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...
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...
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...
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...
Abstract Anti-protest legislation is billed as applying only in the extreme circumstances of mass-movements and large scale civil disobedience. Mass protest exceptionalism provides justification for passage of anti-protest laws in states otherwise hesitant to expand public order criminal regulation. Examples include a Virginia bill that heightens penalties for a “failure to disperse following a...
Abstract The ability to reclassify legal sex as male (M), female (F), and even X, is a core issue of trans and non-binary legal engagements. A wave of legal reform and debate has recently swept across the United States, resulting in a spectrum of laws and policies, from a complete ban on reclassification to the innovative framework of self-identification. This Article provides a comprehensive...
Abstract Jurisdictions increasingly employ algorithms in public sector decisionmaking. Facing public outcry about the use of such technologies, jurisdictions have begun to increase democratic participation in the processes by which algorithms are procured, constructed, implemented, used, and overseen. But what problem is the current approach to democratization meant to solve? Policymakers have...
Loser I’m a loser I lose I lost my way I lost my kids I lost my say I lost my power Plucked right out of my chest In my heart’s final hour Motherhood stolen for family court to devour Still I demand and I plead Bring my babies home to me! It’s my blood they bleed It’s my love they need! All my strength couldn’t fight the shock They took my joy and lodged a boulder between us So I dug my nails...
Abstract This Article profiles and interviews seven artists and organizers who are leaders throughout five distinct Los Angeles grassroots, abolitionist organizations at the forefront of dismantling and abolishing the largest penal system in the world, which is comprised of lethal policing and carceral institutions operated by the County and City of Los Angeles. Through an examination of the...
Abstract Since the unprecedented Summer 2020 uprisings against policing and racism, many elites have embraced an “anti-woke” politics that openly celebrates law-and-order authoritarianism, heteropatriarchy, and white nationalism. This Article attends to a different but reinforcing response to the George Floyd uprisings: repression through a politics of recognition, as elites fortified policing...
Abstract Racial justice is one of the most pressing issues in America today, and police brutality is its flashpoint. Incident after incident ofpolice brutality confirm that police harm with impunity those whom they have a duty to protect. Existing criminal statutes are filled withdiscretionary standards that give officers deference, while civil remedies require victims to surmount the doctrine...
Abstract The federal government’s enormous financial commitment to infrastructure development has drawn renewed attention to the transformative economic potential of public procurement. However, as this Article shows, that potential is limited by the little-known federal competition rule, which requires state and local governments using federal transportation funds to award contracts through a...
Abstract The United States has a history of racial segregation in its facilitation of federal housing programs. One such program, the Low-Income Housing Tax Credit (LIHTC), was intended to respond to the need for affordable housing since its establishment in 1986. Through the LIHTC program, the federal government grants tax credits to investors and developers who rent to low-income tenants. In...