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ABSTRACT This Article uses private law as a lens and a guide to excavate an unfamiliar story about labor and racial violence in the post-slavery south. It is the story of farmers like Colonel Bishop, whose landlord attacked him in the middle of the night in an effort to coerce him into breaching his contract. Violent breaches of contract such as these were not uncommon in the post-slavery south...

ABSTRACT The United States is changing, and its democratic process must change with it. A new non-white majority is emerging after decades of demographic shift. Federal voting rights doctrine, developed throughout the Civil Rights Era, is premised on a biracial conception of American society. Withering under sustained attack, federal protections have also become antiquated in a rapidly developing...

ABSTRACT Beginning in the 1880s, maritime unions sought federal legislation to prevent Chinese, Japanese, Filipino, and Asian Indian sailors from serving as crew members on U.S.-flag vessels. The campaign succeeded and mandatory citizenship requirements for crews remain in the U.S. Code to this day. Similarly, federal and state laws limited the ability of Asians to fish, own fishing boats, or to...

ABSTRACT For more than one hundred years, states have relied on ratemaking to ensure that electric utilities deliver affordable and reliable power to their customers. This process helped keep costs down, but it also produced an electricity system that is a cause of, and vulnerable to, some of the most pressing challenges now facing society: climate change, catastrophic wildfires, extreme storms...

ABSTRACT Legal scholarship tends to obscure how changes in criminal process relate to broader changes in the political and economic terrain. This Article offers a modest corrective to this tendency. By studying the U.S. Supreme Court’s right to counsel jurisprudence, as it has developed since the mid-70s, I show the pervasive impact of the concurrent rise of neoliberalism on relationships between...

ABSTRACT Wage theft is estimated to cost American workers more than $15 billion per year, but upwards of 60 million American workers cannot go to court to sue their employer if their rights are violated. This is because many American workers are subject to mandatory arbitration which forecloses their access to the court system—or an aggregate proceeding in arbitration. This problem has been long...

ABSTRACT This Comment focuses on the convergence of racialized policing and voter suppression of communities of color. While much attention has been given to the disenfranchisement of people upon felony conviction, there has been little attention paid to the policing and subsequent prosecution of people—disproportionately Black and Latinx—for voting or registering to vote. These prosecutions...

ABSTRACT A thriving body of literature discusses various legal issues related to blockchain. This literature often conflates the discussion about blockchain with cryptocurrency. But blockchain is not the same as cryptocurrency. Defined as a decentralized, immutable, peer-to-peer ledger technology, blockchain is a newly emerging data management system. The private sector and the public sector have...

ABSTRACT Progressive prosecutors have been widely hailed as the solution to mass incarceration. This Article argues, to the contrary, that the legal arm of law enforcement can never be the full answer to its problems. While scholars critique police and call to defund and dismantle them, they overlook prosecutors. Building on the work of abolitionist organizers to theorize and critique progressive...

ABSTRACT In the immediate aftermath of the murder of George Floyd at the hands of the Minneapolis Police, protesters engaged in acts of destruction, looting, and seizure of private and state property on a scale unseen since the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr., in 1968. An estimated $2 billion was caused in private property damage, by far the most expensive for an uprising in American...

ABSTRACT When people in law think about strict scrutiny, often they are also thinking about equal protection law’s treatment of race. For more than four decades, scholars have vigorously challenged that legal regime. Yet none of that contestation has interrogated the social manifestation of strict scrutiny. This Article does that work. Its central claim is that Black people live under a social...