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 Note argues that today’s increased racial diversity in the UC’s student body is a result of a two-part system: (1) the UC’s diversity efforts within its self-prescribed limits under Proposition 209, and (2) the hidden ecosystem of private actors acting outside doctrinal limits to increase diversity in higher education.

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.

Despite its growing prominence, the sliding-scale approach to unconscionability remains undertheorized. Courts have seldom discussed its rationale, and scholarly commentators have largely neglected the concept. To help fill this lacuna, this Note provides a history and analysis of California’s sliding-scale approach to unconscionability.

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 Note examines the current legal landscape around “poppers,” an alkyl nitrite-based inhalant that has a strong association with the LGBTQ+ community as a party and sex drug.

This Note is concerned with the unique conflict of interest presented when a prosecutor who accepts campaign contributions from a police union is responsible for investigating police shootings or other officer misconduct.

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.

This Note explains both how artificial intelligence companies could institute initiatives for better quality assurance at the front end, and how courts can encourage such measures through new applications of existing evidentiary and procedural rules. The Note ultimately argues that the emerging use of GAI imagery may necessitate stricter standards in demonstrative evidence law.

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.

Conversations about police use of force have peaked in recent years as social movements and the increased visibility of police killings have led to demands for change and accountability. Unfortunately, criminal prosecutions are rare, which has led victims and their families to seek justice through civil actions. 42 U.S.C. § 1983 is the most common legal vehicle to do this and allows people who have suffered violations of their constitutional rights to seek and receive money for the harm done to them.

In this Essay, I situate front-end solutions in relation to the sorts of back-end accountability-type proposals I offer in Shielded and considering how to prioritize among the seemingly unending swirl of possibilities, suggestions, and demands about how to move forward.

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.

Drawing inspiration from Professor Henry Hart’s work The Power of Congress to Limit the Jurisdiction of Federal Courts: An Exercise in Dialectic, the Essay presents a fictional conversation between two federal courts professors. This dialogue explores the implications of abolitionism and “non-reformist reform” in a legal doctrinal context.

Berkeley Law’s symposium, “Section 1983 and Police Use of Force: Building a Civil Justice Framework,” asked: “How do we reform the law in light of what we know?” This Essay offers three responses.