The UCLA Law Review is seeking submissions for publication in Volume 63: Issues 1, 2, and 3; and for publication in its online component, Discourse.
Judging Opportunity Lost: Assessing the Viability of Race-Based Affirmative Action After Fisher v. University of Texas
In this Article, Mario Barnes, Erwin Chemerinsky, and Angela Onwuachi-Willig examine and analyze one recent, affirmative action case, Fisher v. University of Texas, Austin, as a means of highlighting why the anti-subordination or equal opportunity approach, as opposed to the anti-classification approach, is the correct approach for analyzing equal protection cases. In so doing, these authors...
Milliken, Meredith, and Metropolitan Segregation
Over the last sixty years, the courts, Congress, and the President—but mostly the courts—first increased integration in schools and neighborhoods, and then changed course, allowing schools to resegregate. The impact of these decisions is illustrated by the comparative legal histories of Detroit and Louisville, two cities which demonstrate the many benefits of metropolitan-level cooperation on...
Nonserious Marijuana Offenses and Noncitizens: Uncounseled Pleas and Disproportionate Consequences
Marijuana is being decriminalized in many states and localities throughout the United States. While recreational use of marijuana is legal in only a handful of states, in many other areas it has become a type of pseudo-violation with such low criminal penalties that defendants may be issued just a citation or ticket and are often not entitled to the assistance of a public defender. While low...
David’s Sling: How to Give Copyright Owners a Practical Way to Pursue Small Claims
It is notoriously difficult for copyright owners to bring small infringement claims. Just finding an attorney willing to take the case can be a challenge. Then there is the high cost of litigating in United States District Court—the only court with jurisdiction. For many, the obstacles are so daunting that they do not even try. The U.S. Congress has recognized the problem and asked the Copyright...
Enforcing Rights
Courts frequently confine constitutional litigation to a single remedial avenue. For example, courts typically allow enforcement of Fourth Amendment rights by providing either exclusion of evidence or a civil remedy under 42 U.S.C. § 1983, but not both. Yet this practice is at odds with judicial treatment of remedies in other arenas. Courts rarely limit common law litigants to a single remedy...
Proportional Voting Through the Elections Clause: Protecting Voting Rights Post-Shelby County
The Voting Rights Act passed fifty years ago and its success at curbing electoral discrimination is unquestioned. Section 5’s preclearance, which requires specific jurisdictions to seek federal preapproval of election laws, was central to this success. Yet the Supreme Court, in Shelby County v. Holder, invalidated the formula that selected preclearance jurisdictions. Without the formula...
Inmates’ Need for Federally Funded Lawyers: How the Prison Litigation Reform Act, Casey, and Iqbal Combine With Implicit Bias to Eviscerate Inmate Civil Rights
The United States incarcerates a larger percentage of our population than any other country. Minority populations make up a substantially disproportionate percentage of those incarcerated. For a variety of reasons, violence perpetrated against incarcerated persons, including sexual assault, is endemic and inmates have very limited opportunities to protect themselves. The state has an obligation...