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This Article starts by analyzing the conventional wisdom, crystallized in the Ninth Circuit’s 1983 decision in Gonzales v. City of Peoria, that state and local law enforcement officers do not require express federal authorization to make arrests for criminal violations of federal immigration law. This view, I explain, is based on overreliance on the line between civil and criminal. Even if a...

In Chamber of Commerce v. Whiting, the U.S. Supreme Court decided that state governments could mandate compulsory enrollment in the otherwise voluntary federal E-Verify program. Though it deals primarily with employment of unauthorized workers, this case raises broader questions of the role of federalism in the current immigration regime. State and local entities continue to engage in immigration...

Each year, the UCLA School of Law hosts the Melville B. Nimmer Memorial Lecture. Since 1986, the lecture series has served as a forum for leading scholars in the fields of copyright and First Amendment law. In recent years, the lecture has been presented by many distinguished scholars. The UCLA Law Review has published these lectures and proudly continues that tradition by publishing an Article...

Despite talk of a “federalism revival,” state law is quietly losing ground in the U.S. Supreme Court, and the arbitration area is no exception. For as currently interpreted by the lower courts, the Federal Arbitration Act (FAA) is on course to preempt a vast array of legislation that serves important public interests but that is only tenuously related to arbitration. The Court has implicitly...

Most people—and most lawyers—would assume that the U.S. Supreme Court has jurisdiction to review any determination of federal law by an inferior court, whether state or federal. And there was a time when it was so. But the Court’s recent justiciability decisions have created a perplexing jurisdictional gap—a set of cases in which state court determinations of federal law are immune from the...

The rise of the mixed-race population and its implications for our society has received attention in current discourse and media coverage. Some see it as a portent of the postracial world to come; others see it as just another challenge to which antidiscrimination law must adjust. Despite this new attention, racial mixing is not a new phenomenon by any measure. What have changed are the methods...

As immigration detention has increased in the United States over the past two decades, legislative changes have placed LGBTQ immigrants at a higher risk of being detained because of deportation policies that focus on poverty-related crime and increasingly stringent asylum requirements. Once detained, these immigrants are subjected to significantly higher rates of violence and are often denied...

This Comment argues that the First Amendment should be used as a lens for determining whether something is a “natural phenomenon” for purposes of patent law. Patent law does not permit patents over natural phenomena; yet the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) has allowed patents over items that appear to be natural phenomena. Gene patents are one example. This Comment argues that genomic...

As digital networks emerge as the dominant means of distributing copyrighted works, the first sale doctrine is increasingly marginalized. To the extent the use and alienation of copies entails their reproduction and adaptation to new platforms, the limitations first sale places on the exclusive right of distribution decrease in their legal and market impact. This fact of the modern copyright...

At present, our federal employment discrimination laws fail to provide uniform and consistent legal protection when an employer engages in applicant-specific paternalism—the practice of excluding an applicant merely to protect that person from job-related safety and/or health risks uniquely attributable to his or her federally protected characteristic(s). Under Title VII of the Civil Rights Act...

The Free Press Clause enjoys less practical significance than almost any other constitutional provision. While recognizing the structural and expressive importance of a free press, the U.S. Supreme Court does not explicitly recognize any right or protection as emanating solely from the Press Clause. Recently in the Court’s Citizens United decision, Justices Stevens and Scalia reignited the thirty...

This Comment explores the puzzle of how adjudications of fair use under the Copyright Act should be treated over time. The discussion weighs the importance of copyright law and the incentives created thereby against the policy concerns driving claim and issue preclusion. Currently, the preclusive effect of litigation that concludes in a finding of fair use may bar a copyright holder from...