In this Essay, I situate front-end solutions in relation to the sorts of back-end accountability-type proposals I offer in Shielded and considering how to prioritize among the seemingly unending swirl of possibilities, suggestions, and demands about how to move forward.

This piece suggests that a simple evidentiary tweak can help bring discretionary immigration decision-making back in line with the “fundamental norms . . . that animate the rest of our legal system.”

The problems of racialized policing have come into renewed focus over the past decade. Even after the mobilization of one of the largest racial justice movements in American history, transformative change remains elusive. This Article offers an answer to this puzzle by foregrounding White people’s collective relationship with policing and describing how this relationship colors current debates on how to best address policing’s racial disparities.

This Article offers a critique of the major questions doctrine from a different angle. It primarily contends that the reasons the Supreme Court has given for enforcing the doctrine do not withstand scrutiny, even on their own terms.

Drawing inspiration from Professor Henry Hart’s work The Power of Congress to Limit the Jurisdiction of Federal Courts: An Exercise in Dialectic, the Essay presents a fictional conversation between two federal courts professors. This dialogue explores the implications of abolitionism and “non-reformist reform” in a legal doctrinal context.

Berkeley Law’s symposium, “Section 1983 and Police Use of Force: Building a Civil Justice Framework,” asked: “How do we reform the law in light of what we know?” This Essay offers three responses.

This Article begins a new conversation about debt and debt policy, one that interrogates debt policy’s racialized effects on physical mobility, freedom, and personhood.

This Note uses the history of eugenics and state-sanctioned reproductive oppression to show that abortion is not “a tool of modern-day eugenics,” as conservatives inaccurately proclaim. Adopting a reproductive justice framework is necessary to realize true reproductive freedom.

While still an emerging area of scholarship, a growing body of research suggests that police contact, in its multiple forms, is linked to adverse physical and mental health consequences. These consequences affect not only the individuals who experience direct contact with law enforcement but also their families and communities. We move beyond describing direct linkages between policing practices and immediate bodily harm to considering the ways in which multiple forms of police contact can harm families and communities.

Scholars have recently criticized Fourth Amendment pretext doctrine for leading to more police contact with Black and Brown people and thus to racially disproportionate uses of excessive force. This Essay reveals the intersection of the Court’s pretext and excessive force doctrines by unearthing their shared roots in the 1973 United States v. Robinson search-incident-to-arrest opinion.

This Article makes one simple, novel claim: crime is labor when it generates income, allows individuals to pursue self-sufficiency, or allows them to fulfill societal expectations of providing for or caring for dependents. When individuals engage in survival crimes, instead of seeing them as criminals, we should see them as workers engaged in survival labor.

Jurists and scholars have long debated (and often decried) the practice of forum shopping. Such debates have overlooked the effects of forum shopping on an important constituency: litigants who have little choice over forum. When forum shopping causes a sudden influx of cases—when, that is, it crowds a forum—what happens to other cases that have nowhere else to go?

Redistricting litigation has entered a new era. In 2020, for the first time, state legislatures completed post-census redistricting without preclearance under Section 5 of the Voting Rights Act (VRA). After Shelby County v. Holder, plaintiffs challenging unlawful maps must rely upon private litigation alone. Meanwhile, the Supreme Court has resuscitated the Purcell Principle, an equitable election law doctrine that prohibits federal courts from changing election rules on the eve of a political contest.

Many equal protection challenges to the recent onslaught of anti-transgender legislation ask courts to determine the constitutional limits of the state’s ability to define sex. The canonical cases addressed the state’s ability to treat men differently from women—not the state’s ability to define “men” and “women.” This difference between the canonical cases and what this Article calls “sex-defining” cases does not necessitate any monumental shifts in equal protection doctrine, but it does require courts to tweak their intermediate scrutiny analyses.

Courts should recognize a presumption of exclusive Tribal regulatory authority over all on-reservation water resources. This approach safeguards Tribal health and welfare while providing sorely needed predictability to Tribal-state regulatory disputes over water. States can be confident that their interests will be adequately accounted for because Tribes have a proven track record of equitably regulating water resources, and there are plentiful opportunities for state-Tribal cooperation.

This Article explores the role of lawyers in democratic backsliding—the degradation of democratic institutions and practices using law rather than violence. The Article’s central aim is to set an agenda and outline an approach to studying the professional paradox at the center of backsliding: why and how lawyers attack the rule of law. It thus seeks to shift the scholarly lens from the conventional view of lawyers as defenders of democracy to investigate lawyers as authors of autocracy.

This Note proposes a novel way of applying the Anderson-Burdick balancing test, using the court response to tort claims based on phobia of and misinformation surrounding HIV/AIDS in the 1980s and ‘90s. When considering state regulatory interests, courts should not ask if the state interest is reasonable, but if the state interest should be reasonable.

In recent decades, the U.S. labor market has shifted to more contingent work or work disguised as entrepreneurship. These attenuated relations between worker and firm reflect the “fissuring” of work. Some firms now go beyond fissuring work: they treat the workers themselves as consumers by offering them services and credit products. And when firms expand employment contracts to extend services and credit products to workers, workers are entitled to consumer law protections.

Like all U.S. jurisdictions, California’s criminal legal system is largely administered via plea bargains. Although courts characterize plea bargains as fair and necessary, these characterizations do not enjoy strong empirical support. This Note concludes that plea bargaining practices likely violate California’s unconstitutional conditions doctrine and urges state actors to implement reforms.

Past efforts by the Advisory Committee on Civil Rules to substantially reform Rule 23 have been met with such controversy that more recently, the Advisory Committee has elected to pursue more modest reforms. The new criteria have been widely understood as introducing modest changes and have even been argued by some to have done nothing more than codify existing circuit practice. However, two circuits have sharply diverged in their interpretation of what the new Rule 23(e)(2) requires, calling into question whether the changes are so self-evidently modest and dashing the goal of unifying circuit practice.