Abstract If a police officer pulls a person over for running a stop sign, the Fourth Amendment clearly applies. But if he sexually assaults a person in her home, in a noninvestigative setting, it generally does not. A substantive due process test—whether the officer’s conduct “shocks the conscience”—controls instead. This means more constitutional protection for officers and less for victims...
Love in the Time of Cholera
Abstract A famous novel by Gabriel García Márquez describes a love story among three actors that took place in a city in Colombia during the time of cholera. The interpersonal dynamics that unfold in this work by a Nobel Prize-winning writer offer insight into events taking place today. We show how the urge to romanticize emotions during a time of great social stress, as well as the desire to...
Jump v. Los Angeles: Removing Platforms Further from Democratic Control?
Abstract In March 2020, Jump, Uber’s e-scooter subsidiary, sued the Los Angeles Department of Transportation over a rule that requires the company to share real-time location data about its e-scooters with the city government. Jump argues that the rule operates in practice as a warrantless administrative search. It also argues that all the data it collects from its users are part of its...
How the Law Fails Tenants (And not Just During a Pandemic)
Abstract In the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic, all levels of government are considering how to protect public health by keeping people in their homes, even if they can no longer afford their monthly mortgage or rent payments. The protections that have emerged thus far have been far more protective of homeowners than renters. This essay exposes how the disparity in legal protections for these two...
The Folly of Credit as Pandemic Relief
Abstract Within weeks of the coronavirus pandemic appearing in the United States, the American economy came to a grinding halt. The unprecedented modern health crisis and the collapsing economy forced Congress to make a critical choice about how to help families survive financially. Congress had two basic options. It could enact policies that provided direct and meaningful financial support to...
Immigration Federalism in the Weeds
Abstract This Article takes immigration federalism “all-the-way-down” by focusing on two counties in Southern California—Los Angeles County and Orange County—to consider the role that subfederal governmental entities play in immigration enforcement. Part I synthesizes the existing literature on immigration federalism with particular attention to the role of sublocal, local, county and regional...
Death by Stereotype: Race, Ethnicity, and California’s Failure to Implement Furman’s Narrowing Requirement
Abstract The influence of race on the administration of capital punishment had a major role in the U.S. Supreme Court’s 1972 decision in Furman v. Georgia to invalidate death penalty statutes across the United States. To avoid discriminatory and capricious application of capital punishment, the Supreme Court held that the Eighth Amendment requires legislatures to narrow the scope of capital...
Trump’s Latinx Repatriation
Abstract Two historical episodes have indelibly influenced the development of Latinx identity and sense of belonging in the United States. During the Great Depression, state and local governments, with the support of the U.S. government, repatriated approximately one million persons of Mexican ancestry, including many U.S. citizen children and immigrant parents, to Mexico. Similarly, in 1954, the...