A few years ago, I published, in this journal, an article on the thirtieth birthday of the Americans with Disability Act. That article, The Americans with Disabilities Act at Thirty, 11 CALIF. L. REV. ONLINE 308 (2020), has seen a great deal of success over the past three years. Inspired by that essay, this article celebrates the fiftieth anniversary of another very important disability rights law—the forerunner of the Americans with Disabilities Act—the Rehabilitation Act of 1973 (RA).

In July 2022, transitional U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) requirements for milk in school meals went into effect. These requirements further ensconce milk as a nutritional cornerstone of the USDA’s school breakfast and lunch programs, with milk serving as a key source of calcium, vitamin D, potassium, and calories for children.

Many may recognize the “land grant” moniker that several dozen U.S. universities like the University of California carry, but what many do not realize is that the land “granted” to fund these universities was land that the federal government had recently expropriated from Native Nations through violent seizures and coercive treaties.

Public debate over the U.S. legal response to White supremacist violence is on constant simmer, bound to boil over whenever an attack draws national attention. In recent years, that’s happened often. Like in 2015, when a White nationalist gunman killed nine worshippers at a Black church in Charleston, South Carolina. And in 2019, when a White man who decried the “Hispanic invasion of…

In 2019 and 2020, the Supreme Court denied two petitions for certiorari concerning the provision of gender confirmation surgery to incarcerated individuals. These denials solidified a circuit split over whether a prison must provide gender confirmation surgery to incarcerated people…

In February 2022, the Texas Governor and the Texas Attorney General declared that parents who provide gender-affirming care to their children should be investigated for child abuse. These declarations expressly authorize the surveillance of, intervention in, and possible destruction of LGBTQ families…

In spring 2020, many parents of children in California schools closed during the global pandemic had had enough. A group filed a lawsuit challenging the executive orders requiring compliance with state public health directives that in turn mandated the shuttering of schools…

Throughout the coronavirus pandemic, strong executives emerged in the President and the country’s many Governors. While the situation required extraordinary measures, expanding executive powers evidence a worrying trend of unchecked, unilateral power…

In The Tragedy of the Commons, Garrett Hardin argues that those who can use a resource for free consume more of it than they would if they had to pay for it. Public resources eventually collapse because people overuse them…

The #MeToo Movement cast a spotlight on sexual harassment in various sectors, including higher education. Studies reveal alarming percentages of students reporting that they have been sexually harassed by faculty and administrators. Despite annually devoting hundreds of millions of dollars to addressing sexual harassment and misconduct, nationwide university officials largely take an ostrich approach when…

Since 2012, beneficiaries of Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) have enjoyed a certain normalization, however tenuous, of their status in the United States: they can legally work, their removal proceedings are deferred, and they cease to accrue unlawful presence. Regarding subsidized health coverage, however, DACA beneficiaries remain on the outside looking in. Although other…

Black Law Students experienced a different COVID-19 pandemic than their majority counterparts due in part to the emotional and physical toll caused by the violent, public mistreatment of Black persons at the hands of law enforcement. While some law faculty at some institutions were proactive in identifying the struggles that their Black students were facing…

When foreign labor recruiters, acting on foreign soil as agents of domestic growers, intentionally prefer young, non-disabled men as temporary agricultural workers in the United States, federal antidiscrimination law traditionally has offered no recourse because of the presumption against extraterritorial application of domestic statutes. Accordingly, prospective migrant workers face discrimination abroad by American employers’ agents…

This article is a reply to Professor Suja Thomas’s article “The Customer Caste: Legal Discrimination by Public Businesses.” This reply adds another compelling piece of evidence to Professor Thomas’s thesis by arguing that the federal courts have defied the original meaning of Title II’s central guarantee of “full and equal enjoyment” of public accommodations. That…

HHS under the Trump administration finalized a new rule in June 2020 that officially stripped sexual orientation and gender identity from Section 1557’s safeguards. Whether the position taken by the Trump administration can stand is now the subject of several legal challenges, particularly in light of the recent Supreme Court decision Bostock v. Clayton Co., which held that sexual orientation…

Individuals incarcerated in states that have enacted death penalty moratoria do not have their death sentences carried out in a timely and expeditious manner; instead, these incarcerated individuals sit on death row until they are either exonerated or die of natural causes. Individuals on death row in these states sit on death row for over two decades on average. This Article argues that capital…

Anti-mask laws ban the wearing of masks in public. Popularly understood to prevent Klan activity, these laws are often vague, with a history of selective enforcement. They also clash with the exhortations to wear personal protective equipment to prevent the spread of COVID-19, which by summer of 2020 was encouraged by all states and required by many…

But in other cases, textualists proceed as if legal texts have an ordinary meaning even when they do not. Judges see a rabbit, or a duck, when other reasonable readers see a duck, or a rabbit. Such judges are “seeing as.” Nonetheless, they insist that they are “seeing that.” They do not think, do not know, and might not even believe, that “someone else could have said of [them]: ‘He is seeing the figure as a…

Steven Universe, a children’s cartoon that follows the lives and adventures of the half-human, half-alien boy Steven Universe and his family of intergalactic space aliens, “the Crystal Gems,” upends these narratives, instead modeling restorative justice principles—empathetic, dialogue-based communication, non-punitive conflict resolution, and communal healing—for children…

In a time of constitutional hardball, the Supreme Court’s quorum requirement raises the questions of how and whether a tactic of strategic recusal—or “sitting out”—can be effectively employed by a four-Justice minority and whether utilizing such a tactic would be appropriate…