CategoryDiscourse

Discourse publishes shorter articles that are timely, interdisciplinary, and novel. Discourse strives to serve as a platform for scholars, ideas, and discussions that have often been overlooked in traditional law review settings. Because we seek to publish pieces that are accessible to legal and non-legal audiences alike, Discourse articles are generally between 3,000 and 10,000 words. Like our print journal, Discourse articles are published on Westlaw, Lexis, and in other legal databases, as well as our own website. Beginning with Volume 68, Discourse began publishing special issues of Law Meets World.

Eliminating Racial Assault of Black Bodies in Law School

Abstract The failure of the legal academy to create professional law school environments embracing the tenets of Critical Race Theory (CRT) sustains racial assault on Black Bodies. Embracing the tenets of CRT can help to improve law school environments, because CRT examines systemic racism and causes individuals to rethink policies and procedures with an antiracist mindset. Further, law school is...

Exiting the American Dream

Abstract Exit planning among U.S. citizens is on the rise. A confluence of worrisome domestic conditions— including societal violence, the curtailment of individual rights, and creeping authoritarianism— has prompted U.S. citizens to contemplate and plan for a possible departure from the country. Among the more popular exit pathways, particularly for minorities in the United States who have...

Abortion Costs and the Language of Torture

Abstract Following the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Org., several states imposed significant restrictions on abortion. Some of these states established medical exceptions that would allow a woman or any other pregnant person to receive an abortion only if they face “a life-threatening physical condition aggravated by, caused by, or arising from a pregnancy that...

Special Education Entwinement

Abstract The privatization of public K-12 education in the United States has accelerated dramatically in recent years, blurring the line between public and private schooling. This shift has raised critical constitutional and statutory questions, particularly for students with disabilities. Although the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA) provides robust protections for this...

Racial Reckoning and the Police-Free Schools Movement

Abstract Across the country, students of color face daily threats of arrest, exclusion, and violence at the hands of school police officers. Whether deemed threatening, defiant, or hypersexualized, Black students, in particular, pay a heavy price to access their right to free public education. Despite victories in dismantling educational carcerality since the mid-2000s, efforts to formally remove...

The War on Higher Education

Abstract Higher education is under assault in the United States. Tracking authoritarian movements across the globe, domestic attacks on individual professors and academic institutions buttress a broader campaign to undermine multiracial democracy and the institutions that sustain and safeguard it. Reflecting on the past academic year, this essay charts the increasingly brazen right-wing efforts...

Bringing Visibility to AAPI Reproductive Care After Dobbs

Abstract Dobbs’ impact on growing AAPI communities is underexamined in legal scholarship. This Essay begins to fill that gap, seeking to bring together an overdue focus on the socio-legal experiences of AAPI communities with examination of the effects of reversing Roe and Casey on women of color. It does so by prompting a research agenda that connects diverse AAPI women’s experiences, abortion...

Can CRT Save DEI?: Workplace Diversity, Equity & Inclusion in the Shadow of Anti-Affirmative Action

Abstract Just four years after the nation’s summer of 2020 protests—sparked by the murder of George Floyd—culminated in a racial reckoning in which many organizations across the country instituted racial equity measures and policies, legislators across the nation are enacting anti-Critical Race Theory (CRT) bans in a seeming backlash to this advocacy for racial justice. The bans simultaneously...

Algorithms in Judges’ Hands: Incarceration and Inequity in Broward County, Florida

Abstract Judicial and carceral systems increasingly use criminal risk assessment algorithms to make decisions that affect individual freedoms. While the accuracy, fairness, and legality of these algorithms have come under scrutiny, their tangible impact on the American justice system remains almost completely unexplored. To fill this gap, we investigate the effect of the Correctional Offender...

Can AI Standards Have Politics?

Abstract How to govern a technology like artificial intelligence (AI)? When it comes to designing and deploying fair, ethical, and safe AI systems, standards are a tempting answer. By establishing the best way of doing something, standards might seem to provide plug-and-play guardrails for AI systems that avoid the costs of formal legal intervention. AI standards are all the more tantalizing...

Sovereignity and the Governance of Artificial Intelligence

Abstract This Essay explores the concept of sovereignty in relation to artificial intelligence. Although sovereignty has long been used to describe the status of nation states, the concept of sovereignty is used in multiple ways in the digital context. It is used to articulate state policies in relation to artificial intelligence (AI) and data, an assertion of state sovereignty that often has...

Challenging Minority Rule: Developing AI Standards that Serve the Majority World

Abstract This essay considers the emerging transnational governance frameworks for AI that are being developed under the auspices of a handful of powerful regulatory blocs, namely the United States, the European Union, and China, which are best positioned to influence emerging global standards.  It argues that these represent a relatively homogenous set of global interests, and that while...

Voices In, Voices Out: Impacted Stakeholders and the Governance of AI

Abstract This Essay addresses reasons for impacted stakeholder involvement in AI governance, ranging from democratic accountability norms to principles of regulatory design. It evaluates several recent examples of both soft and hard law, noting a range of examples of impacted stakeholder participation. It closes with a critique: none of these laws adequately contemplates how to craft transparency...

The Pitfalls of the European Union’s Risk-Based Approach to Digital Rulemaking

Abstract The European Union’s Artificial Intelligence Act takes a so-called risk-based approach to regulating artificial intelligence. In addition to being celebrated by industry, this risk-based approach is likely to spread due to the ‘Brussels Effect’ whereby EU legislation is taken as a model in other jurisdictions around the world. This article investigates how the AI Act’s risk-based...