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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

This Article provides the first comprehensive study of traffic courts. It makes four principal observations about their inner workings.

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.

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.

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.”

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.

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.

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.

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.

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 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.

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.

This Article explores the role of lawyers in democratic backsliding—the degradation of democratic institutions and practices using law rather than violence. The Article’s central aim is to set an agenda and outline an approach to studying the professional paradox at the center of backsliding: why and how lawyers attack the rule of law. It thus seeks to shift the scholarly lens from the conventional view of lawyers as defenders of democracy to investigate lawyers as authors of autocracy.

In recent decades, the U.S. labor market has shifted to more contingent work or work disguised as entrepreneurship. These attenuated relations between worker and firm reflect the “fissuring” of work. Some firms now go beyond fissuring work: they treat the workers themselves as consumers by offering them services and credit products. And when firms expand employment contracts to extend services and credit products to workers, workers are entitled to consumer law protections.

For more than a century, the United States has sought to restrict Tribal governments’ powers over criminal law. Tribes are increasingly embracing Indigenous-based restorative justice models, which have regenerated Tribal jurisdiction and enhanced the well-being of Tribal members.

In his 1989 essay The Embarrassing Second Amendment, Sanford Levinson suggested that left-leaning scholars avoid studying the Second Amendment because they are embarrassed that its text might mean what gun-rights proponents claim it means—an individual right to bear arms. Levinson urged such scholars to better engage the text, both to model intellectual integrity and to avoid unnecessarily ceding the terms of a critical constitutional debate. This Article makes a similar argument with respect to the right to counsel granted by the Sixth Amendment.