The United States committed at least two original sins. The one, slavery, is well known. The other, conquest, is both obvious and unknown at the same time.

The Constitution was designed and implemented to facilitate American empire. The country we now know grew from a narrow strip of colonies along the east coast to encompass much of a continent, from sea to shining sea. It grew purposefully, through powers newly granted in the Constitution. The conquest of native America happened pursuant to the Constitution.

Millions of people around the world, most of them women, have been victims of revenge porn and have suffered intense pain and distress as a result. By 2021, almost all US states had criminalized revenge porn, defining it primarily as an infringement of privacy, as obscenity or as harassment. US courts have recently considered the constitutionality of criminalizing revenge porn in view of the potential conflict with freedom of speech. Contrary to the courts’ decisions, we argue that revenge porn is a sex offense and therefore justifies limiting the disseminator’s freedom of speech to a significant degree. Empirical evidence indicates that victims experience revenge porn as an erasure of their personal autonomy, one that radically disrupts their lives, alters their sense of self and identity, and dramatically affects their relationship with themselves and with others. Insofar as the rationale of freedom of speech relies on the protection of autonomy, the protection of the disseminator’s autonomy should not be at the expense of erasing the victim’s autonomy. Thus, our argument highlights the necessity for US state legislators to redefine the boundaries of the revenge porn offense accordingly.

Imagine that you are at home, when suddenly a drone peers into your window, takes a picture of your wardrobe, familiarizes itself with your fashion preferences, or takes a picture of your kitchen table during dinner. The drone immediately transfers the picture to the commercial platform that operates it, such as Amazon or Uber. The platform in turn targets you with personalized advertisements for merchandise or food, in real time, customized to your lifestyle, at the time when you are most susceptible, manipulating you to make a purchase. How should the law react to this? And what if a drone were to collect information on private individuals in public using sophisticated cameras, sensors and facial recognition software? What if the platform that operates drones were to collect and use information on consumers and third parties? Should the law limit such invasions of privacy?

The use of drones is growing rapidly and their technological capabilities are growing exponentially. Drones differ from existing surveillance technology. Their low cost and their ability to fly, equipped with high-resolution cameras, recording systems and sensors, enable them to take in information over longer periods of time and much more effectively than the human eye or ear. Such capabilities are liable to give rise to pervasive surveillance of a kind never known before. Making matters worse, invasion of privacy has serious consequences. By using a network of drone fleets at the service of a single commercial platform, such surveillance could allow the platform to effectively aggregate and analyze tremendous amounts of high-quality information on the parties under surveillance, gain valuable insight on consumers and influence their decisions to order merchandise or food.

Article III of the U.S. Constitution requires that judicial power extend only to “cases” and “controversies”—a requirement commonly understood as standing to sue.1 Article III’s standing requirement embodies a constitutional minimum that the plaintiff must have suffered a concrete injury, fairly traceable to the defendant’s conduct that a court can redress by a favorable ruling.2 Congress may even specify what is required of a potential plaintiff to satisfy Article III standing under a particular statute. Under the civil provision of the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organization Act (“RICO”), a potential plaintiff must be injured “in his business or property” “by reason of” certain predicate acts as defined by the statute.3 Within the past two decades, there has been a wave of opioid litigation against major pharmaceutical corporations.4 A current split among circuit courts of appeals is whether plaintiffs should be able to sue to recover money they would not have paid to pharmaceutical corporations but-for certain misrepresentations.