Civil forfeiture allows law enforcement to seize and retain real or personal property and to use this property to fund government activities. This Case Study proceeds in four parts. Part I outlines Bernadette Atuahene’s stategraft theory and Dick Carpenter’s critique. Part II sets out an overview of Ontario’s civil asset forfeiture legislation and constitutional property protection. Part III details stategraft elements in Attorney General of Ontario v. $10,000. 1. Part IV concludes the Case Study.

Over the last decade, tuition at public universities has risen exponentially. To add insult to injury, misleading price information, vague and confusing language regarding costs, and an overall lack of transparency surrounding tuition has made it nearly impossible to compare pricing among institutions. As a case in point, law students at the University of Wisconsin have been adversely impacted by misleading tuition information. When final law school deposits were due in April 2021, many prospective students relied on the prices and scholarships offered to them in determining where to attend. Students facing ex-post tuition increases have little—if any—recourse. This Case Study argues that post-acceptance increases in tuition at public universities are stategraft. Moreover, this Case Study posits that there is a simple fix to this problem: charging students a fixed tuition rate that averages the tuition increases they would have experienced across the length of their degree, termed “cohort tuition” or the “cohort tuition model.” Several institutions of higher education have already implemented cohort tuition to increase price transparency for students. The University of Wisconsin, other institutions of higher education, and legislators should follow suit.

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.