Abstract This Comment analyzes class actions brought against the Los Angeles Police Department to examine how effective class actions are as a tool for reforming police practices, and how they can be improved. To determine the effectiveness of class actions, I compare the remedies obtained in class actions to the claims brought in later cases with similar facts; specifically, I focus on whether...
Voter Identification and the Forgotten Civil Rights Amendment: Why the Court Should Revive the Twenty-Fourth Amendment
Abstract Since Reconstruction, states have passed laws to limit the power of those traditionally not permitted to vote (i.e. not white men). These barriers on the right to vote include, inter alia, the payment of poll taxes, which were often required months in advance of an election. In 1964, prior to the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965, three-quarters of the States...
Decarbonization in Democracy
Abstract Conventional wisdom holds that democracy is structurally ill equipped to confront climate change. As the story goes, because each of us tends to dismiss consequences that befall people in other places and in future times, the people cannot be trusted to craft adequate decarbonization policies designed to reduce present-day, domestic carbon emissions. Accordingly, U.S. climate change...
#MeToo's Unseen Frontier: Law Enforcement Sexual Misconduct and the Fourth Amendment Response
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...