It is not every day the U.S. Supreme Court adjudicates a case about the water needs and rights of one of the Colorado River Basin’s thirty tribal nations and the trust relationship shared by that sovereign with the United States. Yet just that happened in Arizona v. Navajo Nation in June 2023. As explored in this Article, the Colorado is a relational river relied upon by roughly forty million...
A New Approach to Disability, “Mental Incapacity,” and the Right to Vote: Lessons from Abroad
The vast majority of U.S. states and many countries have laws disenfranchising those lacking “mental capacity.” Such laws discriminate against people with mental and intellectual disabilities. Based on international developments like the United Nations Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities, some countries, including Japan and Peru, have begun questioning the need for incompetence...
Auxiliary Police in Schools
Alternative school police initiatives have recently received significant scholarly and policy attention. From their implementation throughout several school districts nationwide, many scholars, advocates, and policymakers have grappled with two key questions: What replacement for school police officers could both keep classrooms safe and does not result in profiling aimed at Black students? To...
Reestablishment of Religion and LGBTQ Rights
Abstract The disestablishment of religion, also commonly referred to as the separation of church and state or separation of religion and government, has been a salutary constitutional principle in the United States. The diminishment of the disestablishment of religion by the U.S. Supreme Court and accelerated superordination of (conservative) Christianity—like so much of the output of the Supreme...
Episode 9.3 - Shielding the Police with Joanna Schwartz
In this episode we are joined by Joanna Schwartz, Professor of Law and Faculty Director of the David J. Epstein Program in Public Interest Law and Policy at UCLA School of Law to discuss her book Shielded, which explores the various ways in which the police are protected from accountability for misconduct.
On Palestine, the Preciousness of Life, and Courage
The Political Economy of Conservatorship
Abstract Conservatorship, though viewed as a private law device, has always operated as a tool of public governance, social control, and resource extraction through the manipulation of the legal category of disability. This Article places a well-accepted Anglo-American history of conservatorship in probate law in conversation with its historical deployment by states, the federal government, and...
Crowdsourcing Surveillance
Abstract In Unreasonable: Black Lives, Police Power, and the Fourth Amendment, Devon W. Carbado illuminates how both the spectacular and quotidian forms of racialized terror, brutality, and surveillance—characteristic of enslavement—have shaped the construction of our constitutional order. He argues that the combined social normalization and legal naturalization of racial hierarchy paved the way...