This Article explores the race, gender, and class dynamics that render poor Black women vulnerable to racial surveillance and harassment in predominately white communities. In particular, this Article interrogates the recent phenomenon of police officers and public officials enforcing private citizens’ discriminatory complaints, which ultimately excludes Black women and their children from...
Blind Discretion: Girls of Color & Delinquency in the Juvenile Justice System
The juvenile justice system was designed to empower its decisionmakers with a wide grant of discretion in hopes of better addressing youth in a more individualistic and holistic, and therefore more effective, manner. Unfortunately for girls of color in the system, this discretionary charter given to police, probation officers, and especially judges has operated without sufficiently acknowledging...
Another Heller Conundrum: Is It a Fourth Amendment “Exigent Circumstance” to Keep a Legal Firearm in Your Home?
In Heller and McDonald, the Supreme Court recognized an individual’s constitutional right to possess a firearm in his home. This leads to an interesting question—doesn’t that right conflict with the common practice of police forcibly entering a home, without knocking and announcing their presence, when a reasonable suspicion exists that the occupant is armed? In other words, if one has a Second...
Defusing Implicit Bias
The February 2012 killing of Trayvon Martin has slowly reignited the national conversation about race and violence. Despite the sheer volume of debate arising from this tragedy, insuffi cient attention has been paid to the potentially deadly mix of guns and implicit bias. Evidence of implicit bias, and its power to alter real-world behavior, is stronger now than ever. A growing body of research...
The New Ambiguity of “Open Government”
“Open government” used to carry a hard political edge: It referred to politically sensitive disclosures of government information. The phrase was first used in the 1950s in the debates leading up to passage of the Freedom of Information Act. But over the last few years, that traditional meaning has blurred, and has shifted toward open technology. Open technologies involve sharing data over the...
The Pseudo-Elimination of Best Mode: Worst Possible Choice?
Even as it is hailed as the most significant legislative change to patent law in a half-century, some of the changes the U.S. Congress made in the Leahy-Smith America Invents Act are surprisingly equivocal. One provision captures this aspect of the Act particularly well: the pseudo-elimination of the best mode requirement. In this Essay, we develop the concern that by equivocating on the best...
Welcome, Volume 60 Staff!
The Board of Editors of the UCLA Law Review welcomes the 53 staff members who joined the Law Review over summer 2012!
The list of new staff members for Volume 60, in addition to the Board, is available on our Current Members page.
Implicit Bias in the Courtroom
Given the substantial and growing scientific literature on implicit bias, the time has now come to confront a critical question: What, if anything, should we do about implicit bias in the courtroom? The author team comprises legal academics, scientists, researchers, and even a sitting federal judge who seek to answer this question in accordance with behavioral realism. The Article first provides...