In 1990, Congress passed the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) to “provide a clear and comprehensive national mandate for the elimination of discrimination against individuals with disabilities.” Thirty years after this landmark law, discrimination and ingrained prejudices against individuals with intellectual disabilities…

This Article links the climate crisis with the ongoing colonization of the U.S. territories. It explores how the U.S. territories’ political status—rooted in U.S. colonialism—limits their ability to develop meaningful adaptation efforts to combat the climate crisis in their islands. It offers a developing conceptual framework that draws upon…

Privacy law is at a crossroads. In the last three years, U.S. policymakers have introduced more than fifty proposals for comprehensive privacy legislation, most of which look roughly the same: they all combine a series of individual rights with internal compliance. The conventional wisdom sees these proposals as groundbreaking…

This Article reconstructs the litigation over an infamous institution for people with disabilities—Pennhurst State School & Hospital—and demonstrates that litigation’s powerful and underappreciated significance for American life and law. It is a tale of two legacies. In U.S. disability history, Halderman v. Pennhurst State School & Hospital is a celebrated case. The 1977 trial court decision recognized a constitutional “right to habilitation” and ordered the complete closure of an overcrowded, dehumanizing facility.

The saying goes, when life gives you lemons, make lemonade. When it comes to the Supreme Court’s criminal jurisprudence and its relationship to racial (in)equity, progressive scholars often focus on the tartness of the lemons. In particular, they have studied how the Court often ignores race in its criminal decisions, a move that in turn reifies a racially subordinating criminalization system…

The coronavirus pandemic revealed the need to advance the right to housing and abolition movements. The need for advancements in both spaces was no more painfully apparent than among the recently decarcerated population. Securing housing for the recently decarcerated is particularly difficult due to the “culture of exclusion” that has long pervaded subsidized housing policy, enabled by a patchwork of federal laws, including the Anti-Drug Abuse Act (ADA) of 1988 and the Supreme Court’s ruling in HUD v. Rucker…

Criminal law scholarship suffers from a Whiteness problem. While scholars appear to be increasingly concerned with the racial disparities within the criminal legal system, the scholarship’s focus tends to be on the marginalized communities and the various discriminatory outcomes they experience as a result of the system. Scholars frequently mention racial bias in the criminal…

There exists a substantial body of literature on racism and brutality in policing, police reform and abolition, the militarization of the police, and the relationship of the police to the State and its citizenry. Many theories abound with respect to the relationship between the police and Black people in the United States, and most of…

As lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) rights gain traction around the globe, many states have turned toward carceral punishment as a means of sanctioning discrimination based on sexual orientation and gender identity. The carceral turn has been scrutinized in racial justice and feminist literature, but few queer scholars have grappled with the growing use…

Even before the assault on the Capitol on January 6, 2021, a rising chorus of policymakers and pundits had called for treating White supremacist violence as “terrorism.” After multiple mass shootings motivated by White supremacist ideology, commentators argued that the “hate crime” label failed to convey the political nature of the violence or assign it…

United States criminal justice policies have played a central role in the subjugation of persons of color. Under slavery, criminal law explicitly provided a means to ensure White dominion over Blacks and require Black submission to White authority. During Reconstruction, anticrime policies served to maintain White supremacy and re-enslave Blacks, both through explicit…

Disability-selective abortion bans are laws that prohibit individuals from terminating a pregnancy because the fetus has been diagnosed with a health impairment. Many environmental toxins—to which low-income people and people of color disproportionately are exposed—are known to cause impairments in fetuses. When the fact of environmental injustice is read together with disability…

The Tax Cuts and Jobs Act of 2017 contained former President Trump’s signature economic development initiative: the Opportunity Zone program. Allowing a deferral of capital gains tax for certain qualifying investments in low-income areas, the Opportunity Zone program aims to spur economic development by steering capital into economically distressed neighborhoods. The program is…

This Article theorizes and reimagines the place of courts in the contemporary struggle for the abolition of racialized punitive systems of legal control and exploitation. In the spring and summer of 2020, the killings of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, and many other Black and Indigenous people sparked continuous protests against racist police violence and other forms of oppression. Meanwhile…

The COVID-19 pandemic blighted all aspects of American life, but people in jails, prisons, and other detention sites experienced singular harm and neglect. Housing vulnerable detainee populations with elevated medical needs, these facilities were ticking time bombs. They were overcrowded, underfunded, unsanitary, insufficiently ventilated, and failed to meet even minimum…

Prescription drug monitoring program (PDMP) predictive surveillance platforms were designed for—and funded by—law enforcement agencies. PDMPs use proprietary algorithms to determine a patient’s risk for prescription drug misuse, diversion, and overdose. The proxies that PDMPs utilize to calculate patient risk scores likely produce artificially inflated scores for…

For over a century, the Supreme Court has characterized the franchise as instrumental—a right that is preservative of all other rights. Statistics confirm that federal protection of the right to vote has produced higher levels of minority electoral participation and greater shares of minority politicians over the past half century. To voting rights advocates, indicators…

In Peña-Rodriguez v. Colorado, the Supreme Court recognized that racial bias influencing jury deliberations violates the Sixth Amendment’s impartial jury guarantee and is incompatible with the Fourteenth Amendment’s anti-discrimination principles. The Court therefore created a racial bias exception to the centuries-old no-impeachment rule, claiming the decision reflected “progress”…

A vast array of copyrighted works—books, video programming, software, podcasts, video games, and more—remain inaccessible to people with disabilities. International efforts to adopt limitations and exceptions to copyright law that permit third parties to create and distribute accessible versions of books for people with print disabilities have drawn some attention to the role that copyright…

Pronouns are en vogue. Not long ago, introductions were limited to exchanges of names. Today, however, they are increasingly enhanced with a recitation of the speaker’s appropriate gendered forms of address: he/him/his, she/her/hers, they/them/theirs, or neopronouns like zie/zir/zirs, xe/xem/xirs, or sie/hir/hirs. This development—like every other dimension of progress for LGBTQ+…