Date: January 23, 2026 | 2:00pm - 5:00pm ET
Location: NYC (location to be sent via email)
Presenters:

1. Nadia Banteka (FSU): Cross-Sovereign Policing And The Constitutional Crisis Of Accountability 
   1. A quiet transformation in American policing has produced a constitutional rupture that escapes judicial recognition and democratic control. Through federal deputation and joint task forces, police officers now wield overlapping federal and state authority under broad delegations structured without public rulemaking or oversight. These arrangements enable local officers to enforce federal priorities and federal agents to operate through local institutions, while evading the legal frameworks that ordinarily render public authority visible, attributable, and accountable. A deputized city officer may conduct a federally directed raid yet be insulated from constitutional tort liability, criminal prosecution, civilian oversight, and departmental discipline. Conversely, a federal agent embedded in a local department may carry out arrests using city credentials and infrastructure yet remain beyond the reach of state law and municipal accountability. This enforcement regime, which this Article terms cross-sovereign policing, has emerged as a persistent blind spot in the law’s remedial and oversight architectures. This Article provides the first account of cross-sovereign policing as a structural pathology that has unraveled the doctrinal, institutional, and democratic foundations of public control over coercive power. It demonstrates how cross-sovereign policing fractures attribution, extinguishes remedies, and sidelines democratic governance. The intervention operates on three levels: conceptual, doctrinal, and institutional. Conceptually, the Article shows how cross-sovereign policing collapses attribution, vitiating the structural mechanism that keeps coercive power traceable, contestable, and constrained. Officers act under overlapping authority, but no sovereign is held to account. This result subverts federalism’s logic, turning a system meant to divide and restrain power into one that diffuses and insulates it. Doctrinally, that collapse disables both remedial civil doctrines and state criminal enforcement tools meant to check unlawful coercion. Courts deny relief under section 1983 of the Civil Rights Act, the primary civil remedy for constitutional violations by state officials, by treating deputized officers as acting under federal law. Courts reject Bivens claims against federal officers as too novel to fall within the scope of the implied federal cause of action. Supremacy Clause immunity, originally a shield for federal officers against state obstruction, has been extended in cross-sovereign contexts to displace local prosecutions based on asserted federal authority. Institutionally, cross-sovereign partnerships circumvent internal and civilian oversight by bypassing review boards, departmental discipline, and local legal constraints on police conduct. In response, the Article advances a framework to reconstruct police accountability across sovereign lines. It combines doctrinal repair with structural redesign to make coercive authority visible, contestable, and constrained. Doctrinally, it advances a functional attribution test for Section 1983, a new federal cause of action for cross-sovereign misconduct, and a historically grounded narrowing of Supremacy Clause immunity. Institutionally, it recommends fiduciary disclosure duties, public registries of deputized officers, conditional cooperation statutes, interstate compacts, and state constitutional tort regimes. Together, these reforms rebuild the constitutional and legislative architecture necessary to restore legal responsibility and democratic control over cross-sovereign policing.
2. Alexis Hoag-Fordjour (Brooklyn): Divided Loyalties: A Taxonomy of Defense Counsel’s Self-Interests
   1. ​ This Article explores an underexamined aspect of the Sixth Amendment right to counsel: conflicts-of-interest that arise between defense counsel and criminal defendants based on counsel’s self-interests. Conflicts between clients and counsel can arise due to counsel’s duty to another client, to a former client, to a third person, or to counsel’s self-interests. However, conflicts stemming from counsel’s self-interests have received less ethical scrutiny, scholarly attention, and jurisprudential development relative to the other types. The collective inattention has created a gap in recognizing and addressing them. Considering the criminal legal system’s pervasive disparities, the impact falls heaviest on Black and other marginalized defendants. Conflicts stemming from counsel’s self-interests can be difficult to identify. They may be based on counsel’s internal beliefs or biases, rendering them invisible to external actors. Some indigent defense delivery models create self-interest conflicts, whereby acknowledging their existence risks disrupting court appointment of counsel systems. All undermine effective representation. Critical scholarly engagement is crucial to gain a better understanding of the impact counsel’s conflicting self-interests have on defendants and to identify potential remedies. This Article makes three novel contributions. First, it offers a taxonomy of defense counsel’s self-interests, organizing them into four categories: financial, internal, situational, and structurally induced. Second, it applies a critical lens to conflicts-of-interest stemming from counsel’s self-interests, revealing factors that have contributed to the lack of scholarly, jurisprudential, and ethical scrutiny. Third, it identifies how criminal legal system actors can utilize the taxonomy to help mitigate and eliminate defense counsels’ conflicting self-interests. It concludes with a call to expand these efforts to address the gap where the ethical rules and Sixth Amendment protections fall short. This examination is necessary and timely. Any conflict between the accused and defense counsel frustrates counsel’s basic duty to assist the defendant, jeopardizes public confidence in the adjudication system, and erodes defendants’ Sixth Amendment right to counsel.