Articles, notes, and symposia pieces published in CLR’s print volumes.
Print Edition
The Racial Composition of Forensic DNA Databases
Forensic DNA databases have received an inordinate amount of academic and judicial attention. From their inception, numerous scholars, advocates, and judges have wrestled with the proper reach of DNA collection, retention, and search policies. Central to these debates are concerns about racial equity in forensic genetic practices. Yet when such questions arise, critics typically just…
An Abolitionist Horizon for (Police) Reform
Since the Ferguson and Baltimore uprisings, legal scholarship has undergone a profound reckoning with police violence. The emerging structural account of police violence recognizes that it is routine, legal, takes many shapes, and targets people based on their race, class, and gender. But legal scholarship remains fixated on investing in the police to repair and…
Paper Terrorists: Independence Movements and the Terrorism Bar
This Article explores the application of the terrorism bar in immigration law to noncitizens who have participated in an independence movement. It proposes a uniform standard that immigration adjudicators can use to determine whether a foreign entity is a state in order to promote accurate applications of the terrorism bar. The terrorism bar in the…
Does <em>Revlon</em> Matter? An Empirical and Theoretical Study
We empirically examine whether and how the doctrine of enhanced judicial scrutiny that emerged from Revlon and its progeny actually affects M&A transactions. Combining hand-coding and machine-learning techniques, we assemble data from the proxy statements of publicly announced mergers between 2003 and 2017 into a dataset of 1,913 unique transactions. Of these, 1,167 transactions were…
States of Inequality: Fiscal Federalism, Unequal States, and Unequal People
Two potential solutions that have been proposed for addressing the fiscal disparity among states are (1) following the lead of other federal nations and adopting a system of interstate fiscal equalization or (2) ending federalism and fully nationalizing key programs. As I will discuss, neither of these polar solutions is feasible or desirable. Instead, drawing on…
Police Sexual Violence: Police Brutality, #MeToo, and Masculinities
The epidemic of PSV [police sexual violence], both in scale and in concept, is startlingly underanalyzed. Sexual assaults committed by police against members of the public operate at the intersection of two vital national conversations about police brutality and sexual violence and harassment…
Diversity to Deradicalize
In articulating a new explanation of Powell’s motives in Bakke, this Article not only calls into question the prevailing understanding that Powell was motivated by his commitment to racial justice, it also complicates a more critical view of the diversity rationale that locates the Court’s endorsement of “the educational benefits of diversity” in a recognition that exposure to racial minorities confers…
Kicked Out, Kicked Again: The Discharge Review Boards’ Illiberal Application of Liberal Consideration for Veterans with Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder
Rather than continue this pattern of punishing veterans for having mental health conditions—commander kicks them out and the discharge review board kicks them again—veterans deserve the opportunity for true relief in recognition of their service and the mental health condition they developed due to that service…
The Conscience Defense to Malpractice
This Article presents the first empirical study of state conscience laws that establish explicit procedural protections for medical providers who refuse to participate in providing reproductive health services, including abortion, sterilization, contraception, and emergency contraception. Scholarship and public debate about law’s role in protecting health care providers’ conscience rights…
Theories of Prosecution
For decades, legal commentators sounded the alarm about the tremendous power wielded by prosecutors. Scholars went so far as to identify uncurbed prosecutorial discretion as the primary source of the criminal justice system’s many flaws. Over the past two years, however, the conversation shifted. With the emergence of a new wave of “progressive prosecutors,” scholars…
Shadow Governance
Corporations have something to say about some of the most important social and economic issues of our time—and one way they say it is through shadow governance. This Article spotlights a group of influential corporate policies comprising what we call “shadow governance.” These non-charter, non-bylaw governance documents express a corporation’s commitment to and process…
The Title IX Paradox
When Christine Blasey Ford explained to the Senate Judiciary Committee why she had not reported her sexual assault at age fifteen, she captured the struggle of many children who must decide whether to make such reports: “For a very long time, I was too afraid and ashamed to tell anyone the details.” Thousands of sexual…
John Robinson Wilkins and the Resources of the Law: Testing the Limits of Race, Law and Development, and the American Legal Profession
In the fall of 1964, my uncle John Robinson Wilkins joined the Berkeley Law School faculty. He was the first black professor in the school’s illustrious history and only the second in the entire UC Berkeley system. Tragically, my uncle’s time on the Berkeley faculty would be short. In 1970, he was diagnosed with an…
Iron-ing out Circuit Splits: A Proposal for the Use of the Irons Procedure to Prevent and Resolve Circuit Splits Among United States Courts of Appeals
Part I of this Article discusses the problems circuit splits pose and how the circuit courts’ growing caseloads, combined with the Supreme Court’s shrinking docket, are perpetuating the potential for increasing circuit splits. Part II discusses the informal en banc procedures currently in place in the courts of appeals. Part III provides an overview of…
The Case for a Federal Criminal Court System (and Sentencing Reform)
In their article in this issue, Professors Peter Menell and Ryan Vacca describe a federal court docket that is overloaded and unable to process cases efficiently. This article first considers whether the problems Menell and Vacca describe on the civil side afflict criminal litigation to the same extent. On the assumption that the problems in…
Regulating Implicit Bias in the Federal Criminal Process
Like other supervisory lawyers, federal judges have twin responsibilities. They must comport with ethical and professional rules that govern their own behavior while simultaneously monitoring other attorneys to ensure they are not violating similarly controlling rules. The judicial robe, however, adds an extra dimension of responsibility in the trial oversight process…
Revisiting and Confronting the Federal Judiciary Capacity “Crisis”: Charting a Path for Federal Judiciary Reform
The modern federal judiciary was established well over a century ago by the Judiciary Act of 1891. Over the next seventy years, the structure and core functioning of the judiciary largely remained unchanged apart from gradual increases in judicial slots. By the mid-1960s, jurists, scholars, practitioners, and policy-makers had voiced grave concerns about the capacity…
Bankruptcy Hardball
On the eve of the financial crisis, a series of Delaware court decisions resulted in a radical change in law: creditors would no longer have the kind of common law protections from opportunism that helped protect their bargains for the better part of two centuries. In this Article, we argue that Delaware’s shift materially altered…
The Institutional Design of Community Control
A growing set of social movements has in recent years revived interest in “community control,” the idea that local residents should exercise power over services like the police, infrastructure, and schools. These range from a call from the Partnership for Working Families, a grassroots coalition, to build community control through the direct democratic governance of…
The Law of Rescue
Diverse areas of law regulate acts of rescue, often inconsistently. For example, maritime law mandates rescue, immigrant harboring law prohibits it, and tort law generally permits it but does not require it. Modern legal scholarship has focused principally on mandatory and permissive forms of rescue. With humanitarian actors facing prosecution for saving migrants’ lives in…