California Law Review hosted the “Democracy Reform for the 21st Century” symposium from September 10 to 18, 2020. This piece is the opening keynote address. Thanks so much, Jeff, for that introduction and for your remarkable work. We’re so appreciative of all your leadership and all your work as well. And thank you too…

Redistricting has seen progress in two seemingly distinct areas. On the technology side, a quantum leap in the development and maturation of redistricting algorithms has made it possible to generate and analyze large numbers of random, simulated districting plans that satisfy stated redistricting criteria. Analysis based on these algorithms and the simulated maps they drew…

What would happen if states stopped equalizing districts’ total populations and started equalizing their citizen voting-age populations (CVAPs) instead? This is not a fanciful question. Conservative activists have long clamored for states to change their unit of apportionment, and the Trump administration took many steps to facilitate this switch. Yet the question remains largely…

I swear to the Lord, I still can’t see, why Democracy means, everybody but me. —Langston Hughes From its beginning, America has had a paradoxical democracy, where “all men are created equal” while simultaneously denying the right to vote to anyone who was not White, male, or owned property. The pandemic exposed the fault lines…

Race and law scholars almost uniformly prefer antisubordination to anticlassification as the best way to understand and adjudicate racism. In this short Essay, we explore whether the antisubordination framework is sufficiently capacious to meet our present demands for racial justice. We argue that the antisubordination approach relies on a particular conception of racism, which we call…

This Article offers an empirical account of felon disenfranchisement and legal financial obligations in the era of mass incarceration. It focuses on a 2018 ballot initiative, known as Amendment 4, which sought to end lifetime disenfranchisement in Florida. At the time, the Republican controlled state accounted for more than a quarter of the six million…

The fossil fuel industry has filed an increasing number of dormant Commerce Clause lawsuits against coastal states and cities that have rejected proposals for new coal and oil export facilities in their jurisdictions. These lawsuits are creating a wholly new “law of energy exports” that to date has been underexplored in the academic literature, even…

The disparate treatment of capital and labor reflects one of globalization’s central asymmetries: the law often allows financial capital, but not people, to move freely across borders. Yet scholars have largely neglected the intersection of these two regimes, the legal restrictions on migrants’ capital, particularly when the migrants themselves are deemed illegal. These restrictions on…

Although the U.S. Supreme Court has famously spoken of a “historic kinship” between patent and copyright doctrine, the family resemblance is sometimes hard to see. One of the biggest differences between them today is how much ingenuity they require for earning protection. Obtaining a patent requires an invention so innovative that it would not have…

Law enforcement has an opacity problem. Police use sophisticated technologies to monitor individuals, surveil communities, and predict behaviors in increasingly intrusive ways. But legal institutions have struggled to understand—let alone set limits on—new investigative methods and techniques for two major reasons. First, new surveillance technology tends to operate in opaque and…

Under the Uniform Child Custody Jurisdiction and Enforcement Act (UCCJEA), U.S. courts must enforce a custody order from an international court unless the custody laws of that country constitute a “fundamental violation of human rights.” Historically, U.S. courts have rarely invoked this “escape clause.” However, this Note argues that this narrow construction of the escape…

Courts usually don’t grant habeas claims for criminal defendants who allege that their lawyer’s racism prejudiced their defense unless the racial animus is obvious on the cold trial record. In Ellis v. Harrison, the Ninth Circuit had the opportunity to relax this standard and grant habeas relief to a client of a known racist lawyer…