2024

Consumers are familiar with being disappointed by a product not worth its price tag. Perhaps you discovered your expensive “100% extra virgin olive oil” was diluted with vegetable oil or that your “grass-fed” beef came from a grain-fed animal. Not long ago, I entered a Starbucks café and ordered a Strawberry Açai Refresher based on the açai fruit’s reputation as a “superfood.” Despite its name, the only trace of strawberry in the beverage is the freeze-dried strawberries sprinkled into it. There is zero trace of açai. The lack of fruits in Starbucks Refreshers is what the FDA refers to as “economically motivated adulteration” or “food fraud,” a practice that captures nearly $40 billion annually. This Comment examines FDA regulations and suggests that the FDA should ban companies from including certain foods in names and labels when the product does not actually contain any of the depicted fruit, or any fruit at all.

Stategraft refers to the practice by which “state agents transfer property from persons to the state in violation of the state’s own laws or basic human rights.”1 Public officials engaging in stategraft utilize these financial resources to replenish public coffers and often target segments of the population poorly positioned to fight back.2 Arguably, there are few populations more vulnerable to financial extraction than incarcerated individuals. Thus, a prime example of stategraft at work is that of “pay-to-stay” fees or the practice of states and localities charging incarcerated individuals for the cost of their incarceration. Legal scholars have challenged the constitutionality of these practices as violating the Due Process Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment, and the Excessive Fines Clause of the Eighth Amendment. Our research has focused primarily on states that utilize civil lawsuits to collect these fees, such as Illinois and Michigan, as particularly egregious examples of stategraft.

After the Supreme Court’s decision in Biden v. Nebraska, we now have three interpretations of the major questions doctrine. Chief Justice John Roberts, Justice Neil Gorsuch, and Justice Amy Coney Barrett have each offered different justifications for the doctrine and different ideas about how it should operate. By examining the Supreme Court’s most recent “major questions” cases, this Essay traces the origins, justifications, and operations of the three different approaches.