Articles, notes, and symposia pieces published in CLR’s print volumes.
Print Edition
The Equal Right to Exclude: Religious Speech and the Road to 303 Creative LLC v. Elenis
This Article explains how speech became the constitutional vehicle for the right to discriminate on religious grounds in places of public accommodation. It argues that cause lawyers for the New Christian Right cobbled together a right to exclude from a surprising doctrinal source: the egalitarian tendencies within the First Amendment.
Violence in the Administrative State
Drawing on an original, interview-based case study of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and a synthesis of six decades of social science literature, this Article offers a theory of physical violence in the administrative state that challenges foundational assumptions about administrative law.
Under the Watchful Eye of All: Disabled Parents and the Family Policing System’s Web of Surveillance
The child welfare system, more accurately referred to as the family policing system, employs extensive surveillance that disproportionately targets marginalized families and subjects them to relentless oversight. This Article provides a nuanced and novel analysis of the family policing system and its extensive surveillance targeted at disabled parents and their children.
The Antisubordination Eighth Amendment
Through an examination of the history, structure, jurisprudence, and theory of the Eighth and Fourteenth Amendments, the Article concludes that an Antisubordination Eighth Amendment is both possible and necessary to address the systemic racism of the criminal legal system.
Prison Banking
This Article examines the history and legal status of inmate trust accounts and the vulnerability of these funds. The Article places prison banking within the broader landscape of racialized wealth extraction through the criminal system and challenges the assumption that prisons and jails—subject to little regulation despite apparent conflicts of interest—should be permitted to operate a low-transparency banking system with exclusive control.
Internal Revenue’s External Borders
This Article proposes reforms to better align tax agency efforts with their revenue-generating mission and to protect immigrants caught in the crosshairs. Those reforms include redesigning criminal tax investigations, crafting interagency agreements, and providing immigration relief.
A Right to Be Left Dead
This Article interrogates the need for a right to be left dead and takes some preliminary steps towards defining its contours, chief among them an awareness that an individual right to prevent unauthorized reanimations of the dead must look very different than the existing privacy, consumer protection, and property laws marshalled against unauthorized invocations of the living.
Rethinking Environmental Disclosure
Despite the widespread enthusiasm, after decades of implementation it is increasingly clear that information regulation largely fails to achieve its environmental goals. This Article makes two main contributions. By drawing on quantitative and qualitative case studies of information-forcing regulations, it first answers the question of whether this approach to environmental regulation is effective. This Article then analyzes the mechanisms behind information forcing in conjunction with these case studies to propose characteristics that determine the success, or failure, of information regulation.
Bridging Silos: Environmental and Reproductive Justice in the Climate Crisis
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.
Traffic Courts
This Article provides the first comprehensive study of traffic courts. It makes four principal observations about their inner workings.
Whack-A-Mole Reasonable Suspicion
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.
Rejecting Public Utility Data Monopolies
As the first exploration of this question, this Article tests the continuing application and rationale of the state action immunity doctrine to the evolving services that a utility provides as the grid becomes digitized.
Guilty After Proven Innocent: Hidden Factfinding in Immigration Decision-Making
This piece suggests that a simple evidentiary tweak can help bring discretionary immigration decision-making back in line with the “fundamental norms . . . that animate the rest of our legal system.”
Legal Endearment: An Unmarked Barrier to Transforming Policing, Public Safety, and Security
The problems of racialized policing have come into renewed focus over the past decade. Even after the mobilization of one of the largest racial justice movements in American history, transformative change remains elusive. This Article offers an answer to this puzzle by foregrounding White people’s collective relationship with policing and describing how this relationship colors current debates on how to best address policing’s racial disparities.
The Major Questions Doctrine: Unfounded, Unbounded, and Confounded
This Article offers a critique of the major questions doctrine from a different angle. It primarily contends that the reasons the Supreme Court has given for enforcing the doctrine do not withstand scrutiny, even on their own terms.
Debt, Race, and Physical Mobility
This Article begins a new conversation about debt and debt policy, one that interrogates debt policy’s racialized effects on physical mobility, freedom, and personhood.
Survival Labor
This Article makes one simple, novel claim: crime is labor when it generates income, allows individuals to pursue self-sufficiency, or allows them to fulfill societal expectations of providing for or caring for dependents. When individuals engage in survival crimes, instead of seeing them as criminals, we should see them as workers engaged in survival labor.
Forum Crowding
Jurists and scholars have long debated (and often decried) the practice of forum shopping. Such debates have overlooked the effects of forum shopping on an important constituency: litigants who have little choice over forum. When forum shopping causes a sudden influx of cases—when, that is, it crowds a forum—what happens to other cases that have nowhere else to go?
Redistricting Immunity
Redistricting litigation has entered a new era. In 2020, for the first time, state legislatures completed post-census redistricting without preclearance under Section 5 of the Voting Rights Act (VRA). After Shelby County v. Holder, plaintiffs challenging unlawful maps must rely upon private litigation alone. Meanwhile, the Supreme Court has resuscitated the Purcell Principle, an equitable election law doctrine that prohibits federal courts from changing election rules on the eve of a political contest.
Sex-Defining Laws and Equal Protection
Many equal protection challenges to the recent onslaught of anti-transgender legislation ask courts to determine the constitutional limits of the state’s ability to define sex. The canonical cases addressed the state’s ability to treat men differently from women—not the state’s ability to define “men” and “women.” This difference between the canonical cases and what this Article calls “sex-defining” cases does not necessitate any monumental shifts in equal protection doctrine, but it does require courts to tweak their intermediate scrutiny analyses.