CategoryDiscourse

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...