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...
The Art of Abolition: Interview with Angela Davis by Bryonn Bain
To Democratize Algorithms
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
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...
Abolitionist Aesthetics and the Abolitionist Movement: Los Angeles Grassroots Organizations and the Aesthetic Foundations of Real-Time Abolition
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...
Say Their Names, Support Their Killers: Police Reform After the 2020 Black Lives Matter Uprisings
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...
Police Brutality as Torture
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...
Preemption By Procurement
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...
Awarding Racial Segregation: The Low-Income Housing Tax Credit as a New Racially Restrictive Covenant
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...
Restorative Justice for Indigenous Culture
Abstract One still unresolved aspect of North American colonization arises out of the mass expropriation of Indigenous peoples’ cultural expressions to European-settler institutions and their publics. Researchers, artists, entrepreneurs, missionaries, and many others worked in partnership with major universities, museums, corporations, foundations, and other Institutions to capture and exploit...
The International Commitments of the Fifty States
Abstract U.S. law allocates power to conduct foreign relations primarily to the federal government, but it is well known that states routinely maintain foreign relations of their own. Much of this activity appears to result in legal and political commitments, whether in the form of “sister state” agreements or binding pledges to cooperate on discrete issues such as investment, environmental...
Democratizing Abolition
Abstract When abolitionists discuss remedies for past and present injustices, they are frequently met with apparently pragmatic objections to the viability of such bold remedies in U.S. legislatures and courts held captive by reactionary forces. Previous movements have seen their lesser reforms dashed by the white supremacist capitalist order that retains its grip on power in America. While such...
An Abolitionist Critique of Quality-of-Life Policing
Abstract Policing “disability in public” refers to the ways in which coerced compliance with norms for appearing, walking, talking, thinking, or otherwise existing, render disabled people more vulnerable to citation, arrests, or imprisonment even where such conduct is linked to, or caused by, disabilities. Disabled people have been suspected of criminal activity, arrested, jailed, and even killed...
The Racialized History of Vice Policing
Abstract Vice policing targets the consumption and commercialization of certain pleasures that have been criminalized in the United States—such as the purchase of narcotics and sexual services. One might assume that vice policing is concerned with eliminating these vices. However, in reality, this form of policing has not been centered on protecting and preserving the moral integrity of the...