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.

A silver lining of recent migration crises is increased reliance on responsibility-sharing arrangements in international actor responses. This new experience allows for evidence-based analysis of such arrangements. We distinguish between progressive arrangements—ones that shift responsibilities to more affluent, institutionally…

International lawyers have been preoccupied with refugee responsibility sharing for decades, and with good reason. They have invested energy both in critiquing the existing regime and developing proposals for alternatives. However, the corresponding literature has largely, though not entirely, neglected two related but distinct phenomena: imperial domination and imperial intervention. I argue that attention to imperial domination and imperial intervention, which I define shortly, should unsettle the very frame of responsibility sharing and even asylum for many who are coerced into migration.

Section 240.37 of the New York State Penal Code, colloquially known as the “Walking While Trans” Ban, is an example of our nation’s commitment to its identity—defining the boundaries between what is deviant and non-deviant, what is normative and non-normative. This Note seeks to understand the intersection between…

To be forced to move from a beloved home is a tragedy, no matter the cause. But such moves need not end tragically. Though the wounds of losing a homeland may never fully heal, people with the strength and resilience necessary to withstand these kinds of moves are also often well-equipped to build something positive out of pain. They can be tremendous assets to others in their newfound homes.

The international community has long recognized the principle that countries should share responsibility for hosting and supporting refugees. The 2018 Global Compact on Refugees’ recognition of an “urgent need” for greater responsibility sharing across borders reflects widespread agreement that the existing distribution of…

Responsibility sharing was a central commitment in the 2016 New York Declaration for Refugees and Migrants. It was also a key commitment in the preamble to the landmark 1951 Refugee Convention, in which countries of first asylum were promised “international cooperation” in return for providing refuge—though the Convention…

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…

This Note explores the use of secret recordings in domestic violence litigation. It is particularly concerned with how the criminalization of domestic violence influences the laws governing the creation and use of secret recordings in this context. Secret recordings can provide determinative evidence of domestic violence. However, a domestic violence survivor who makes a secret recording is criminally and civilly liable under California’s Anti-Eavesdropping Statute (CEPA). CEPA also renders secret recordings inadmissible as evidence.

Border control is often seen as the last bastion of sovereignty. The term conjures up images of fortified walls and barbed wire separating one country from another. These fortifications determine access; entry can easily be denied to those on the other side. Defensive walls date back to prehistoric times. Think of Gilgamesh’s Uruk or the…

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 the country’s most populous state and the world’s fifth largest economy, California has often been characterized as a “nation-state,” historically independent in its governing priorities. Yet even as the state’s political identity coalesces in favor of recognizing greater social welfare provisions for its inhabitants, formal…

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…

In the United States, climate change discourse often focuses on international communities, island nations, and poor global citizens. While the focus on international communities is important, it places the impact of climate change in remote and distant locations. This Note argues that associating climate change with people outside the United States creates an “otherization” of climate change…

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 term “mass incarceration” is used to describe a crisis that, to many, is both abstract and distant. But for Black, Latinx, Indigenous, low-income, and other communities whose lives are disproportionately affected by the criminal legal system, the reality of carceral exploitation is as unavoidable as it is harmful. Incarceration has always had economic ramifications, but the…