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.
Abstract In Unreasonable: Black Lives, Police Power, and the Fourth Amendment, Devon W. Carbado illuminates how both the spectacular and quotidian forms of racialized terror, brutality, and surveillance—characteristic of enslavement—have shaped the construction of our constitutional order. He argues that the combined social normalization and legal naturalization of racial hierarchy paved the way...
Abstract Unreasonable makes a number of important contributions to discourses on race, crime and justice. First, a central claim of the book is that within policing, race discrimination is not an individual phenomenon or a problem of bad police officers. Rather, bias is seamlessly built in to policing practices, training, accountability policies, and judicial approaches to evaluating police...
Abstract What can public health frameworks tell us about the causes of police brutality and possible remedies? Devon W. Carbado’s book Unreasonable: Black Lives, Police Power, and the Fourth Amendment offers compelling insight into how understanding law as a determinant of the poor health outcomes associated with policing might create new pathways for rethinking the ways that law authorizes...
Abstract Abolition captured national attention in 2020 following the police killings of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor. Despite this attention, stakeholders favoring traditional legal reforms remain skeptical about the abolitionist demand to gradually eliminate police and prisons. Abolitionists, in contrast, have sought to identify how the Constitution can be interpreted to create a society that...
Abstract As the ranks of prison industrial complex abolitionists grow, the question of whether, and if so how, they should engage with criminal procedure doctrine becomes ever more pressing. This Essay engages Devon W. Carbado’s Unreasonable: Black Lives, Police Power, and the Fourth Amendment’s interrogation of whether to “blame” Chief Justice Warren for the expansion of the carceral state...
Abstract In 1991, Rodney Glen King was beaten mercilessly by four Los Angeles Police Department (LAPD) officers after being stopped for driving while intoxicated, igniting national outrage. Despite the brutality being caught on film by a witness, the police officers were acquitted at trial. Three years later, O.J. Simpson led authorities on a nationally televised low-speed pursuit before his...
Abstract Criminal trials increasingly rely on computer programs to generate forensic evidence. But experts in the fi lds of computer science and forensic science often disagree over whether programs are sufficiently trustworthy to meet the legal admissibility standards for scientific evidence. When adjudicating between these disciplines, courts overwhelmingly side with forensic experts—even when...
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...
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...
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 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 places the female...
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...
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...
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...