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

Boston College Law School Lectures and Presentations

This is a review of "The Magnetic Pull of American Discovery: Second Thoughts About American Exceptionalism" by Richard Marcus in Proceso Civile e Costituzione (2023).

How Is the Discovery Water Here?

Since Roger Bannister broke the four-minute mile barrier in the mid-1950s, the American public has become increasingly obsessed with achieving the impossible. In 2016, the U.S. Patent Office approved Nike’s ground-breaking and controversial patent on its first of many “super shoes,” the Vaporfly, a shoe utilizing a new lightweight foam and carbon fiber plate designed to maximize energy return and enhance running performance. Since then, dozens of other manufacturers have succeeded in developing their own super shoes. Despite this progress, however, critics contend that the approval of Nike’s Vaporfly patent not only threatens the integrity of running as a sport but also stifles innovation amongst industry players. In contrast, this Article argues that the Vaporfly’s patent approval and subsequent patent regulation has actually stimulated competition among companies and led to significant economic payoffs for Nike and its competition.

Intellectual Property and Technology Forum

How Existing Patent Regulations Encourage Competition in the "Super Shoe" Race



How the law contributes to economic inequality is the subject of renewed attention, but the legal dimensions of geographic inequality have received much less scrutiny. At its core, geographic inequality is a function of how the national income gets spatially divided between capital and labor. While labor’s share of national income has generally declined, workers in rural and distressed communities have suffered most at the expense of capital. Recent empirical research on rural and distressed labor markets reveals an important structural cause: disproportionately high levels of employer market power with weak, if any, countervailing worker power to check it. While federal labor market regulation was intended to prevent this outcome nationally, it has failed these workers and the communities they support, contributing to and reinforcing geographic inequality. The failure of our legal infrastructure erodes economic self-determination in a place-based manner. But it also generates place-specific and place-salient resentment, perceptions of democratic disempowerment, and significant political polarization between spaces of wealth generation and wealth extraction.

This Article is the first comprehensive effort to tackle the legal sources of geographic labor market inequality. It documents the convergence of unique labor market failures in rural and distressed labor markets and identifies how federal labor market regulation has contributed to and exacerbated those failures to employers’ benefit and at workers’ expense. Specifically, it describes how rural and distressed labor markets have unusually high levels of labor market concentration, market thinness, and natural monopsony, worsening market frictions that exist in thicker, more competitive urban labor markets. Neither federal employment policy nor labor, employment, and antitrust rules have recognized these geographically-specific realities. Instead, while appearing to operate in a place-neutral manner, the legal infrastructure they jointly create carves out and deregulates the types of labor markets, categories of workers, and employer conduct that are most prevalent in rural and distressed environments. They are thus ill-adapted to remedy market failures unique to rural and distressed spaces to ensure workers’ access to livable wages and countervailing leverage against employers. The Article reconceptualizes labor market regulation through a place-based lens, adapting and tailoring existing regulatory tools and proposing broader, more interventionist efforts to restructure and regulate the employment bargain outside of thick urban markets. It draws from historical examples of workforce investment and successful economic governance in markets facing similar characteristics to propose solutions that can revive rural and distressed communities by increasing worker power and generating diversified and high-quality job growth.

The Law of Geographic Labor Market Inequality

Front Matter

This Note advocates for congressional and state action to remedy the Supreme Court’s flawed 2022 decision in Ruan v. United States. This approach includes a modified return to the objective good faith defense established by the Controlled Substances Act of 1970 (CSA) and United States v. Moore, the 1975 seminal case that established that physicians could be prosecuted under 21 U.S.C. § 841. Ruan requires that the government show a defendant physician subjectively knew their conduct in issuing controlled substances was unlawful. This permits the substitution of an individual physician’s conception of acceptable medical practice in place of a generally agreed upon standard when a jury decides whether the physician prescribed in good faith. The Ruan decision is inconsistent with the text and intent of the CSA and the objective good faith defense standard established in Moore. Further, it is incongruous with the Supreme Court’s 2006 decision in Gonzales v. Oregon, which delegated authority to the states, not individual physicians, to determine the bounds of acceptable medical practice. Additionally, Ruan had the unintended consequence of exacerbating a treatment disparity between low-level drug couriers and physicians charged under the CSA. This Note argues that a comprehensive, uniform amendment to the CSA, state prescribing statutes, and federal agency prescribing guidelines clearly defining what constitutes lawful prescribing would fulfill the Ruan Court’s aims and maintain consistency with the CSA and the Supreme Court’s prior holdings. Simultaneously, it would prevent the inequity between drug couriers and physicians from intensifying.

Ruan's Hippocratic Hegemony: Physician Idiosyncrasy Should Not Determine Criminality

The Supreme Court’s 1969 decision in Brandenburg v. Ohio introduced a new paradigm for evaluating incitement by looking at whether the speech was intended to induce imminent lawless action by third parties and whether such action was likely to occur. The tripartite test offered by the Court, however, is arguably overprotective of speech that may cause legitimate harm, including coded speech, or speech whose true meaning is not facially obvious. In particular, coded speech—including dog whistles, or speech designed to elicit a specific reaction from certain listeners—may escape the requisite scrutiny under Brandenburg by giving the speaker plausible deniability, despite contextual clues known to all or part of the audience as to the words’ true meaning. Applying speech-act theory, this Note argues that the Court should adopt a more uptake-sensitive approach to incitement, which would allow audience response to assist in determining intent and better capture the veiled manner of such speech.

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The Alledger

Boston College Law Review

Boston College Law School Faculty Papers

Boston College Law School Lectures and Presentations

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How Is the Discovery Water Here?

How Existing Patent Regulations Encourage Competition in the "Super Shoe" Race

The Law of Geographic Labor Market Inequality

Front Matter

Ruan's Hippocratic Hegemony: Physician Idiosyncrasy Should Not Determine Criminality

Words Not Said: Can the Brandenburg Incitement Test Cope with Coded Speech?

Welcome to LIRA@BC Law!

Featured Collections

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Recent Additions

The Alledger