This Article analyzes how the U.S. prison and foster care systems work together to punish black mothers in the service of preserving race, gender, and class inequality in a neoliberal age. The intersection of these systems is only one example of many forms of overpolicing that overlap and converge in the lives of poor women of color. I examine the statistical overlap between the prison and foster...
From Private Violence to Mass Incarceration: Thinking Intersectionally About Women, Race, and Social Control
The structural and political dimensions of gender violence and mass incarceration are linked in multiple ways. The myriad causes and consequences of mass incarceration discussed herein call for increased attention to the interface between the dynamics that constitute race, gender, and class power, as well as to the way these dynamics converge and rearticulate themselves within institutional...
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...
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...
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.
Shocking the Conscience: What Police Tasers and Weapon Technology Reveal About Excessive Force Law
Since Graham v. Connor, the U.S. Supreme Court’s 1989 opinion establishing the Fourth Amendment standard for assessing whether a police officer’s use of force was unconstitutionally excessive, the law has slowly developed through a body of narrow and fact-specific precedents that guide judges’ excessive force and qualified immunity analyses. Recently, the Ninth Circuit—the source of many of the...