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...
Second-Order Participation in Administrative Law
Public participation has long been a cornerstone of administrative law. Many administrative procedures require participation, and underlying normative theories embrace participation as a way to legitimate the administrative state. It is well recognized that interest groups dominate this participation. Yet the implications of interest-group dominance have been largely overlooked. Administrative...
The Freedom of Speech and Bad Purposes
Can otherwise constitutionally protected speech lose its protection because of the speaker’s supposedly improper purpose? The Supreme Court has sometimes said “no”—but sometimes it has endorsed tests (such as the incitement test) that do turn on a speaker’s purpose. Some lower courts have likewise rejected purpose tests. But others hold that, for instance, a purpose to annoy or distress can turn...