As technology advances and more Americans use the internet to get their news, AI-generated “deepfakes” have become a powerful tool for misinformation. One common use of deepfakes is to make fake, but convincing, videos of electoral candidates or government officials. Deepfakes pose particular harm to local governments and officials because, unlike federal leaders, local leaders usually do not have the financial resources to fund the counterspeech sufficient to disprove deepfakes. Thus, to help defend the integrity of local governments, this Note argues that every state should enact legislation prohibiting deepfakes of public officials and proposes a First Amendment-compliant framework for doing so. This Note proposes that a deepfake statute survives constitutional scrutiny if it meets the following criteria: (1) it targets the medium of deepfakes rather than the accuracy of the speech; (2) it uses precise language defining the scope of the law; (3) it includes carveouts to exclude people from liability if they include a reasonable disclaimer clarifying the video is a deepfake; (4) it contains no time-based restrictions on applicability; and (5) it provides for injunctive relief and criminal penalties consistent with existing falsity statutes.

Today, venue is generally treated as secondary to jurisdiction: statutory, waivable, and concerned with where litigation should proceed, rather than whether it should proceed at all. Yet the courts of appeals remain split over a basic question of federal venue procedure: who bears the burden of proof when a defendant moves to dismiss for improper venue under Federal Rule of Civil Procedure 12(b)(3)? Though seemingly technical, in practice, burden allocation can determine whether a suit survives.

This Note offers the first historically grounded approach to resolving Rule 12(b)(3)’s burden allocation problem and argues that the circuit majority approach rests on a doctrinal error. Most circuits place the burden on the plaintiff, often by analogizing venue to jurisdiction and requiring the plaintiff to justify her chosen forum once challenged. The Sixth Circuit recently adopted this approach in Tobien v. Nationwide General Insurance Co. But that analogy collapses venue into jurisdiction, importing jurisdiction’s constitutionalized limitations into venue’s waivable statutory framework. The minority approach, led by the Third Circuit in Myers v. American Dental Association, instead treats improper venue as what it is: a waivable, procedural defense that only delays litigation and operates like other affirmative defenses that allocate the burden of proof on the movant.

Today’s dispute about Rule 12(b)(3)’s burden allocation can be resolved by looking to yesterday’s procedural requirements. At common law, objections to venue’s “place of trial” were disfavored by courts and existed as dilatory pleas in abatement. The plea in abatement, which objected to the technical aspects of a particular suit but not its merits, was strictly policed by the court, easily waived, and required the movant to bear the burden of proof. As American procedure evolved, the Supreme Court constitutionalized jurisdiction while Congress separated venue by statute, keeping improper venue as a waivable privilege of the defendant. The creation of the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure repackaged, rather than repudiated, the inherited procedural burdens of the Federal Rule’s predecessors. Read against its historical background, Rule 12(b)(3) is an outlier only because modern courts have lost sight of where it came from.

This Note advances a clear rule: when properly raised, the movant should bear the burden of proving improper venue under Rule 12(b)(3). Not only is the movant in the best position to answer whether venue is improper, but venue transfer mechanisms under 28 U.S.C. §§ 1404 and 1406 make the rule procedurally and normatively attractive. Placing the burden on the movant would reduce gamesmanship and ensure that a procedural threshold does not become an evidentiary barrier to adjudication on the merits.

Modern arbitration clauses hide a dirty secret: many don’t actually provide for genuine arbitration. These provisions masquerade as mutual commitments to fair and efficient private dispute resolution but, in truth, are mere imitations of genuine arbitration provisions. Some reserve for the drafter the power to amend or terminate the clause at will without notice or consent; others design the arbitration process to ensure bias from the start; still others depart so radically from the bilateral, informal model blessed by the Supreme Court that they scarcely resemble arbitration at all. These arrangements are arbitration in name only, falling outside the Federal Arbitration Act’s (FAA) scope, which extends only to the enforcement of authentic arbitration agreements.

Much turns on the threshold question of whether a valid arbitration clause exists. Once a court classifies a clause as “arbitration,” the FAA’s machinery activates: state-law defenses are narrowed by federal preemption, delegation provisions channel validity challenges to the arbitrator, and courts must stay litigation and compel arbitration under §§ 3 and 4 of the FAA. But when a clause fails to qualify as arbitration in the first instance, the FAA never applies. No preemption, no delegation, no pro-arbitration presumption—just the application of ordinary contract law. Yet courts routinely treat the label “arbitration” as dispositive, extending FAA protection to provisions that lack arbitration’s basic attributes and enabling sham regimes to proliferate in consumer and employment contracts.

This Article recovers arbitration’s definitional boundaries. Drawing on the FAA’s text and legislative history, and on the Supreme Court’s repeated emphasis on arbitration’s defining features, it identifies three core prerequisites—structural neutrality, procedural minimalism, and mutual obligation. Clauses that lack these features are not simply flawed arbitration agreements—they are not FAA-protected arbitration at all.

This definitional clarity is especially urgent today. Corporations, seeking to stave off mass arbitration, are rewriting their clauses to impose exhaustion requirements, batching rules, queuing regimes, and other procedural chokepoints that transform streamlined dispute resolution into a bureaucratic obstacle course. Plaintiffs are increasingly challenging these anti-mass-arbitration provisions as exceeding arbitration’s definitional boundaries—yet courts lack principled tools for distinguishing genuine arbitration from its counterfeits. A threshold inquiry into whether a provision truly constitutes arbitration would prevent the FAA’s protections from extending to arrangements that bear arbitration’s name but not its substance.