Authoruclalaw

Channeling the Queen of Hearts, the California Supreme Court drafts and votes on its merits opinions before the case under review is orally argued. The court can, and does, alter those opinions in light of the argument, often sprinkling in citations to oral argument before publishing the decision. Nevertheless, given that a majority has already signed onto a written opinion, oral argument in that...

Judges, like all public officials, are used to criticism. The task of resolving important legal controversies seldom pleases all sides, and scholars, pundits, and dissenting colleagues often spare no pains to remind us that we are not “infallible.” On many issues, no matter how we decide, we must take our lumps. That goes with the job. But it is one thing to be told that the outcome of a judicial...

Justice Liu’s response to Opinions First—Argument Afterwards treats Opinions First as an attack on the court—which it is not—rather than a wellsupported proposal for reform, which is the ground I had hoped to occupy. Instead of addressing the ways out of the box the court unfortunately finds itself in post-Stevens v. Broussard (I identified several), the Liu Response chooses to deny the existence...

Family law is now replete with proposals advocating for the legal recognition of nonmarital relationships: those between friends, relatives, unmarried intimate partners, and the like. The presumption underlying these proposals is that legal recognition is financially beneficial to partners. This assumption is sometimes wrong: Legal recognition of relationships can be harmful to unmarried...

Courts and commentators have long assumed, without significant analysis, that immigration detention is a form of civil confinement merely because the immigration proceedings of which it is part are deemed civil. This Article challenges that deeply held assumption. It harnesses the U.S. Supreme Court’s instruction that detention’s civil or penal character turns on legislative intent and...

School quality and resources vary dramatically across school district boundary lines. Students who live mere miles apart have access to disparate educational opportunities based on which side of a school district boundary line their home is located. Owing in large part to metropolitan fragmentation, most school districts and the larger localities in which they are situated are segregated by race...

Each year, the UCLA School of Law hosts the Melville B. Nimmer Memorial Lecture. Since 1986, the lecture series has served as a forum for leading scholars in the fields of copyright and First Amendment law. In recent years, the lecture has been presented by many distinguished scholars. The UCLA Law Review has published these lectures and proudly continues that tradition by publishing an Article...