Discourse publishes shorter articles that are timely, interdisciplinary, and novel. Discourse strives to serve as a platform for scholars, ideas, and discussions that have often been overlooked in traditional law review settings. Because we seek to publish pieces that are accessible to legal and non-legal audiences alike, Discourse articles are generally between 3,000 and 10,000 words. Like our print journal, Discourse articles are published on Westlaw, Lexis, and in other legal databases, as well as our own website. Beginning with Volume 68, Discourse began publishing special issues of Law Meets World.
Abstract This Essay examines professionalism as a tool to subjugate people of color in the legal field. Professionalism is a standard with a set of beliefs about how one should operate in the workplace. While professionalism seemingly applies to everyone, it is used to widely police and regulate people of color in various ways including hair, tone, and food scents. Thus, it is not merely that...
Abstract The year of racial justice awakening following George Floyd’s 2020 murder have been accompanied by a rise in attacks on Black thought, including Critical Race Theory, led by far-right activists who are invested in maintenance of a white supremacist status quo in the United States. This Essay uses artist Kara Walker’s 2014 Sugar Sphinx to contextualize the critiques on Critical Race...
Abstract A necessary conclusion from Critical Race Theory (CRT) is that Black people cannot look to the law for justice because racism is baked into the law. As a result, the movement for Black liberation cannot rely on the law for just outcomes. This result does not, however, mean that we have to abandon legal interventions altogether. Instead, for those of us who are lawyers working...
Book Review An Equal Place: Lawyers in the Struggle for Los Angeles. By Scott Cummings. Oxford University Press. 2020. Pp. ix, 688. Introduction Scott Cummings’s An Equal Place is a monumental rendition of the history of Los Angeles’s social movements with a multifaceted set of actors working together to obtain equality for low-wage workers. At just over 500 pages long, the book is a brilliant...
Abstract This Essay uses scholarly debate about the U.S. Supreme Court’s September 2021 decision on the Centers for Disease Control’s pandemic eviction ban to argue that legal elites’ view of the law is useless as it fails to capture the law’s social reality. As a more accurate lens, the Essay uplifts and sketches an alternative perspective on law it calls, “The Jurisprudence of Trousered Apes...
Abstract Each year, the UCLA School of Law presents the Rutter Award for Excellence in Teaching to an outstanding law professor. On April 28, 2021, this honor was given to Professor Hiroshi Motomura. UCLA Law Review Discourse is proud to continue its tradition of publishing a modified version of the ceremony speech delivered by the award recipient. * * * Thank you very much, Dean Mnookin, and...
Abstract The COVID-19 pandemic not only exposed the socio-political and economic hardships that plague vulnerable communities across the United States, but it also challenged academicians with caregiving responsibilities. Teaching from home threatened the very notion of work-life balance. Compounding these pressures, faculty members were tasked with teaching online amidst the traumas of the...
Abstract We are living in a moment of nearly constant, cascading ecological crises. In the United States alone, we have witnessed record-breaking heat waves in the Pacific Northwest, increased forest fires in California, worsening hurricanes in the Gulf Coast, and massive flooding in the Midwest and on the East Coast—all in the summer of 2021. The need for transformative ecological...
Abstract This Essay puts forward a two-element argument that noncitizen defendants can use to establish that they have been interrogated for Miranda purposes when they have been questioned about their immigration status by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) officers. I examine the briefing and decision in one defendant’s case to illustrate why this two-element argument matters, and why it...
Abstract The impact of the spread of the novel coronavirus in the United States beginning in winter 2020 has simultaneously laid bare vast chasms of inequality in education and created a crisis in which radical reforms have become possible almost overnight. Schools, colleges and universities have dramatically changed how they admit, assess, and support their students; for example, the University...
Abstract The Fifth Amendment of the U.S. Constitution holds that no person shall be twice put in jeopardy of life or limb for the same offense. Read plainly, a person cannot be tried or punished more than once for a single crime. Yet in recent decades, as legislatures have expanded the prosecutorial state with weapons designed to punish more criminal defendants more harshly, the U.S. Supreme...
Jailhouse lawyering has a long and radical tradition in the American prison system, and for decades, it has been recognized and protected by the U.S. Supreme Court. In Johnson v. Avery,[1] the Court struck down Tennessee’s restrictions on jailhouse lawyering because “it is fundamental that access of prisoners to the courts for the purpose of presenting their complaints may not be denied or...
Abstract Jailhouse lawyers face unreasonable barriers to have their constitutional claims heard post-conviction. Courts, without adequate regard for the physical limitations inherent behind bars, place procedures over justice. *** They say that a lawyer who represents himself has a fool for a client. When you are poor and incarcerated, you often have no choice. Your right to appointment of...
Abstract This Essay traces the roots of the criminal legal and immigration systems and explains my personal journey through these systems, as well as what I have observed about how they operate today. These systems are rooted in British and colonial laws, as well as Puritanism. The remnants of these practices still affect our systems today and show us that they are not broken but working...