Over the past few decades, the number of Americans living in condominiums, master-planned communities, and other types of Common Interest Communities (CICs) has climbed to fifty million. In many of these communities, gates, leafleting bans, or no-solicitation rules prohibit solicitors from speaking or distributing written information to residents. In some, CIC governing boards reserve the...
Fiscal Federalism and Tax Progressivity: Should the Federal Income Tax Encourage State and Local Redistribution?
One of the central tenets of fiscal federalism is that redistributive policies should be undertaken by the most central level of government rather than state or local governments. This Article highlights and critically examines the ways in which the current federal deduction for state and local taxes (SALT) frustrates this goal. The federal SALT deduction, as presently designed, encourages state...
Codifying Copyright Comprehensibly
The UCLA Law Review has been proud to present Articles based on the annual tribute to Professor Melville B. Nimmer that takes place at the UCLA School of Law. The Review continues that tradition by publishing an Article by this year's presenter, Professor David Nimmer. In the form of a tribute to the author's father, the Article evaluates each provision of the Copyright Act of 1976 and each...
The Culture of Judicial Deference and the Problem of Supermax Prisons
Ever since the prison reform movement ended in the early 1980s, it has become increasingly difficult for inmates to challenge their conditions of confinement under the Eighth Amendment. Supreme Court rulings, statutes, and lower courts' conservative applications of precedent have worked together to create a culture of deference that constrains federal courts from intervening in prison affairs. At...
A Prisoner's Right to Religious Diet Beyond the Free Exercise Clause
Are religious prisoners entitled to dietary accommodations consistent with their religious beliefs? The current answer for this question derives from two 1987 cases, Turner v. Safley and O'Lone v. Estate of Shabazz, in which the U.S. Supreme Court articulated a factor-driven balancing test. Under this test, a prison regulation may burden an inmate's rights only if, on balance, the regulation...
Taking Politics Seriously: A Theory of California's Separation of Powers
This Article presents the first comprehensive analysis of separation of powers under the California Constitution, and also lays the groundwork for a more general theory of separation of powers in state constitutional law. Such an effort is of more than academic interest, for the California Supreme Court will soon confront its most important separation of powers case in more than one hundred...
National Rulemaking Through Trial Courts: The Big Case and Institutional Reform
This Article reconceptualizes institutional reform lawsuits-big cases involving the structural reform of local government entities such as prisons and housing authorities-as the nodes of a nationwide network capable of generating national standards of administration for disparate local institutions. The repeat-playing litigators, parties, and experts who participate in this network facilitate the...
Denying Prejudice: Internment, Redress, and Denial
In the early 1980s, Fred Korematsu, Minoru Yasui, and Gordon Hirabayashi marched back into the federal courts that convicted them during World War II for defying the internment of persons of Japanese descent. Relying on suppressed exculpatory evidence discovered in the national archives, they filed writs of error coram nobis to overturn their convictions. Remarkably, this litigation was...