Articles, notes, and symposia pieces published in CLR’s print volumes.
Print Edition
Consumer Law as Work Law
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.
Can California Pleas Resurrect Its Unconstitutional Conditions Doctrine?
Like all U.S. jurisdictions, California’s criminal legal system is largely administered via plea bargains. Although courts characterize plea bargains as fair and necessary, these characterizations do not enjoy strong empirical support. This Note concludes that plea bargaining practices likely violate California’s unconstitutional conditions doctrine and urges state actors to implement reforms.
A Rule Change Is, After All, a Rule Change: Rule 23 Settlement Approval and the Problems of Consensus Rulemaking
Past efforts by the Advisory Committee on Civil Rules to substantially reform Rule 23 have been met with such controversy that more recently, the Advisory Committee has elected to pursue more modest reforms. The new criteria have been widely understood as introducing modest changes and have even been argued by some to have done nothing more than codify existing circuit practice. However, two circuits have sharply diverged in their interpretation of what the new Rule 23(e)(2) requires, calling into question whether the changes are so self-evidently modest and dashing the goal of unifying circuit practice.
Restorative Justice as Regenerative Tribal Jurisdiction
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.
The Embarrassing Sixth Amendment
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.