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This Comment examines a group of asylum cases in which the applicants, women of Muslim heritage, were portrayed or understood as Westernized because of their beliefs in gender equality. This Comment utilizes the work of female scholars of Muslim heritage, whose work on gender, Islam, and Orientalism has provided critical insights which can help us understand how women of Muslim heritage are...

In the age of civilian vigilance, smartphone technology and social media have enabled individuals to record and share videos of police interactions with citizens at an unprecedented rate, sometimes providing indisputable evidence of police misconduct for the world to see instantly. The probative value and public shock factor of some of these videos have also opened the door to retaliatory arrests...

Copyright law has a framing problem. The problem is pervasive, unresolved, and often unnoticed, and it significantly impacts the nature and scope of copyright protection. Copyrighted works are complex: Books consist of chapters, newspapers consist of articles, and so on. Courts often need to decide whether to frame the work as one comprehensive whole, an approach we call “zooming out,” or to...

We are progressing toward a post-antibiotic world: Antibiotic drugs that could once treat basic infections are losing their effectiveness at an accelerating rate. If this trend continues, common illnesses will become potentially deadly, and more complex procedures—chemotherapy, surgeries, dialysis—will carry much more significant risk. The modern industrial agricultural system may have...

This Article argues that the securities disclosure regime contains previously unexamined structural deficiencies that pertain to the information provided by the largest public companies. These deficiencies arise from the operation of the materiality standard, a core element of the disclosure regime that is used in a number of SEC disclosure rules. The materiality standard is designed to limit...

There is a split among state courts about whether personal jurisdiction over an alleged domestic violence perpetrator is required in order to obtain a civil protection order preventing the defendant from contacting the victim. Some courts have held that such orders interfere with the defendant’s liberty interests, and therefore the Due Process Clause requires personal jurisdiction for the...

Millions of criminal defendants, most of them indigent, are convicted of misdemeanor offenses every year. Many are constitutionally entitled to free legal counsel, yet in practice the quality of that counsel depends on how public defender agencies allocate attorneys between misdemeanor and felony defendants. Attorney experience is a limited, if not scarce, resource, and public defenders will...

Many scholars have written about the racialization process experienced by people of Southwest Asia and North African (SWANA) descent, emphasizing the increased discrimination experienced by those perceived as Middle Eastern or SWANA. There is very little scholarship, however, concentrating specifically on employment discrimination faced by those of SWANA descent in the United States. Although...

Throughout American history untold numbers of people have concealed their true racial identities and assumed a white racial identity in order to reap the economic, political, and social benefits associated with whiteness. This phenomenon is known as passing. While legal scholars have thoroughly investigated passing in its conventional form, the corollary process of reverse passing—the process in...

Cities and states around the country have promised their workers—most often teachers, police officers, and firefighters—retirement benefits, but have in many cases failed to set aside adequate assets to fund those benefits. Several of these pension plans are predicted to become insolvent within the next decade and innumerable additional plans appear headed for insolvency in the decade that...

A machine gun overpowers a nine-year-old girl, erratically spraying bullets and accidentally killing her instructor; a perturbed mother slays her son and then takes her own life; a convicted felon circumvents federal prohibitions to access a firearm to commit suicide; and, perhaps most notably, Navy SEAL war veteran Chris Kyle, focus of the movie American Sniper, is murdered while attempting to...

The Supreme Court’s decisions relating to corporate constitutional rights are a conceptual quagmire. While the Court has grappled with the proper scope of corporate rights for more than two centuries, it has failed to articulate a consistent approach to determine which rights corporations should receive and how those rights should be delineated. As a result, the Court has issued a long line of...

Given the emerging consensus that solitary is a weapon used with distressing frequency in U.S. prisons, researchers and practitioners must seriously consider existing tools that allow prisoners to contest their confinement. Thus, although most states now have policies and procedures detailing how prisoners are assigned to solitary, this Comment analyzes policies on the opposite end of the...

Public protests from Occupy to Ferguson have highlighted anew the offense of unlawful assembly. This Article advances the simple but important thesis that contemporary understandings of unlawful assembly cede too much discretion to law enforcement by neglecting earlier statutory and common law elements that once constrained liability. Current laws also ignore important First Amendment norms...