Beginning in 1981 and continuing into the mid-1990s, The Alledger was the student newspaper of the Boston College Law School. The Alledger published both serious and satirical articles on topics related to student life at the law school. Frequent topics include the arrival and departure of faculty members, profiles of candidates for leadership positions in student government, and previews of lectures given by noteworthy speakers.

The publication consistently poked fun at the law student experience, making professors and classmates alike the targets of good-natured parody. The Alledger featured an annual April Fool’s Day issue which consisted entirely of satirical articles.

The Alledger is a record of the school’s history, offering evidence of an increasingly competitive environment for law schools in the form of extensive coverage of a 1995 dispute related to the U.S. News and World Report law school rankings. The newspaper also recorded changes in the demographics of the student body, as well as frequent discussion of tuition increases and the financial relationship of the law school to the university. Moreover, the humorous and frank tone of The Alledger provides real insight into the lives of law students in the 1980s and 1990s.

The Alledger was digitized from the collection of the Boston College Law School Library. Issues missing from this collection are not owned by the law library; due to frequent inconsistencies in the numbering of issues, the law library is not sure how many issues are missing from this collection.

The Alledger

Boston College Law Review is Boston College Law School's flagship scholarly publication.

The Review, ranked in the top 25 law journals by Washington & Lee, publishes eight issues each year featuring articles and essays by prominent authors addressing legal issues of national interest.

In addition to articles written by outside academics, the Review prints the work of its student staff, many of whom publish notes during their third year. The Review’s second-year staff members also prepare short comments on recent federal circuit court decisions, which may be published in the Review's Electronic Supplement.

Visit the Boston College Law Review website at <a href="http://bclawreview.bc.edu">bclawreview.bc.edu</a>.

Boston College Law Review

Boston College Law Library collects the publications of Law School faculty, and, when possible, makes them available through this collection. Organized by year and tagged with authors and subject areas, this resource reflects the school and the library’s commitment to open access while at the same time serving as a valuable institutional record.

Boston College Law School Faculty Papers

Begun as part of the <a href="https://www.bc.edu/content/bc-web/schools/law/sites/bclaw-black-history/gallery.html">Black History at BC Law</a> project, this collection seeks to document the history of Black BC Law students and alumni, particularly highlighting events held by the Black Law Students Association (BLSA) and Black Alumni Network (BAN).

The photos below come from a variety of sources, including the BC Law Library and BC Law Magazine archives and the personal collections of multiple community members. We welcome additions to this collection, as well as assistance naming any unidentified individuals in these images. Please reach out to <a href="mailto:lawpubs@bc.edu">lawpubs@bc.edu</a> with any questions or contributions related to this archive.

BLSA and BAN Photo Archive

This book answers many questions for those tasked with deciding whether and how to fund a law school clinic. It also provides metrics by which to evaluate the operations of a clinic. And finally, this book addresses not just how best to run a clinic, but in many ways how best to deliver legal services to a community in great need of legal help, whether through a law school program or in the neighborhood. It answers questions every legal aid office in the world with limited resources must answer: how to choose clients, how to decide which services the clients will receive, and from whom, and how to deliver those legal services.

This review essay will proceed as follows. It explores the major themes of each chapter, and how these ideas may be useful to a wide audience. The review attempts to guide its reader to those chapters that will be most helpful for those who do not have time to read everything, and it suggests avenues to explore ideas further.

CC BY 4.0 Attribution

How to Set Up and Run a Law Clinic

This article addresses an unexplored problem in the externalities literature: the present value of future externalities. The problem arises because externalized costs and benefits occur in the future, and therefore should be discounted, yet discount rates used by corporate decision-makers are typically higher than the appropriate social discount rate.

In simple terms, corporations discount the future too much, and therefore underproduce potential future benefits and overproduce potential future costs. Our key insight is that the impact of high corporate discount rates, relative to the socially appropriate discount rate, is an additional externality. We refer to the additional costs that arise when corporations use higher-than-optimal discount rates as “the externality of discounted externalities.”

Policy makers should take into account the difference between corporate and social discount rates. Regulators and courts that seek to incentivize corporations to make decisions about the future in socially optimal ways should not ignore the externality of discounted externalities.

The Externality of Discounted Externalities

It is an open secret that equity has an Erie problem. In 1945, the Supreme Court insisted that federal courts sitting in diversity must apply certain general equitable principles when faced with suits seeking equitable relief, even for state law claims and even in the face of contradictory state law. At first glance, this proposition appears to run headfirst against Erie ’s notorious instruction that “[t]here is no federal general common law.” Although distinct from the forbidden general commercial law that Erie declared unconstitutional as federal common law, in many ways these equitable principles—like the rule that equitable remedies are unavailable when legal remedies are adequate—seem to exist only “by common practice and consent among a number of sovereigns.”

This Equity-Erie problem exists and persists in large part because of the way that federal law treats equity—as distinct from law and limited by certain historical principles. That conception of equity’s exceptionalism is not an aberration or the result of judicatory error. To the contrary, the idea that equity may operate only in certain circumstances has been the common consensus of the federal courts since the founding. This theory of equity, which is associated with the English Court of Chancery but traces its origins as far back as Aristotle, infiltrated the American legal psyche at the founding and, despite challenges to its legitimacy, has survived in a complex federalist system even after the supposed merger of law and equity.

First published by Arizona State Law Journal, Volume 56, Issue 1.

Resolving Equity’s Erie Problem

Immigration detainees challenging immigration judges’ bond decisions are hitting a jurisdictional wall—federal courts are given license to ignore errors that immigration judges make in determining dangerousness and flight risk, because such decisions can be categorized as “discretionary.” This license comes from a 1996 amendment to the Immigration and Nationality Act that removed federal courts’ jurisdiction over discretionary decisions to detain for immigration purposes. Detainees’ important liberty interests are left to the whims of a single immigration judge, who determines bond under conditions representing an implicit bias minefield.

This Article explores the justifications for unreviewable discretion and for stripping federal court jurisdiction over immigration decisions and argues that none of these justifications are applicable when an immigration judge decides whether to detain a person pending their removal proceedings. The Article also suggests manners by which the judiciary can limit the reach of this jurisdiction-stripping statute to ensure that immigration detainees will not face an unclimbable wall when seeking federal court review of their bond decisions.

Discretionary Immigration Detention

In this Essay, we argue that Congress should not (or at least not yet) respond to the NCAA’s entreaties by enacting legislation to preserve or restore the NCAA’s ability to limit the compensation and earnings of Division I athletes. Instead, we believe that Congress, the courts, and the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) should ensure that laws of general applicability, including antitrust and labor law, apply to the NCAA and its members. Although this could be accomplished through the courts and NLRB, it is also possible that this will require legislation making the relationship between athletes and universities that conduct Division I sports programs subject to the National Labor Relations Act (NLRA).

We take this position because we doubt that college sports face the kind of existential crisis that justifies exempting the NCAA and its members from laws that govern all commercial enterprises, including sports. These laws exist to ensure that all enterprises treat fairly those whose work makes enormous revenue possible, and there is no compelling reason why NCAA athletes should be treated as an exception. Although NCAA sports presently face uncertainty and change, we think that federal antitrust and labor law already provide an effective legal framework to encourage negotiations that ensure the fair treatment of athletes while preserving the commercial viability and continued growth of college sports. Indeed, the collective bargaining process contemplated by antitrust and labor law already has an excellent track record of facilitating acceptably fair compromises between employers and workers in professional sports. If athletes and universities wind up negotiating mutually acceptable terms to govern their relationships (and we believe that they will if given the chance), there is little reason for Congress to do more.

Federal Legislation and College Sports: Which Way Forward?

It is widely argued that the world is in a new era of global tax cooperation, evidenced by the multilateral OECD/G20 project on base erosion and profit shifting (BEPS). This article argues, however, that this cooperation-centric account masks fundamental conflicts between developing and developed countries, which recently culminated in a vote to shift reform work to the United Nations. This article contends that developing country-centered criticisms of the project are not random but instead reflect coherent concerns about the wide historical gulf in power and resources between developing and developed countries and how the BEPS reforms ignore, and may even exacerbate, that gulf. The reform’s defenders have largely missed this fundamental crux of the criticisms, focusing primarily on the project’s incremental short-term benefits for inter-developing country tax competition. This article’s framework for analysing global tax reform incorporates these deep conflicts and thus more accurately assesses the reform’s promise and risks.

This is the author’s version of a work that was accepted for publication in World Tax Journal (2024), Vol. 16, No. 4, IBFD. Changes may have been made to this work since it was submitted for publication.

Welcome to LIRA@BC Law!

Featured Collections

The Alledger

Boston College Law Review

Boston College Law School Faculty Papers

BLSA and BAN Photo Archive

Recent Additions

How to Set Up and Run a Law Clinic

The Externality of Discounted Externalities

Resolving Equity’s Erie Problem

Discretionary Immigration Detention

Federal Legislation and College Sports: Which Way Forward?

The Conflictual Core of Global Tax Cooperation

Welcome to LIRA@BC Law!

Featured Collections

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Recent Additions

The Alledger