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

Legal institutions rely on monitoring and prediction technologies to enforce the law. Drawing on three recent books— by Sarah Brayne (2021), by Karen Levy (2023), and by Elizabeth Chiarello (2024)—this review essay examines how the incorporation of these technologies brings about three shifts in the work of frontline enforcement. First, it broadens the categories of actors with the capacity to facilitate the formal enforcement of law. Second, it reorients enforcement to increasingly center on generating information for future use by institutional actors beyond the original information gatherer. Third, it increases the variety and frequency of agents’ decisions about how much to engage with new tools. These shifts are likely to exacerbate a persistent challenge faced by frontline agents: navigating conflicting goals and flawed laws with inadequate resources and guidance.

CC BY 4.0 Attribution

Frontline Enforcement in the Age of Information

When they sue their employers for disability discrimination, do plaintiffs with some types of conditions fare better than others? This paper analyzes legal outcomes for three types of conditions that are potentially disputed (subject to suspicion and doubt) or disfavored (subject to stigma or judgment): mental illnesses, invisible conditions, and subjectively diagnosed pain conditions. Using logistic regression to analyze over 1,100 judicial opinions in the US federal courts, we find that invisible conditions tend to be disputed and mental illnesses tend to be disfavored. We find the strongest and most consistent disadvantages for subjectively diagnosed pain conditions; plaintiffs with these conditions are significantly less likely to be deemed a person with a disability and to win in court. The disadvantages for plaintiffs with difficult-to-document pain conditions persist even if they are deemed to be persons with disabilities, suggesting that skepticism about these conditions pollutes judges’ overall impression of plaintiffs.

CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 Attribution NonCommercial-NoDerivs

Disputed and Disfavored: Pain, Mental Illness, and Invisible Conditions in Disability Discrimination Cases

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.

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.

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

Frontline Enforcement in the Age of Information

Disputed and Disfavored: Pain, Mental Illness, and Invisible Conditions in Disability Discrimination Cases

How to Set Up and Run a Law Clinic

The Externality of Discounted Externalities

Resolving Equity’s Erie Problem

Discretionary Immigration Detention

Welcome to LIRA@BC Law!

Featured Collections

.repo-96qggn{color:inherit;text-align:left;font-weight:500;line-height:2.3rem;font-size:1.8rem;overflow-wrap:break-word;-webkit-box-orient:vertical;display:-webkit-box;-webkit-line-clamp:4;overflow:hidden;hyphens:auto;}.repo-96qggn:hover{color:inherit;}The Alledger

Recent Additions

The Alledger