Although the Bankruptcy Code is facially neutral, the consumer bankruptcy discharge provisions produce anomalies that run counter to bankruptcy’s internal principles of not forgiving debt that is based on misconduct or that implicates a public policy concern. For example, the discharge provisions allow some individuals to discharge debt that stems from civil rights violations or tortious discrimination. In contrast, the Bankruptcy Code precludes some debtors from debt relief based on narrow views of misconduct or misconceptions about moral hazards.

In the United States, law condemns poor people to their fates in states. Where Americans live continues to dictate whether they can access cash, food, and medical assistance. What’s more, immigrants, territorial residents, and tribal members encounter deteriorated corners of the American welfare state. Nonetheless, despite repeated retrenchment efforts, this patchwork of programs has proven remarkably resilient. Yet, the ability of the United States to meet its people’s most basic needs now faces an unprecedented…

Congress enacted the Bankruptcy Abuse Prevention and Consumer Protection Act of 2005 (BAPCPA) with the express purpose of limiting the number of consumer debtors eligible to file a Chapter 7 case, which typically lasts only a few months and eliminates the debtor’s unsecured debts. Under BAPCPA, bankruptcy courts…

Nearly twenty percent of consumers self-identify as suffering from a food allergy or sensitivity, and over 30 million people in the United States have medically proven food allergies. Food allergies cause over 200,000 emergency room visits annually in the United States alone. Among these severe allergen-related food incidents, nearly three-quarters arise at restaurants.

The widely accepted “Story Model” of jury decision-making acknowledges that juries, in large part, base their decisions not on logical or probabilistic reasoning but on the stories they construct at trial. Storytelling thus plays an important role in guaranteeing a criminal defendant a fair trial, especially where a defendant’s race triggers stereotypes that risk the presumption of innocence.

There is widespread recognition that algorithms in criminal law’s administration can impose negative racial and social effects. Scholars tend to offer two ways to address this concern through law—tinkering around the tools or abolishing the tools through law and policy. This Article contends that these paradigmatic interventions, though they may center racial disparities, legitimate the way race functions to structure society through the intersection of technology and law.

While financial technology (fintech) has the potential to make financial services more accessible and affordable, hope that technology alone can solve the complex issue of wealth inequality is misplaced. After all, fintech companies are still subject to the same market forces as traditional financial institutions, with little incentive to address contributing causes such as unequal access to credit and financial services, lower rates of return, and discrimination.

From ending qualified immunity, to establishing community control over policing, to eradicating the institution of policing altogether, proposals to remedy the issue of “police violence” are on everyone’s lips. But, in the deep reservoir of proposals, the meaning of “police violence” has received relatively little attention.

Punishment as a social institution has failed to live up to the quixotic ideals of theory and has descended into the practice of mass incarceration, which is one of the defining failures of modern times. Scholars have traditionally studied punishment and incarceration as parts of a social transaction between the criminal offender, whose crime imposes a cost to society, and the state that ensures the offender repays this debt by correcting past harms and preventing future offenses.

The data that everyday consumers produce is becoming more and more important to the economy. Yet, as this data imbues tech corporations with tremendous wealth and power, we, the data producers, have no say as to how our data is collected or how it is used. The reign of data analytics to pursue profit above all else has led to a conflagration of data harms perpetuated…

A new form of domestic violence has emerged out of the modern proliferation of consumer lending: coerced debt. Although abusers use a wide range of tactics to coerce debt—from…

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…

Regulatory enforcement is only as good as the standards to be enforced. I argue here that subjective standards formerly in place at the Motion Picture Producers and Distributors of America (MPPDA) and the United States Patent & Trademark Office (PTO) were imbued with the White-centric beliefs of its designers and enforcers. Drawing on critical race…

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…

Blood often serves as the basis for identity for many groups in the United States. Native Americans, however, are the only population in which blood is a requirement for collective belonging and can be the determining factor for whether one receives tribal benefits and services. Many Tribal Nations use blood quantum, the percentage of Indian…