The recent wave of commentary on Masterpiece Cakeshop sounded a common theme: disappointment, even frustration. This article contends that Masterpiece is a flawed decision because of its fundamental incompleteness. Despite being held out as an opinion on religious liberty, Kennedy’s decision omits any discussion of whether the state interest might outweigh the baker’s religious freedom.
W(h)ither Environmental Justice?
This article considers Gitanjali Nain Gill’s recent book Environmental Justice in India, the first comprehensive look at India’s National Green Tribunal. In addition to assessing issues concerning the best ways to integrate science into judicial decisionmaking and highlighting India’s failure to maintain good environmental data, it argues that the Tribunal’s record reveals several crucial...
Sexual Violence, Disability, and Empowerment: The Attorney’s Role
This piece highlights the issues at the intersection of disability and sexual violence. It provides a case study of a woman with a disability who interacts with the criminal justice system after reporting a sexual assault and explains the associated legal issues. The piece then concludes with a call to action for the legal profession to empower survivors with disabilities.
Mental Disability, Exceptional Abortion, and the Pain-Capable Unborn Child Protection Act
This piece argues that the underlying logics of the Pain-Capable Unborn Child Protection Act, which recently gained traction in Congress but failed to be passed, raise serious concerns that have been largely overlooked, and calls for a more thoughtful consideration of mental health and disability in contemporary gender and reproductive discourse and politics.
A Critical Race and Disability Legal Studies Approach to Immigration Law and Policy
This piece argues that the progressive immigration reform must take into account the ways in which racism and ableism permeate the immigration system, and calls for a more intersectional approach to immigration law and policy scholarship and practice. It highlights one organization’s recent efforts to put this intersectional approach into research and practice.
Episode 4.2: Reforming Open Records Laws to End Political Harassment of Public University Researchers
In this episode, we talk with Professor Claudia Polsky from UC Berkeley Law School about her recently published article, Open Records, Shuttered Labs: Ending Political Harassment of Public University Researchers.
Everything Is Obvious
Inventive machines are increasingly being used in research, and once the use of such machines becomes standard, the standard of the “person skilled in the art” used to judge “obviousness” for patentability should be a person using an inventive machine, or just an inventive machine. As inventive machines continue to improve, this will increasingly raise the bar to patentability, eventually...
Invoking Federal Common Law Defenses in Immigration Cases
This article argues that we should take a deeper look at the applicability of federal common law defenses in immigration cases. In the rare cases where noncitizens attempt to raise common law defenses, such arguments tend to be dismissed by immigration judges because removal proceedings are civil, not criminal. Yet many common-law defenses may be raised in civil cases. This article proposes three...