Print Edition
This Note examines the current legal landscape around “poppers,” an alkyl nitrite-based inhalant that has a strong association with the LGBTQ+ community as a party and sex drug.
This Note is concerned with the unique conflict of interest presented when a prosecutor who accepts campaign contributions from a police union is responsible for investigating police shootings or other officer misconduct.
This Article makes two interventions into existing legal scholarship. First, the Article identifies an intersectional nexus of hazard between environmental and reproductive justice, which is especially acute for women of color living in under-resourced communities. Second, the Article argues for a ground-up approach based on community power-building and interdisciplinary cooperation, which can inform legal and policy solutions at scale.
This Article provides the first comprehensive study of traffic courts. It makes four principal observations about their inner workings.
This Article examines police officers’ and deferential courts’ emerging reliance on the term “blading” or “blading away,” as a behavior supporting the reasonable suspicion constitutionally required for a stop and search. After conducting a comprehensive analysis of the term’s usage in state and federal courts over the past five years, the Article groups three contradictory categories of meaning and argues for the abolition of "blading" as a justification.
This Note explains both how artificial intelligence companies could institute initiatives for better quality assurance at the front end, and how courts can encourage such measures through new applications of existing evidentiary and procedural rules. The Note ultimately argues that the emerging use of GAI imagery may necessitate stricter standards in demonstrative evidence law.
CLR Online
The web edition of the California Law Review.
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…
Bennett Capers’s article Against Prosecutors challenges us to imagine a world where we “turn away from prosecution as we know it,” and shift “power from prosecutors to the people they purport to represent.” In this world, crime victims decide whether to prosecute their own cases, and public prosecutors play a subsidiary role, taking primary responsibility only for cases “where…
Symposia
Articles accompanying CLR’s conferences. Published in the print edition.
In the summer of 1854, the Massachusetts Anti-Slavery Society sent out word of a large gathering to be held at Harmony Grove in Framingham—sixteen miles from Boston—on the Fourth of July. For fifty cents, picnickers were offered “Special Trains” to and from the grounds.
In his essay Frederick Douglass and the Two Constitutions, Professor David Blight explores the constitutional thought of the nineteenth century’s great human rights advocate, statesman, and orator, Frederick Douglass. How should we understand, he asks, Douglass’s arrival at a natural rights interpretation of the 1787 Constitution?
Even in a century notable for oratory, Frederick Douglass’s capacities as an orator were astonishing. He was a master of words, whether spoken or written.
Thank you for inviting me to participate in this symposium. I want to thank David Blight, in particular, for this rich and provocative Essay. It was fascinating for me to learn that he has come over to the position of my friends James Oakes and Sean Wilentz, with whom I have argued about the concept of the antislavery American Constitution.
Born a slave on the eastern shore of Maryland and spending the first twenty years of his life in bondage, Frederick Douglass possessed no conventional education. He did not spend a single day of his life in schools of any kind. His “education” came from people around him, from books, from journalism, from wide reading, and finally, from his personal experience and relationships.
In his Jorde lecture, Professor Steven Levitsky offers an important account of the nation at a crossroads. Down one path is a thriving multiracial democracy; down the other lies democracy’s demise. To avoid the latter path, Levitsky presses the need for major institutional reform, including constitutional amendments to change the structure of the United States…
Podcast
Traffic courts resolve over half of the cases in the U.S. legal system. These cases are easy for some defendants to handle by paying a fine, but they can have devastating effects for those with fewer means. And despite the key role these courts play in funding state judicial branches and other state and local programs, they have not been comprehensively studied in decades. What’s going on in traffic courts? And what can they teach us about the legal system more broadly? In this episode, Arizona State University Sandra Day O’Connor College of Law Professor Justin Weinstein-Tull explains his research on traffic courts.
Immigration adjudications regularly use information from the criminal legal system to justify a discretionary denial of relief or benefits, even when charges have been dismissed. This practice faces little scrutiny due to the assumption that adjudicators are merely importing facts already found by the criminal system. But what if this practice actually constitutes “hidden factfinding”? Sarah Vendzules, a Senior Staff Attorney at the Office of the Appellate Defender in New York City, uncovers this hidden factfinding and offers a framework that could rein it in.
The U.S. carceral system disproportionately harms racial minorities and people living in poverty. Penal abolitionist frameworks have helpfully reframed the conversation to foreground those harmful social consequences. But how do those consequences affect our understanding of work, and particularly work that is both criminalized and undertaken in order to survive? In this episode, Indiana University Maurer School of Law Professor Yvette Butler explains her concept of survival labor and why it should be included in our general understanding of work.
For more than a century, the United States has restricted Tribal governments’ powers over criminal law. It has diminished Tribal jurisdiction and imposed adversarial approaches on Tribal courts. But recently, some Tribal courts have begun to embrace Indigenous-based restorative justice models. UCLA School of Law Assistant Professor Lauren van Schilfgaarde discusses how these these models strengthen both Tribal courts and Tribal jurisdiction more broadly.
Each year, Child Protective Services investigates over one million families. Every investigation includes a room-by-room search of the family home, as well as the threat of the state’s coercive authority to remove children from their families. CUNY School of Law Professor Tarek Z. Ismail discusses how these investigations have evaded traditional Fourth Amendment scrutiny.
Americans have long persevered in the face of the national welfare system's inadequacies. But when a new challenge like climate change emerges, how can the United States adapt its welfare programs to assist its people?
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