Can political compromise harm democracy? Black advocates have answered this question for centuries, even as most academics have ignored their wisdom about the perils of compromise. This Article argues that America’s racial equality compromises have systematically restricted the rights of Black people and have generated inequality and distrust, rather than justice and unity. In so doing, these compromises…

For far too long, “unveiling” has been the subject of imperial fetish and Muslim women the expedients for western war. This Article reclaims the term and serves the liberatory mission of reimagining how Islamophobia distinctly impacts Muslim women. By crafting a theory of gendered Islamophobia centering Muslim women rooted in law, this Article disrupts legal…

From Standing Rock to San Francisco Peaks, Native American efforts to protect threatened sacred places in court have been troubled by what this Article identifies as the profanation principle: a presumption that places already profaned or degraded by development…

From global challenges such as climate change and mass extinction, to local challenges such as toxic spills and undrinkable water, environmental degradation and the impairment of Earth systems are well documented. Yet, despite this reality, the U.S. federal government has done little in the last thirty years to provide a comprehensive solution to these profound environmental challenges…

When President Donald Trump launched an assault on diversity training, critical race theory, and The 1619 Project in September 2020 as “divisive, un-American propaganda,” many law students were presumably confused. After all, law school has historically been doctrinally neutral, racially homogenous, and socially hierarchical. In most core law school courses, colorblindness and objectivity…

Qualified immunity has faced trenchant criticism for decades, but recent events have renewed focus on this powerful defense to liability for constitutional violations. This Article takes aim at the roots of the doctrine—fundamental errors that have never been excavated. First, this Article demonstrates that the Supreme Court’s qualified immunity jurisprudence is premised on a flawed…

For over forty years, scholars and advocates have responded to the criminalization of homelessness by calling for a “right to shelter.” As traditionally conceived, the right to shelter is a positive right—an enforceable entitlement to have the government provide or fund a temporary shelter bed for every homeless individual. However, traditional right-to-shelter efforts have failed…

The immigration system operates through the looming threat of the arrest, detention, and removal of immigrants from the United States. Indiscriminate immigrant arrests result in family separation. Immigrants languish in carceral facilities for months or even years. For most undocumented immigrants, there is no available pathway to citizenship. To protest this injustice, undocumented immigrants…

In the United States, Black cultural expressions of democratic life that operate within specific historical-local contexts, yet reflect a shared set of sociocultural mores, have been historically crowded out of the law and policymaking process. Instead of democratic cultural discourse occurring within an open and neutral marketplace of ideas, the discursive production and consumption of…

How do people, organizations, and even movements bounce back from losses and setbacks? For organized labor, the disappointments are routinely legal: an overturned precedent, a loss of coverage, or even the accelerated degradation of the National Labor Relations Act regime itself. In aggregate, these and other law-based defeats pose a serious, even existential, threat…

Millions of Americans live in food deserts, a term that describes urban neighborhoods and rural regions where residents do not have access to healthy, affordable food. Food deserts are neither natural nor inevitable. Many food deserts result from the deliberate choices of supermarkets to maximize their profits by shifting resources to suburban consumers while affirmatively blocking other grocery…

Waste is built into the American way of life. Yet the problem of what to do with waste remains largely unresolved. Indeed, our entire way of life hinges on overburdening with waste some communities, so that other communities may be underburdened, and thereby enjoy the benefits of clean air, water, and land. Perhaps the most…

Wage theft is rampant in the United States. It occurs so frequently because employers have much more power than workers. Worse, our main tool for preventing and remedying wage theft—charging government agencies with enforcing the law—has largely failed to mitigate this power differential…

This Article contributes to the emerging literature on abolition within the immigration legal system by mapping deportation abolition theory onto lawyering practice. Deportation abolitionists work to end immigrant detention, enforcement, and deportation, explicitly understanding immigrant justice as part of a larger racial justice fight…

The growing use of predictive algorithms is increasing concerns that they may discriminate, but mitigating or removing bias requires designers to be aware of protected characteristics and take them into account. If they do so, however, will those efforts be considered a form of discrimination? Put concretely, if model-builders take race…

For the past five decades, lawyers advocating on behalf of trans people have used arguments based in a binary understanding of gender to win critical legal battles in the fight for gender justice. These binary arguments clearly serve a strategic purpose: achieving major legal victories. Judges from state trial courts to the U.S. Supreme Court…

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.