Authoruclalaw

Each year, the UCLA School of Law presents the Rutter Award for Excellence in Teaching to an outstanding law professor. On March 13, 2013, this honor was given to Professor Patrick D. Goodman. UCLA Law Review Discourse is proud to continue its tradition of publishing a modified version of the ceremony speech delivered by the award recipient.

In a recent UCLA Law Review article, The New Investor, 60 UCLA Law Review 678 (2013), Professor Tom Lin argues: Technological advances have made finance faster, larger, more global, more interconnected, and less human. Modern finance is becoming an industry in which the main players are no longer entirely human. Instead, the key players are now cyborgs: part machine, part human. Modern finance is...

Disputes over custody and visitation can arise when a marriage ends and one parent comes out as gay or lesbian. The heterosexual parent may seek custody or may seek to restrict the activities of the gay or lesbian parent, or the presence of the parent’s same-sex partner, during visitation. A gay or lesbian parent’s assertion of constitutional rights has not been an effective response to such...

Across the country, we see institutions and businesses advocating for the right not to comply with anti-discrimination mandates on the grounds that doing so violates their religious beliefs. Bucolic inns and bakeries close their doors to same-sex couples, businesses seek to deny their workers insurance coverage for contraception, and religiously affiliated schools fire employees because they are...

Does a judicial decision that vindicates minority rights inevitably give birth to a special kind of backlash, a more virulent reaction than legislation achieving the same result would produce? We examine this question with respect to Roe v. Wade, so often invoked as the paradigmatic case of court-caused backlash, and with the pending marriage cases in mind. As we have shown, conflict over...

Professor Jay Silver’s criticism of the reform proposals put forward in Brian Tamanaha’s book Failing Law Schools displays some characteristic weaknesses of American legal academic culture. These weaknesses include a tendency to make bold assertions about the value of legal scholarship and the effectiveness of law school pedagogy, while at the same time providing no support for these asser-tions...

By looking at the nature of data that may be disclosed by governments, Harlan Yu and David Robinson provide an analytical framework that evinces the ambiguities underlying the term “open government data.” While agreeing with their core analysis, I contend that the authors ignore the enabling conditions under which transparency may lead to accountability, notably the publicity and political agency...

This Essay shows how LGBT rights advocates successfully transformed civil unions and domestic partnerships from a sign of equality into a marker of inequality. The deployment of constitutional frames, and the articulation and resolution of those frames in court, played a significant role in this shift. Constitutional commitments provided the language through which advocates could embrace civil...