Private: Blog

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...