This piece takes issue with Bridget Crawford and Michelle Simon’s argument in their article about the recent Supreme Court case North Carolina Department of Revenue v. Kaestner Family Trust (argued May 16, 2019) (The Supreme Court, Due Process and State Income Taxation of Trusts (67 UCLA L. Rev. Disc. 2 (2019)).

Combining the statistical data on the rapidly shifting demography of the federal judiciary under President Trump with insights from the scholarly literature on theories of procedural justice and representative bureaucracy, which posit that the diversity of judges matters to citizens’ perceptions of justice as well as to judicial accountability to minority citizens’ interests, this paper suggests that President Trump’s “whitewashing” of the federal judiciary will have grave consequences for the legitimacy and effective functioning of our courts on behalf of an increasingly diverse citizenry.

What are the constitutional limits on a state’s power to tax a trust with no connection to the state, other than the accident that a potential beneficiary lives there? The Supreme Court of the United States will take up this question this term in the context of North Carolina Department of Revenue v. Kimberley Rice Kaestner 1992 Family Trust. The case involves North Carolina’s income taxation of a trust with a contingent beneficiary, meaning someone who is eligible, but not certain, to receive a distribution or benefit from the trust, who resides in that state.

This article considers Gitanjali Nain Gill’s recent book Environmental Justice in India, the first comprehensive look at India’s National Green Tribunal. In addition to assessing issues concerning the best ways to integrate science into judicial decisionmaking and highlighting India’s failure to maintain good environmental data, it argues that the Tribunal’s record reveals several crucial challenges for India’s environmental future.

The recent wave of commentary on Masterpiece Cakeshop sounded a common theme: disappointment, even frustration. This article contends that Masterpiece is a flawed decision because of its fundamental incompleteness. Despite being held out as an opinion on religious liberty, Kennedy’s decision omits any discussion of whether the state interest might outweigh the baker’s religious freedom.

Language lives in the present, though we often approach it as though it was settled in the past. But those yearning for the meanings of some bygone era, like those endeavoring to deduce a single, correct meaning from the words on a page, are deluded. The intractable problem of induction scuttles these projects, and reveals that we cannot ask “What does it mean?” without also asking, “To whom?”