CLR Diversity Editor Sean Darling-Hammond analyzes the Ninth Circuit’s decision in Renee v. Duncan—the latest in a series of cases challenging Department of Education regulations that disproportionately affect low-income students by allowing teachers enrolled in alternative certification programs to engage in instruction. Darling-Hammond ultimately advocates a novel solution to allow states…

CLR member Anna K. Christensen argues that the Supreme Court’s decision in Miller v. Alabama stopped short of providing juvenile offenders with complete justice. By failing to categorically ban life sentences without the possibility of parole for juvenile offenders, Christensen asserts that the Court neglected an opportunity to fashion a sentencing system that acknowledges…

Robin Kuntz, a CLR member, analyzes the implications of the Ninth Circuit’s decision in United States v. Ressam, the first case in the jurisdiction involving the criminal sentencing of a terrorist under the advisory sentencing guidelines. Kuntz concludes that although the guidelines do not offer a clear standard by which a…

Third-year law student Jalem Peguero argues that the Supreme Court’s decision in Blueford v. Arkansas trades constitutional protection for rigid formalism. The Blueford Court sanctioned the retrial of criminal defendants for offenses where a jury did not formally acquit the defendant; accordingly, Peguero claims, the Court prevented even clear statements by jury…

Current CLR member Ioana Tchoukleva examines the Supreme Court’s decision in Miller v. Alabama, which prohibited mandatory sentences of life without parole for juvenile homicide offenders under the Eighth Amendment, and discusses the implications of the Court’s holding on the future of juvenile rights. This Case Note is one of seven written…

In the wake of several proposed patent reform bills, James Bessen and Professor Brian Love introduce an unconventional approach to discouraging so-called “patent trolls”: levying a Pigovian tax on patent holders by increasing maintenance fees for older patents. The pair argue that establishing a tiered fee structure…

In this essay, Professor Brian Clarke examines the Supreme Court’s various articulations of the proper standard for determining causation in employment discrimination cases. Professor Clarke then proposes a novel solution that the Court should adopt in its opinion in University of Texas Southwest Medical Center v. Nassar in order to…

The regulation of domestic drone use has been the subject of much media attention. In addition to how much domestic drones should be regulated, scholars and policymakers are debating a more complex question, which is who should regulate drones. In this Essay, Margot Kaminski, Executive Director of the Yale Information Society Project…

In this Book Review, Professor Glenn H. Reynolds looks to both the past and the future of space law. Drawing from his experience co-authoring one of the first comprehensive legal texts on outer-space law and legal issues, Professor Reynolds provides an expert’s evaluation of The Laws of Spaceflight: A Guidebook for New Space Lawyers.

University of Connecticut School of Law Professor Bethany R. Berger looks at the relationship between descent-based tribal citizenship requirements and race or racism. She argues that tribal citizenship laws that require Indian or tribal descent are generally neither the…

Current CLR member Keagan D. Buchanan previews the Supreme Court’s upcoming decision in Maryland v. King, which will decide whether Maryland’s expansion of its DNA collection and analysis procedures to felony arrestees is constitutional. This Case Note is one of seven written by California Law Review members for CLR Circuit’s first annual Case Note Review.

Michigan State University College of Law Professor Matthew L.M. Fletcher examines the late Berkeley Law Professor Philip P. Frickey’s call for more grounded and empirical American Indian legal scholarship. Fletcher analyzes the state of American Indian legal…

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”…

Human trafficking is big business, with industry estimates running in the billions of dollars annually. Much of that profit accrues to traffickers, illegal profiteers, and organized crime groups. However, the private sector-including legitimate businesses and industries-also reaps economic benefits, directly and indirectly, from the trafficking and related exploitation of persons…

Like many who attend law school, I was an undergraduate history major. The humanities, my college pre-professional advisor assured me, were ideal preparation for the rigors of law school. I believed the hype. Three years later, on my first day of Contracts, my blind faith in…

Why do I include films, art and novels in the study of property law? The reason for this, as I argue in this Essay, is quite simple. I contend that deploying these materials in the classroom deepens my students’ understanding of property law. The study of property law…

I began teaching Contract Law in 1997, and because I wanted my students to benefit from an interdisciplinary approach to the subject, I chose a wonderful casebook edited by Amy Kastely, Deborah Waire Post, and Sharon Hom, called Contracting Law. Rather than…