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…

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…

Decades ago, it was difficult to imagine a reality in which artificial intelligence (AI) could penetrate every corner of our lives to monitor our innermost selves for commercial interests. Within just a few decades, the private sector has seen a wild proliferation of AI systems, many of which are more powerful and penetrating than anticipated…

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…

Does litigation addressing catastrophes caused by climate change make society more or less fragile? As sea-level rise and wildfires threaten to cause enormous financial and social costs, related litigation presents unmatched concerns of over- and under-deterrence. In this Note, I examine litigation addressing two of climate change’s greatest impacts: sea-level rise and wildfires…

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…

In his Jorde lecture, Professor Steven Levitsky offers an important account of the nation at a crossroads. Down one path is a thriving multiracial democracy; down the other lies democracy’s demise. To avoid the latter path, Levitsky presses the need for major institutional reform, including constitutional amendments to change the structure of the United States…