Labor and employment laws are systematically underenforced in low-wage, franchised workplaces. Union contracts, and the benefits and protections they provide, are nonexistent. The Fight for Fifteen movement has brought attention to the low wages, systemic violations of workers’ rights, and lack of collective representation in fast-food franchises. Given that franchisees can be judgment…

Police officers have become permanent fixtures in public schools. The sharp increase in the number of school police officers over the last twenty years has generated a substantial body of critical legal scholarship. Critics question whether police make students safer. They argue that any safety benefits must be weighed against the significant role the police…

Over the last four decades, scholars from diverse disciplines have documented a wide variety of cultural appropriations from Indigenous peoples and the harms these have inflicted. Copyright law provides at least some protection against appropriations of Indigenous culture—particularly for copyrightable songs, dances, oral histories, and other forms of Indigenous cultural creativity…

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…

Scholars have long debated whether surrogacy furthers or inhibits equality and reproductive liberty. What has gone almost entirely unremarked upon, however, is whether and to what extent the ways U.S. jurisdictions regulate surrogacy further these principles. This oversight is produced and re-produced by existing scholarship that focuses on the threshold question of whether to ban…

Medicines and vaccines are complex products, and it is often extraordinarily difficult to know whether they help or hurt. The Food and Drug Administration (FDA) holds an enormous reservoir of data that sheds light on that precise question, yet currently releases only a trickle to researchers, doctors, and patients. Recent examples show that data secrecy…

Cities throughout the country respond to homelessness with laws that persecute people for surviving in public spaces, even when unsheltered people lack a reasonable alternative. This widespread practice—the criminalization of homelessness—processes vulnerable people through the criminal justice system with damaging results. But recently, from the epicenter of the…

The Immigration and Nationality Act (INA) deems an individual inadmissible to the United States for having engaged in terrorist activity. Both “engaged in terrorist activity” and “terrorist activity” are terms of art that are broadly defined under the INA to include activity that courts, scholars, and advocates agree stretches the definition of terrorism. An individual…

The electricity sector is often appropriately called the linchpin of efforts to respond to climate change. Over the next few decades, the U.S. electricity sector will need to double in size to accommodate electric vehicles, while transforming to run entirely on clean energy. To drive this transformation, states are increasingly adopting 100 percent clean energy…

It is legal to follow and watch people in retail stores based on their race, give inferior service to restaurant customers based on their race, and place patrons in certain hotel rooms based on their race. Congress enacted Title II of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 to protect Black and other people of color…

In this Article, we argue that accounting for the experience of Indigenous Peoples in the creation and regulation of borders is critical to advancing a human rights approach to migration and to addressing the legacies of conquest and colonization that undergird nation-state territorial sovereignty. By focusing on the unique situation of Indigenous Peoples, this Article…

Police use of force is a persistent problem in American cities, and the number of people killed at the hands of law enforcement has not decreased even as social movements raise greater awareness. This context has led to reform conversations on use of force that seek less violent ways for police to engage the public…

We are told that we live in the era of textualism. Inspired by the commanding presence of Justice Antonin Scalia, many accounts of American constitutional law focus on, and stress the preeminence of, the written word. On this view, the contractual sense of the constitution as a defined pact means that the intentionality of the original…

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…

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…

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…

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…