ABSTRACT For more than one hundred years, states have relied on ratemaking to ensure that electric utilities deliver affordable and reliable power to their customers. This process helped keep costs down, but it also produced an electricity system that is a cause of, and vulnerable to, some of the most pressing challenges now facing society: climate change, catastrophic wildfires, extreme storms...
The Right to Counsel in a Neoliberal Age
ABSTRACT Legal scholarship tends to obscure how changes in criminal process relate to broader changes in the political and economic terrain. This Article offers a modest corrective to this tendency. By studying the U.S. Supreme Court’s right to counsel jurisprudence, as it has developed since the mid-70s, I show the pervasive impact of the concurrent rise of neoliberalism on relationships between...
Discipline Outside the Schoolhouse Doors: Anti-Black Racism and the Exclusion of Black Caregivers
Abstract This Essay calls upon the civil rights and education justice communities to expand their vision of school discipline law and policy reform to include the often ignored, yet deeply impacted lives of parents, caregivers, and families. Deploying what critical race theorists define as storytelling or counternarratives, we share Nyla’s story to bring forward an all too common deployment of...
Judges, Lawyers, Legal Theorists, and the Law in Nazi Germany (1933–1938); Kristallnacht; and My Parents’ Escapes from the Nazis
I. Introduction How did the legal system in Germany enable the deprivation of the rights of Jews and, ultimately, the Holocaust in which six million Jews, including 1.5 million children, were murdered? How could state-sponsored and legalized evil be permitted in a civilized country in the twentieth century? The core answer, as this Essay will explain, is that German society—including, shamefully...
Mass Arbitration: How the Newest Frontier of Mandatory Arbitration Jurisprudence has Created a Brand New Private Enforcement Regime in the Gig Economy Era
ABSTRACT Wage theft is estimated to cost American workers more than $15 billion per year, but upwards of 60 million American workers cannot go to court to sue their employer if their rights are violated. This is because many American workers are subject to mandatory arbitration which forecloses their access to the court system—or an aggregate proceeding in arbitration. This problem has been long...
Policing the Body Politic
ABSTRACT This Comment focuses on the convergence of racialized policing and voter suppression of communities of color. While much attention has been given to the disenfranchisement of people upon felony conviction, there has been little attention paid to the policing and subsequent prosecution of people—disproportionately Black and Latinx—for voting or registering to vote. These prosecutions...
Blockchain Initiatives for Tax Administration
ABSTRACT A thriving body of literature discusses various legal issues related to blockchain. This literature often conflates the discussion about blockchain with cryptocurrency. But blockchain is not the same as cryptocurrency. Defined as a decentralized, immutable, peer-to-peer ledger technology, blockchain is a newly emerging data management system. The private sector and the public sector have...
The Place of the Prosecutor in Abolitionist Praxis
ABSTRACT Progressive prosecutors have been widely hailed as the solution to mass incarceration. This Article argues, to the contrary, that the legal arm of law enforcement can never be the full answer to its problems. While scholars critique police and call to defund and dismantle them, they overlook prosecutors. Building on the work of abolitionist organizers to theorize and critique progressive...