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The Civilization Canon

Abstract Recently, scholars have uncovered many ways in which our traditional understandings of the U.S. Constitution have failed to grapple with American empire and colonialism. This work has shown that the nation’s history of mistreating Indigenous peoples is constitutive of its legal order. In this Article, I provide evidence of a similar kind of imperialistic effect in the realm of statutory...

Women’s Suffrage, Black Suffrage, and Lessons for Today

Abstract Recent elections in the United States have commanded national and international attention with voting rights becoming a leading concern for Americans. Though the American public and the judicial and political institutions that represent the American people understand the importance of voting to the health of a democracy, the voting rate among eligible voters in the United States pales in...

The Legal Foundations of Extractive Power

Abstract Over the last decade, the United States has become the world’s top producer and leading exporter of oil and gas—a change with dramatic geopolitical and climate implications. At the root of this ascendency is a legal framework around oil and gas extraction in the United States that empowers extractive industry to dismantle community opposition, undermine local governance, and entrench...

The Consequences of Mythology: Supreme Court Decisionmaking in Indian Country

Abstract Ilanoli isht unowa. We tell our own stories. A single historical event has many stories. Although this nation’s official chronicle expected and even hoped for Indigenous peoples to fade away, we are still here. Our histories are marked by resistance, survival, sovereignty, and renaissance. Only now, in the later stages of the American experiment, do our histories have the chance to...

Expedited Expungement and Its Limits: AB 2147 as a Peak of Progress

Abstract In September 2020, California Governor Gavin Newsom signed Assembly Bill (AB) 2147, a bill creating an expedited expungement process for prisoners in California’s Conservation Camp Program. This bill purportedly removed a barrier that kept formerly incarcerated firefighters locked out of postrelease employment as professional firefighters. Experts and fire camp workers alike praised the...

Free Speech Versus the First Amendment

Free Speech Versus the First Amendment The digital age has widened the gap between the judge-made doctrines of the First Amendment and the practical exercise of free speech. Today, speech is regulated not only by territorial governments but also by the owners of digital infrastructure. This has made First Amendment law less central and the private governance of speech more central. When the free...

Abolish Gang Statutes With the Power of the Thirteenth Amendment: Reparations for the People

Abstract The abolitionist movement seeks to fundamentally dismantle the prison industrial complex. Modern abolitionists recognize that mass incarceration of Black and Brown people is twenty-first century slavery. True abolition, they note, cannot be realized by merely tinkering with the carceral state. Instead, the complete elimination of modern-day badges and incidents of slavery must occur. The...

Captive Without Counsel: The Erosion of Attorney-Client Privilege for Incarcerated Individuals

Abstract To be incarcerated is to be deprived of the choices available to those in the free world. In the absence of those choices, carceral facilities dictate the ways that individuals may engage. If an incarcerated person wants to communicate with someone who is not in their facility, they have very limited options. Because of the extended erosion of attorney-client privilege, for years...

Warrantying Health Equity

Abstract The United States is experiencing a significant rise in the prevalence of asthma and other debilitating respiratory and cardiovascular ailments that disproportionately burden low income and marginalized Americans. This is due in large measure to climate change, which is responsible for increasingly devastating air quality events—including wildfires and drought—that trigger these serious...

Public Defenders as Gatekeepers of Freedom

Abstract Nearly half a million people are currently held in pretrial detention across the United States. Legal scholarship has explored many of the actors and factors contributing to the deprivation of freedom of those presumed innocent. And while the scholarship in these areas is rich, it has primarily focused on certain system actors—including judges, prosecutors, and profit-seeking...

Federalizing Caremark

Abstract When corporations misbehave, the normal government response is to saddle the industry with more federal oversight requirements. But reactive policies fail to curb corporate misconduct and can incentivize corporations to ignore or break the law due to the ever-increasing cost of compliance. Even though shareholders have to foot the bill when the corporations get caught ignoring or...

Citizenship, Self-Determination, and Cultural Preservation in American Samoa

Abstract Recent litigation about the Citizenship Clause’s applicability in American Samoa exposes tensions between competing goals of inclusion, self-determination, and cultural preservation. The noncitizen national category and the Insular Cases are both legacies of a long tradition of racial exclusion in the United States, but their current significance is more complicated, as shown by American...

Including Disabled People in the Battle to Protect Abortion Rights: A Call-to-Action

Abstract The battle to protect abortion rights in the United States has not been this fierce in fifty years. From the U.S. Supreme Court’s recent Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization decision to a precipitously growing number of states passing draconian laws that drastically limit—and in some states, entirely ban—access to safe and legal abortion services, reproductive freedom is under...