Authoruclalaw

As immigration reform initiatives driven by established advocacy organizations in Washington, D.C., were successively defeated in the late mid to late 2000s, movement-centered organizations and newly created formations of undocumented youth mobilized against the federal-local immigration enforcement regime of the Bush and Obama administrations. Drawing on media, scholarly, and first person...

This Article explains how a particular area of Fourth Amendment law—stop-and-frisk jurisprudence—facilitates police violence against African Americans. The Article challenges the standard account of Terry v. Ohio— the case that constitutionalized stop-and-frisk—and argues that, in addition to eroding the probable cause standard on which Fourth Amendment law has historically rested, the...

In one of the most striking developments in American legal scholarship over the past quarter century, social movements have become central to the study of law. Why has this happened? To answer the question, this article provides an original account of progressive legal theory that reveals how the rise of social movements is a current response to an age-old problem: harnessing law as a force for...

Obergefell’s national mandate for marriage equality became possible because marriage equality advocates set out to change social and constitutional meanings by winning over moveable middle voters in ballot question elections. Thus, a new variation on popular constitutionalism was born. The article argues that the same-sex marriage campaign is likely to foreshadow sophisticated social change...

Did backlash to judicial decisions play a destructive role in debates over same-sex marriage, as was so often claimed? The article argues that the Supreme Court’s decision in Obergefell was possible not simply because public opinion changed, but also because struggle over the courts helped change public opinion and forge new constitutional understandings. The debate over same-sex marriage...

How should lawyers connect their preexisting advocacy with a broader social movement? Must lawyers be relegated to the background, or might they assume an active role that enhances the leadership of grassroots community members within the movement? What are concrete tools lawyers might deploy in advancing the struggle? Through a case study of challenging traffic court debt in South Los Angeles...