Those of us on the board would like to extend a hearty congratulations to those joining the Law Review staff! We look forward to working with you over the course of the next year.
Showing Up
Each year, the UCLA School of Law presents the Rutter Award for Excellence in Teaching to an outstanding law professor. On March 31, 2015, this honor was given to Professor Clyde Spillenger. UCLA Law Review Discourse is proud to continue its tradition of publishing a modified version of the ceremony speech delivered by the award recipient.
Restoring the Fifteenth Amendment: The Constitutional Right to an Undiluted Vote
In 1965, Congress enacted the Voting Rights Act (VRA) to enforce the Fifteenth Amendment of the U.S. Constitution. Specifically, Section 2 of the VRA, as originally adopted in 1965, closely tracked the language of the Fifteenth Amendment and prohibited voting practices that denied or abridged the right to vote on account of race or color. But in 1980, the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision in City of...
A Critique of the Secular Exceptions Approach to Religious Exemptions
Many scholars, some lower courts, and at least one Supreme Court justice support the idea that if a law contains secular exceptions, the Free Exercise Clause compels similar religious exemptions from the law. They argue, for instance, that if a police department with a no-beards policy allows exceptions for medical reasons, it must also allow those who wish to grow their beards for religious...
Prison Abolition and Grounded Justice
This Article introduces to legal scholarship the first sustained discussion of prison abolition and what I will call a “prison abolitionist ethic.” Prisons and punitive policing produce tremendous brutality, violence, racial stratification, ideological rigidity, despair, and waste. Meanwhile, incarceration and prison-backed policing neither redress nor repair the very sorts of harms they are...
Faith-Based Intellectual Property
The traditional justification for intellectual property (IP) rights has been utilitarian. We grant exclusive rights because we think the world will be a better place as a result. But what evidence we have doesn’t fully justify IP rights in their current form. Rather than following the evidence and questioning strong IP rights, more and more scholars have begun to retreat from evidence toward what...
Wills Law on the Ground
Traditional wills doctrine was notorious for its formalism. Courts insisted that testators strictly comply with the Wills Act and refused to consider extrinsic evidence to construe instruments. Yet the 1990 Uniform Probate Code revisions and the Restatement (Third) of Property: Wills and Donative Transfers replaced these venerable bright-line rules with fact-sensitive standards in an effort to...
Risk Regulation, Extraterritoriality, and Domicile: The Constitutionalization of American Choice of Law, 1850–1940
This Article examines the developments leading to the U.S. Supreme Court’s decisions in the 1930s that legitimated the extraterritorial application of state law in civil litigation. Today, these decisions are thought of as having established the basic constitutional limitations on choice-of-law rulings by state courts. But they are better understood as the culmination of an historical process in...