Despite the ever-growing number of exonerations in the U.S.—and the corresponding surge in scholarly interest in wrongful convictions in recent years—research on the carceral experiences of wrongfully-convicted persons remains strikingly limited. In this essay, we draw on in-depth interviews with 15 exonerated men to explore the moral dimensions of the experience of wrongful imprisonment…

This essay reveals that the “diversity justification” for affirmative action has its roots in part in the South African anti-apartheid movement of the 1950s, and that when Justice Powell wrote the controlling opinion in the Bakke case, placing diversity at the center of our discourse on race in America, he was relying on arguments developed in the anti-apartheid movement that the right to admit a racially diverse student body was a key element of academic freedom…

Roe v. Wade and Miranda v. Arizona are among the most notable decisions handed down by the Supreme Court. Issued less than a decade apart, these two opinions are widely recognized as being foundational to our legal system…

The Supreme Court’s decision in Arthrex is the latest in a growing set of decisions regarding administrative patent law. A close look at this entire series suggests that Arthrex is a culmination of a subtle shift in the Court’s approach to such cases…

Using the case study of Christa McAuliffe Intermediate School PTO, Inc. v. de Blasio, a lawsuit challenging New York City’s class-based policies to diversify its elite Specialized High Schools, this Essay explains that purported support for class-based affirmative action serves as a rhetorical smokescreen for eliminating Brown v. Board of Education’s promise of a racially…

This Essay will connect the persistent strategies, logics, and identities created by settler colonialism to the disparate health impacts of COVID-19 in Indigenous, Black, and immigrant of color communities in the United States. By offering a framework that uncovers the root causes of ongoing patterns of systemic oppression, this Essay hopes to inspire reform efforts that seek to…

If the late Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s successor is confirmed before the 2020 presidential election or in the post-election lame-duck period, and if Democrats come to have unified control of government on January 20, 2021, how can they respond legislatively to the Court’s new 6-3 conservative ideological balance? This Essay frames a hypothetical 117th Congress’s options, discusses its…

Popular selection of judges offers a partial answer to the charge that the judiciary has usurped the role of the People in constitutional governance. Particularly in today’s intensely polarized environment, whether judges are selected through a process that actually reflects popular preferences is thus of critical importance to the democratic legitimacy of the constitutional order…

But the public health workforce shortage existed long before the outbreak. The real issue isn’t about a deficit of skilled workers available to enter the health care worker pipeline with hopes to work their way up to higher-paying jobs in the sector. The problem is job quality…

The greatest impact of the novel coronavirus on most of our lives has not been physiological. Rather, the impact has come from state governments’ responses to the virus. In much of the country, stay-at-home measures have shut down our lives—including our ability to continue with our employment, study, religious practice, socializing, and access to arts and entertainment. Commentary on the legality…

When school funding flows from property taxes, it follows that geographic wealth disparities will lead to unequal districts. In the 1970s, courts began wading into the legally murky water of school funding to correct such gaps, but they did so without a comprehensive understanding of what creates them in the first place. Courts focused on property taxes and spending per pupil…

The U.S. News & World Report law school rankings are highly influential among people applying to law school. Nonetheless, they are widely panned among the legal community for the often-arbitrary criteria they use to distinguish between law schools. In this essay, I seek to rescue the rankings from this derision by proposing a novel use for them: picking the winner of college football games…

Five months before he passed away, my father, Fred Toyosaburo Korematsu, gave me a charge: continue his mission to educate the public and remind people of the dangers of history. At that time, I was running my commercial interior design firm. I was far from a public speaker, educator, and civil rights advocate. However, for the previous four years I had been traveling with my aging father as…

This report reviews research that coded the content of the 16,376 comments filed with the U.S. Department of Education (ED) in response to ED’s call for public comments on Executive Order 13777 (establishing a federal policy to “alleviate unnecessary regulatory burdens”), which closed on September 22, 2017. This research focused on the 12,035 comments that addressed Title IX of the…

The word crisis has lost its essence through overuse and exaggeration. Still, looking through the dictionary, I find myself quietly nodding along with how fittingly the definition describes the current state of housing in Alameda County…

In June 2017, Susan Burton, founder of the successful prisoner reentry program A New Way of Life Reentry Project (ANWOL), spoke to students and staff at the East Bay Community Law Center (EBCLC). Ms. Burton’s story is profound…

Founded in 1989 as one of the pioneer clinics at the East Bay Community Law Center (EBCLC), the Health & Welfare Practice provides holistic legal services through a medical-legal partnership model to improve the health and well-being of vulnerable individuals. Our experience over the last three decades…

In Rebellious Lawyering: One Chicano’s Vision of Progressive Law Practice, Gerald P. López advocates for an inclusive model of progressive lawyering that acknowledges and employs the varying expertise of all the participants in the struggle for social change. In a similar spirit, the East Bay Community Law Center (EBCLC) was founded in 1988 by Berkeley Law students who were immensely…

I was recently at a conference of lawyers where we were asked to reflect on how we developed our professional identity. Not easily defined, professional identity is “a way of being” that encompasses the skills, values, roles, and behavior patterns of the profession. For most of the lawyers in the room, the answer lay outside their law school experience. For many of these lawyers, their professional…

It was a weekday afternoon, and my last meeting of the day was a community forum in Oakland hosted by Alameda County Supervisor Keith Carson to discuss African American achievement. The convening was at an Oakland high school that was not on a BART line. But rather than drive, I decided to take the bus. AC Transit buses were my primary form of transportation in my youth, taking me…