In Masculinity As Prison: Sexual Identity, Race, and Incarceration, Professor Russell Robinson explores the creation of the KG6 unit of the Los Angeles County Jail. Robinson describes how this unit, designed to protect prisoners who may be targets because of non-normative gender and sexual orientation, operates as a site for the enforcement of racialized and classed norms about sexual…

California once led the country in sterilizations of mentally disabled people. In the first half of the twentieth century, this practice, inspired by the then-socially-acceptable “science” of eugenics, was considered progressive. Such sterilizations became common around the country and were authorized by state law in California and many other states…

On January 23, 2012, the Supreme Court held unanimously that the installation and use of a GPS tracker on a suspected drug dealer’s Jeep constituted a search under the Fourth Amendment. The outcome had been fairly well foreshadowed: At oral argument, the Justices had seemed perturbed by the thought that police could put trackers on cars—even the Justices’s own cars—seemingly at will…

We are sympathetic to the institutional innovations Leib and Elmendorf propose, and to the concept of democracy at the heart of their recommendations. They resist the opposition of “popular democracy” and “party democracy,” and their models of reform ingeniously blend the two. Popular democracy tries to make real the injunction that “the people should rule” by engaging “the people”…

Russell Robinson has done it again. With “Masculinity as Prison: Sexual Identity, Race, and Incarceration,” he has given us another provocative Article, which illuminates a phenomenon in the world and, indirectly, in ourselves.The Article represents much of what…

Since 2005, the Reverend Fred Phelps and other members of the Westboro Baptist Church have outraged almost everyone by protesting near military funerals. In Snyder v. Phelps, the Supreme Court will finally decide whether that outrage is actionable. Few people will lose sleep if the Court finds that the First Amendment allows Albert Snyder to sue the Phelpses for intentional infliction…

The recently passed health care bill1 contains many provisions that deserve celebration. Improving access to care is an important first step. Enhancing patient safety and accountability is an important second step, one that proponents of medical malpractice reform often undermine with attempts to restrict the liability of health care providers through “litigation alternatives.” During the health care…

In recent years, legal scholars and practitioners alike have expressed major misgivings about the advice that the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel (OLC) provided to former President George W. Bush following the attacks of September 11, 2001. On February 19, 2010, House Judiciary Committee Chairman John Conyers, Jr. released internal communications of the Justice…

Approximately 200,000 divorce petitions are filed annually in California. Seventy percent of those cases involve at least one self-represented litigant at the beginning of the case. That figure increases to 80 percent by the time of judgment. This is not simply a California issue. Utah, for example, reports that 49 percent of petitioners and 81 percent of respondents in divorce…

In 2007, the California Supreme Court faced a difficult question: were procedures used in a family law court, intended to make the process easier for the litigants, in fact violating their rights to due process? Deciding that they were, the Court declared: "[t]hat a procedure is efficient and moves cases through the system is admirable, but even more important is for the courts to provide fair and…