The United States is a nation in transition, struggling to surmount its racist past. This transitional imperative underpins American race jurisprudence, yet the transitional bases of decisions are rarely acknowledged and sometimes even denied. This Article uncovers two main ways that the Supreme Court has sought “racial transition.” While Civil Rights era decisions focused on “reckoning” with the legacies of…
Category: Articles
Miscarriage, Stillbirth, & Reproductive Justice
Each year in the United States, millions of women’s pregnancies end not with the birth of a living child, but in miscarriage or with the birth of a dead, stillborn child. Marginalized women face a higher risk of these undesired endings. Compared to white women, Black women are twice as likely to suffer a late miscarriage and to give…
Delegating National Security
Conservative scholars and a Supreme Court majority support reviving the nondelegation doctrine as a way to downsize the administrative state. But proposals from these scholars and Justices inevitably maintain there should be an exception for national security. This Article explains why a national security exception defeats the nondelegation doctrine’s goals of preserving the separation of powers and individual liberty. In…
Police Prosecutions and Punitive Instincts
This Article makes two contributions to the fields of policing and criminal legal scholarship. First, it sounds a cautionary note about the use of individual prosecutions to remedy police brutality. It argues that the calls for ways to ease the path to more police prosecutions from legal scholars, reformers, and advocates who, at the same time, advocate for a…
Economic Regulation and Rural America
Rural America today is at a crossroads. Widespread socioeconomic decline outside cities has fueled the idea that rural communities have been “left behind.” The question is whether these “left behind” localities should be allowed to dwindle out of existence, or whether intervention to attempt rural revitalization is warranted. Many advocate non-intervention because rural lifestyles are…
Active Virtues
Constitutional theory has long been influenced by the idea that the Supreme Court exercises “passive virtues,” avoiding politically divisive cases that threaten its legitimacy. The Article inverts the logic. Supreme Court Justices (and other judges too) do more than avoid divisive cases that could weaken the Court. They seek “unity” cases—meaning cases where law and…
Democratizing Rule Development
Agencies make many of their most important decisions in rulemaking well before the publication of a Notice of Proposed Rulemaking (NPRM), when they set their regulatory agendas and develop proposals for public comment. Agencies’ need for information from outside parties and openness to alternative courses of action are also generally at their greatest during these…
Breaking Down Status
The law regulates some of society’s most significant relationships through status. Yet social and legal changes can diminish a status’s effectiveness and importance. The debates surrounding worker classification and nonmarital relationship recognition provide two pressing examples. By some estimates, over one quarter of all U.S. workers are part of the gig economy. If these gig…
Copyright and the Brain
This Article explores the intersection of copyright law, aesthetic theory, and neuroscience. The current test for copyright infringement requires a court or jury to assess whether the parties’ works are “substantially similar” from the vantage point of the “ordinary observer.” Embedded within this test are several assumptions about audiences and art. Brain science calls these…
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