By Audra Locicero*

The United States’s federal public lands are the treasure of the American landscape. Encompassing some of the most grandiose, wild, and sacred lands in the country, our Nation’s federal public lands are cherished by many for their natural beauty and cultural significance. They are also the ancestral homelands of America’s Indigenous Peoples. Through centuries of war, treaty-breaking, and forced removal, Native American ancestral homelands were taken from Native American peoples, becoming the property of the United States Government and later the Nation’s federal public lands. The majesty of our collective public lands is thus tainted with injustice. 

Action on the part of the United States Government to address the harms wrought by Native land dispossession is long overdue. Tribal co-management of federal public lands, an emerging land management strategy in which the United States Government and tribal nations joint-manage parcels of federal public lands, offers a potential route for reconciliation. By exploring the dual histories of Native land dispossession and the federal public land system, and the current legal authority for tribal co-management, this Article provides a call to action to the federal government to prioritize tribal co-management of its millions of acres of federal public lands—the need is pressing, the legal authority exists, and successful tribal co-management agreements are currently in place. The time for tribal co-management is now. 

By Hilleary Barbara Gramling*

With the ruling in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, overturning both Roe v. Wade and Planned Parenthood v. Casey, the United States Supreme Court revoked the constitutional right to abortion and discarded nearly fifty years of precedent. Since the decision, fourteen states completely ban abortions and, in total, nearly half of the United States restricts abortions. Such restrictions limit accessibility to not only abortion-related care, but also reproductive healthcare in general. The Dobbs decision has cascading consequences in a world where almost everyone is “online,” and nearly every app on any given device collects accessible, minable data that can illuminate an individual’s choices, habits, and even their thoughts. The Dobbs holding incited an unexpected and dangerous reality—one where device data takes on another dimension of value, evolving into evidence procured by law enforcement to prosecute individuals for seeking abortions—and sometimes even to prosecute individuals who experienced stillbirths and miscarriages. Focusing specifically on privacy concerns under the U.S. Constitution in criminal prosecutions, by drawing a parallel between device data and the cell site location information analyzed in Carpenter v. United States, this Article urges that obtaining device data from location services, period-tracking apps, and search engines without a warrant is a violation of the Fourth Amendment’s prohibition on illegal searches and seizures. To navigate this complex and evolving area of law, this Article delineates avenues and approaches advocates must take to protect individuals adversely impacted by the Dobbs decision. 

By Matthew R. Lyon*

 Using Elon Musk as a case study, this Article provides a profile of the “superstar CEO.” Silicon Valley tends to swoon over corporate leaders, particularly founders, who are charismatic, confident, and sound more like they are leading a movement than a company. In recent years, “founder-friendly” venture capitalists have allowed entrepreneurs to keep their leadership positions as the company matures, and governance structures have been put in place to protect founders and surround them with friendly directors and officers. This can become a problem for shareholders if the high-profile CEO, through misfeasance or malfeasance, becomes more damaging than beneficial to the corporation. After presenting a character profile of the “superstar CEO,” the Article will analyze the board’s role in overseeing the CEO, and how that becomes more challenging structurally if good corporate governance practices are not established early in the corporation’s lifecycle. It then turns to whether courts, through the shareholder derivative action, or regulators, through SEC oversight, can be a sufficient backstop to protect shareholders when boards fail to act. Throughout, the Article reflects on the enigmatic Elon Musk and his relationship with Tesla shareholders as an illustration of both the benefits and downsides of the CEO as superstar. 

By   Joan MacLeod Heminway *

What would it be like to represent Elon Musk on business law matters or work with him in representing a business he manages or controls? This Article approaches that issue as a function of professional responsibility and practice norms applied in the context of publicly available information about Elon Musk and his business-related escapades. Specifically, the Article provides a sketch of Elon Musk and considers that depiction through a professional conduct lens, commenting on the challenges of representing or working with someone with attributes and behaviors substantially like those recognized in Elon Musk. 

Ultimately (and perhaps unsurprisingly, for those who have followed Elon Musk’s interactions with the law in a business setting), the Article concludes that representing Elon Musk or one of his controlled businesses would be a tough professional assignment, raising both typical and atypical professional responsibility issues. Taking on an engagement in which Elon Musk is the client or a control person would require deliberate lawyer leadership, including (among other things) patience, mental toughness, and empathy. As a result, the lawyer would be required not only to have the required legal expertise, sensitivity to professional conduct regulation, and practical experience to carry out the representation, but also to understand and know how to employ their talent, personality, and character strengths and leadership style in a demanding and mutable lawyering context. 

By  Carliss Chatman & Carla L. Reyes*

In 2022, Elon Musk publicly announced that he would purchase Twitter after acquiring a five percent stake in the company. His failure to report this acquisition—and the company’s failure to notice—allowed Musk to continue purchasing stock at a deflated price, costing the company more than $156 million. After the signing of a merger agreement, the details of the transaction caused wild fluctuations in Tesla’s stock price. Musk’s complaints about the management of Twitter and the existence of bots on the platform led Twitter’s stock to also drop in value, as did Musk’s attempts to withdraw from the transaction. Even after the deal closed, many commentators noted their concern that the shareholders of two corporations saw the value of their investments impacted by the whims of one billionaire. But is that the whole story? 
At some point in the Musk-Twitter saga, Musk claimed that the number of bots on the Twitter platform devalued the company sufficiently that he should be let out of the transaction altogether. At the time, most observers did not take Musk’s complaints about bots seriously. But what if, instead of just being a silly excuse, Musk’s complaints about bots on Twitter were a tell? What if, they were a hint about a deeper business strategy with a potential to impact capital markets in as yet unanticipated ways? This Article examines the connections between Musk’s many business ventures and argues that Musk’s emphasis on bots on Twitter points toward the one, nearly stealth connecting factor in his businesses: data collection and monetization. By uncovering Musk’s data empire, the Article also reveals key data blind spots in the federal laws meant to govern capital markets and argues that state law offers a better avenue for reigning in the negative externalities of data-driven mergers—mergers and acquisitions undertaken primarily to gain access to the data and data exhaust produced by the target company.