and capricious” standard. In applying this standard post-Loper Bright, courts face a dual […]

Agencies routinely offer conclusory and boilerplate reasoning to explain their redaction determinations under the Freedom of Information Act (“FOIA”). This is a major problem. When explaining such determinations to requesters, FOIA officers should provide sufficient reasons to allow a reasonable requester to evaluate the underlying claim of privilege. But agencies likely will not implement that […]

The principle of legality is currently understood as a ban on criminal punishment unless one’s conduct violates a criminal statute—that is, as a ban on common law crime. Because the principle prevents judges from imposing criminal punishment at their whim, it is seen as an obvious good. This article argues that this is far from […]

The Senate’s decision on July 1, 2025 to strike Section 43201(c) from the One Big Beautiful Bill Act represents a clear rejection of federal efforts to enforce a decade-long moratorium on state and local regulation of artificial intelligence (AI) models and systems. This article analyzes the implications of this rejected provision, using its brief legislative […]

From the positivist’s perspective, originalism is “our law”. As a matter of social fact, our constitutional practices—the way we adjudicate constitutional cases and justify our constitutional decisions—are originalist. This positivist account is, by its nature, limited. It just tells us that originalism is our law today. It takes an empirical snapshot of today’s social facts: […]

This Article identifies and advocates for holistic constitutional interpretation, a method in which interpreters consider disputed constitutional terms or provisions in the context of the Constitution as a whole to gain insight into otherwise inscrutable textual questions. Holistic interpretation resembles, but is distinct from, alternative methods like structural argument and intratextualism—maintaining a focus on constitutional […]

To both its sharpest critics and strongest proponents, natural law increasingly appears to be enjoying a “moment” in American legal discourse. The 2024 Herbert W. Vaughan Lecture at Harvard Law School, in fact, took as its subject “The Natural Law Moment in Constitutional Theory.” Following the publication of Adrian Vermeule’s Common Good Constitutionalism, among other […]