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

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.

The Conflictual Core of Global Tax Cooperation

The Essay proceeds as follows. Part I describes the evolution of the U.S. employment-based retirement system, with a focus on the respective roles of employers and employees in the public and private sectors. In the private sector, the transition from defined-benefit to defined-contribution plans has shifted longevity and investment risk onto individual participants. The regulatory and institutional frameworks, however, were designed for—and still largely reflect—a defined-benefit model in which employers bore the investment risk and typically did not consider participants’ preferences with respect to particular investments. Today, while individual employees do get to select investments from a menu of options, they generally have no formal input on menu construction. Moreover, the options on the investment menu typically include a mix of mutual funds, collective investment trusts, and insurance-company separate accounts, all of which have traditionally centralized voting in the hands of fund managers and trustees.

In the public sector, traditional defined-benefit pension plans remain widely available, with public employers promising their employees a monthly pension benefit upon retirement. The responsibility for plan administration and oversight, as well as the investment of plan assets, is divided among state legislative bodies, state executive branches, and the boards of trustees of the individual retirement systems. Although the composition of the pension system boards varies across states, public employees traditionally have had representation and voice on such bodies.

Part II shows that recent developments have begun to reshape the traditional narrative about worker voice in both the private and public sectors. For private-sector employees, recent regulatory developments have signaled the Department of Labor’s support for the accommodation of participants’ preferences in menu selection as a means of promoting greater participation and deferral rates. Yet, as this Essay will show, the interest in participant preferences currently exceeds the institutional capacity of employer-sponsored plans to meaningfully take such preferences into account. In the public sector, meanwhile, state legislative and executive bodies have sought to constrain the authority of retirement plan boards with respect to investment decisions, thereby muting the voices of such boards and member representatives.

Part II also situates recent developments within the broader academic and policy debate about the extent to which investment intermediaries can and should take individual participant preferences into account. In recent years, various asset managers, including those managing retirement plans assets, have expressed interest in delegating certain voting decisions for the underlying securities to individual participants through so-called “pass-through” voting. The growing availability of pass-through voting has amplified debates about the merits and effectiveness of various “disintermediation” strategies for investors, including those saving for retirement through employer-sponsored plans.

The Essay concludes by suggesting that closer examination of and attention to retirement plan governance is necessary to understand both how employers engage with their employees and how retirement plans, as institutional investors, engage with their portfolio companies. As this interdisciplinary Symposium underscores, developments in employee benefits law—and particularly those related to worker voice in the management of retirement assets—are necessarily linked with developments in labor, employment, and corporate law.

Worker Voice in Retirement Plan Governance

For decades, antitrust enforcers ignored employer power in labor markets, adopting neoclassical assumptions that labor markets are competitive. Despite fanfare regarding recent labor antitrust enforcement, enforcers still deploy neoclassical assumptions and methods, targeting only proven deviations from a presumed competitive baseline, or infracompetitive wages and working conditions. The New Labor Antitrust deduces harms only from reduced competition that workers suffer.

This Article radically challenges that approach as contrary to law and policy. First, as a legal matter, it uncovers the Clayton and Norris–LaGuardia Acts’ labor and wage policy as rejecting competitively determined wages in favor of bargained-for wages determined through workers’ collective self-determination. It contextualizes those Acts as Progressive and institutional economists’ policy victories over neoclassical and formalist views of labor relations. Second, as a policy matter, the New Labor Antitrust’s approach contradicts mounting evidence of imperfect competition that should drive new assumptions and methods of detecting and countering employer power. Market-based metrics undercount employer power and its effects, making it needlessly challenging to establish liability. And when liability is established, it may be established for only competition-based—rather than non-competition-based—harms like reducing workers’ countervailing power and freedom of association.

The Article explains how the New Labor Antitrust inherited neoclassical doctrine and methods developed outside labor antitrust to usurp Congress’s now-forgotten labor and wage policy. It proposes reframing labor antitrust regulation to better detect and target employer power’s sources consistent with a policy favoring workers’ collective self-determination. It offers preliminary solutions, drawing from broader federal labor policy and the social scientific and philosophical literatures.

Toward a Progressive Labor Antitrust

Newsletter of the Boston College Law Library.

Law School Publications

Boston College Law Library Newsletters

Boston College Law Library Newsletter, Spring 2025

Under the Ryan Haight Act (RHA), the federal government has tightly restricted the prescription of controlled substances through telemedicine. Since the COVID-19 pandemic, however, which led millions to rely on telemedicine, lawmakers have introduced and renewed waivers to these restrictions to ensure continued access to treatment. By relaxing enforcement, those waivers have inadvertently spawned a resurgence in the unlawful activities that the RHA aimed to prevent. This Article proposes that special registration, a reliable process allowing legitimate providers to apply for the ability to prescribe virtually, is a better alternative to renewing the waivers, as it preserves telemedicine while maintaining security.

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

Federal Legislation and College Sports: Which Way Forward?

The Conflictual Core of Global Tax Cooperation

Worker Voice in Retirement Plan Governance

Toward a Progressive Labor Antitrust

Boston College Law Library Newsletter, Spring 2025

Waivers to the Ryan Haight Act and the Future of Telemedicine

Welcome to LIRA@BC Law!

Featured Collections

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Recent Additions

The Alledger