CategoryDiscourse

Adam Chodorow’s recent essay, Death and Taxes and Zombies, has alerted the legal world to the dangers posed by the looming zombie apocalypse.  Chodorow successfully demonstrates that existing tax laws are woefully inadequate in a world where the undead outnumber the taxpaying living.  In this Essay, I argue that while tax law may be ill suited to address the zombie apocalypse, federal criminal...

Women in California have the right to abortion protected by statute and the state constitution. Yet for many women, the “right” to abortion is illusory. Most clinics and hospitals that provide abortions are concentrated in urban areas, leaving many counties without a single abortion provider. Practical barriers to access are compounded by California’s sheer size and geography, resulting in...

Each year, the UCLA School of Law presents the Rutter Award for Excellence in Teaching to an outstanding law professor. On March 13, 2013, this honor was given to Professor Patrick D. Goodman. UCLA Law Review Discourse is proud to continue its tradition of publishing a modified version of the ceremony speech delivered by the award recipient.

In a recent UCLA Law Review article, The New Investor, 60 UCLA Law Review 678 (2013), Professor Tom Lin argues: Technological advances have made finance faster, larger, more global, more interconnected, and less human. Modern finance is becoming an industry in which the main players are no longer entirely human. Instead, the key players are now cyborgs: part machine, part human. Modern finance is...

Does a judicial decision that vindicates minority rights inevitably give birth to a special kind of backlash, a more virulent reaction than legislation achieving the same result would produce? We examine this question with respect to Roe v. Wade, so often invoked as the paradigmatic case of court-caused backlash, and with the pending marriage cases in mind. As we have shown, conflict over...

Across the country, we see institutions and businesses advocating for the right not to comply with anti-discrimination mandates on the grounds that doing so violates their religious beliefs. Bucolic inns and bakeries close their doors to same-sex couples, businesses seek to deny their workers insurance coverage for contraception, and religiously affiliated schools fire employees because they are...

Disputes over custody and visitation can arise when a marriage ends and one parent comes out as gay or lesbian. The heterosexual parent may seek custody or may seek to restrict the activities of the gay or lesbian parent, or the presence of the parent’s same-sex partner, during visitation. A gay or lesbian parent’s assertion of constitutional rights has not been an effective response to such...

By looking at the nature of data that may be disclosed by governments, Harlan Yu and David Robinson provide an analytical framework that evinces the ambiguities underlying the term “open government data.” While agreeing with their core analysis, I contend that the authors ignore the enabling conditions under which transparency may lead to accountability, notably the publicity and political agency...

Professor Jay Silver’s criticism of the reform proposals put forward in Brian Tamanaha’s book Failing Law Schools displays some characteristic weaknesses of American legal academic culture. These weaknesses include a tendency to make bold assertions about the value of legal scholarship and the effectiveness of law school pedagogy, while at the same time providing no support for these asser-tions...

This Essay uses the opportunity to examine Roe v. Wade forty years after it was decided and Lawrence v. Texas ten years after it was decided as a platform from which to analyze the status of the civil rights paradigm in American law. A comparison of the two decisions illustrates an important and new point about how civil rights law is deployed to achieve very different goals. What civil rights...

This Essay shows how LGBT rights advocates successfully transformed civil unions and domestic partnerships from a sign of equality into a marker of inequality. The deployment of constitutional frames, and the articulation and resolution of those frames in court, played a significant role in this shift. Constitutional commitments provided the language through which advocates could embrace civil...

Roe v. Wade grounds constitutional protections for women’s decision whether to end a pregnancy in the Due Process Clauses. But in the forty years since Roe, the U.S. Supreme Court has come to understand the abortion right as an equality right, as well as a liberty right. In this Essay, we describe some distinctive features of equality arguments for abortion rights. We then show how, over time...

This Essay responds to an article by Hila Shamir previously published in the UCLA Law Review, in which she suggests that human rights has failed as a framework for addressing human trafficking and that instead a labor model would be more successful. Although her article identifies potentially important benefits of a labor perspective, the binary framework it establishes, pitting human rights and...

In her article Marriage This Term: On Liberty and the “New Equal Protection,” Katie Eyer suggests that this term will likely provide a crucial test determine whether due process or equal protection guarantees will be the preferred basis on which minorities will be able to protect themselves from majoritarian discrimination. Assuming that the Court reaches a protective result on the merits in...