While lawmakers have long known that Native American women experience gender-based violence at higher rates than any other population, lawmakers historically have addressed these harms by implementing jurisdictional changes: removing tribal jurisdiction entirely, limiting tribal jurisdiction, or returning jurisdiction to tribes in a piecemeal fashion. The result is a “jurisdictional maze” that law…

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…

President Donald Trump frequently argues that confirming federal appellate judges constitutes his quintessential success. The President and the Republican Senate majority have dramatically eclipsed appeals court records by appointing fifty-one conservative, young, and capable appellate court nominees, which leaves merely one vacancy across the country. Nonetheless, these approvals…

The modern #MeToo movement started in late 2017 and immediately had an impact on many aspects of society, bringing down over 200 powerful men in the first year and sparking swift legal change regarding the use of nondisclosure agreements to silence victims. But no research has been conducted into how the #MeToo movement has affected juror decision making in sexual assault…

President Trump has proven oddly reluctant to make full use of federal emergency powers during the coronavirus pandemic. The reasons for the delay are puzzling, given his enthusiasm for using emergency powers in other settings. Fortunately, the harm caused by his lackluster response to the coronavirus has been somewhat mitigated by the decentralized nature of the U.S. federal system for addressing epidemics. Where the federal government has faltered, state governments have stepped up to address the challenge with social distancing orders and stay-at-home orders…

First, what can and can’t the government do in restricting liberties to stop the spread of COVID-19? Second, what is the respective constitutional authority of the federal and state governments in dealing with the pandemic?

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…

Affirming that a transgender woman is a woman legitimizes her identity, signals she is worthy of equal dignity, and helps the court better grasp her vulnerability to and experience of discrimination as a woman…

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…

Professor William Baude asks, “Is qualified immunity unlawful?” He refers to the § 1983 defense, under which officers avoid liability for damages unless they have violated “clearly established statutory or constitutional rights of which a reasonable person would have known.” Baude concludes that qualified immunity is unlawful because…

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…

The pirates of the 21st century plunder more than the pirates of the 18th century ever did. Copying and distributing content worth billions of dollars online, modern-day pirates cost movie studios, music companies, and content creators an astronomical amount of money.[1] While Internet pirates have traded in their cutlasses and ships for keyboards and high-definition copies of “Blade Runner,” the impact…

Prisoners love to file habeas petitions. Maybe a little too much. That is why Congress drafted the federal habeas statutes to preclude prisoners from filing “second or successive” petitions attacking their judgments. But in drafting those statutes, Congress left open a loophole: if a prisoner secures some change to his judgment that makes that…