CategoryDiscourse

Abstract As the ranks of prison industrial complex abolitionists grow, the question of whether, and if so how, they should engage with criminal procedure doctrine becomes ever more pressing. This Essay engages Devon W. Carbado’s Unreasonable: Black Lives, Police Power, and the Fourth Amendment’s interrogation of whether to “blame” Chief Justice Warren for the expansion of the carceral state...

Abstract In 1991, Rodney Glen King was beaten mercilessly by four Los Angeles Police Department (LAPD) officers after being stopped for driving while intoxicated, igniting national outrage. Despite the brutality being caught on film by a witness, the police officers were acquitted at trial. Three years later, O.J. Simpson led authorities on a nationally televised low-speed pursuit before his...

Abstract Criminal trials increasingly rely on computer programs to generate forensic evidence. But experts in the fields of computer science and forensic science often disagree over whether programs are sufficiently trustworthy to meet the legal admissibility standards for scientific evidence. When adjudicating between these disciplines, courts overwhelmingly side with forensic experts—even when...

Abstract The failure of the legal academy to create professional law school environments embracing the tenets of Critical Race Theory (CRT) sustains racial assault on Black Bodies. Embracing the tenets of CRT can help to improve law school environments, because CRT examines systemic racism and causes individuals to rethink policies and procedures with an antiracist mindset. Further, law school is...

Abstract Exit planning among U.S. citizens is on the rise. A confluence of worrisome domestic conditions— including societal violence, the curtailment of individual rights, and creeping authoritarianism— has prompted U.S. citizens to contemplate and plan for a possible departure from the country. Among the more popular exit pathways, particularly for minorities in the United States who have...

Abstract Following the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Org., several states imposed significant restrictions on abortion. Some of these states established medical exceptions that would allow a woman or any other pregnant person to receive an abortion only if they face “a life-threatening physical condition aggravated by, caused by, or arising from a pregnancy that...

Abstract The privatization of public K-12 education in the United States has accelerated dramatically in recent years, blurring the line between public and private schooling. This shift has raised critical constitutional and statutory questions, particularly for students with disabilities. Although the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA) provides robust protections for this...

Abstract Across the country, students of color face daily threats of arrest, exclusion, and violence at the hands of school police officers. Whether deemed threatening, defiant, or hypersexualized, Black students, in particular, pay a heavy price to access their right to free public education. Despite victories in dismantling educational carcerality since the mid-2000s, efforts to formally remove...

Abstract Higher education is under assault in the United States. Tracking authoritarian movements across the globe, domestic attacks on individual professors and academic institutions buttress a broader campaign to undermine multiracial democracy and the institutions that sustain and safeguard it. Reflecting on the past academic year, this essay charts the increasingly brazen right-wing efforts...

Abstract Dobbs’ impact on growing AAPI communities is underexamined in legal scholarship. This Essay begins to fill that gap, seeking to bring together an overdue focus on the socio-legal experiences of AAPI communities with examination of the effects of reversing Roe and Casey on women of color. It does so by prompting a research agenda that connects diverse AAPI women’s experiences, abortion...

Abstract Just four years after the nation’s summer of 2020 protests—sparked by the murder of George Floyd—culminated in a racial reckoning in which many organizations across the country instituted racial equity measures and policies, legislators across the nation are enacting anti-Critical Race Theory (CRT) bans in a seeming backlash to this advocacy for racial justice. The bans simultaneously...

Abstract Judicial and carceral systems increasingly use criminal risk assessment algorithms to make decisions that affect individual freedoms. While the accuracy, fairness, and legality of these algorithms have come under scrutiny, their tangible impact on the American justice system remains almost completely unexplored. To fill this gap, we investigate the effect of the Correctional Offender...

Abstract How to govern a technology like artificial intelligence (AI)? When it comes to designing and deploying fair, ethical, and safe AI systems, standards are a tempting answer. By establishing the best way of doing something, standards might seem to provide plug-and-play guardrails for AI systems that avoid the costs of formal legal intervention. AI standards are all the more tantalizing...

Abstract This Essay explores the concept of sovereignty in relation to artificial intelligence. Although sovereignty has long been used to describe the status of nation states, the concept of sovereignty is used in multiple ways in the digital context. It is used to articulate state policies in relation to artificial intelligence (AI) and data, an assertion of state sovereignty that often has...