In June 2016, the Supreme Court held in United States v. Bryant that uncounseled tribal court convictions could serve as predicate offenses under 18 U.S.C. § 117(a). Citing the public safety crisis in Indian country, the limitations of tribal court sentencing, and the legislative history of Section 117(a), the Court upheld the federal statute enacted to address domestic violence offender...
The Double-Edged Sword of Sovereignty by the Barrel: How Native Nations Can Wield Environmental Justice in the Fight Against the Harms of Fracking
Natural resource extraction has become an appealing form of economic growth for many Native nations. Nations have experienced booming economic growth and prosperity from oil and gas development, but this has come at the expense of environmental and social harms to their communities. These environmental and social harms develop because the oil and gas industries and the Native nations’ governments...
The Right to Record Images of Police in Public Places: Should Intent, Viewpoint, or Journalistic Status Determine First Amendment Protection?
Introduction In February 2016, a federal district court in Fields v. City of Philadelphia1 held there is no First Amendment2 right to record images of police performing duties in public places, “absent any criticism or challenge to police conduct.”3 Specifically, U.S. District Judge Mark Kearney found “no basis to craft a new First Amendment right based solely on ‘observing and recording’...
Congratulations to the New UCLA Law Review Staff for Volume 64!
The Volume 64 Board of UCLA Law Review would like to extend a hearty congratulations to those joining the Law Review staff!
To see the names of the new staff members please review the updated masthead at .
Privileged or Mismatched: The Lose-Lose Position of African Americans in the Affirmative Action Debate
Introduction This Article builds on an intervention Luke Harris and Uma Narayan made more than two decades ago in the Harvard BlackLetter Law Journal repudiating the conceptualization of affirmative action as a racial preference.1 The central claim we advance is that affirmative action levels the playing field for all African Americans students, not just those who are class-disadvantaged. ...
How Workable Are Class-Based and Race-Neutral Alternatives at Leading American Universities?
This Essay reviews and synthesizes contemporary social science research relevant to the constitutional question, in Fisher v. University of Texas at Austin and more broadly, of whether consideration of socioeconomic status and percent plan admissions based on high school rank represent viable race-neutral alternatives to race-based affirmative action programs. The strong weight of the evidence...
Mismatch and Science Desistance: Failed Arguments Against Affirmative Action
Introduction When I attended Michigan Law School in 1966, as a 2L Harvard transfer, there was only one, or perhaps two, African Americans in a student body of about 1100 students, and if there were any students of Latino heritage their presence went unnoticed. When I began teaching at Michigan in the fall of 1968, the situation had begun to change. There were eight or nine African American...
How Governments Pay: Lawsuits, Budgets, and Police Reform
For decades, scholars have debated the extent to which financial sanctions cause government officials to improve their conduct. Yet little attention has been paid to a foundational empirical question underlying these debates: When a plaintiff recovers in a damages action against the government, who foots the bill? In prior work, I found that individual police officers virtually never pay anything...