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Many scholars have written about the racialization process experienced by people of Southwest Asia and North African (SWANA) descent, emphasizing the increased discrimination experienced by those perceived as Middle Eastern or SWANA. There is very little scholarship, however, concentrating specifically on employment discrimination faced by those of SWANA descent in the United States. Although...

Throughout American history untold numbers of people have concealed their true racial identities and assumed a white racial identity in order to reap the economic, political, and social benefits associated with whiteness. This phenomenon is known as passing. While legal scholars have thoroughly investigated passing in its conventional form, the corollary process of reverse passing—the process in...

Cities and states around the country have promised their workers—most often teachers, police officers, and firefighters—retirement benefits, but have in many cases failed to set aside adequate assets to fund those benefits. Several of these pension plans are predicted to become insolvent within the next decade and innumerable additional plans appear headed for insolvency in the decade that...

A machine gun overpowers a nine-year-old girl, erratically spraying bullets and accidentally killing her instructor; a perturbed mother slays her son and then takes her own life; a convicted felon circumvents federal prohibitions to access a firearm to commit suicide; and, perhaps most notably, Navy SEAL war veteran Chris Kyle, focus of the movie American Sniper, is murdered while attempting to...

The Supreme Court’s decisions relating to corporate constitutional rights are a conceptual quagmire. While the Court has grappled with the proper scope of corporate rights for more than two centuries, it has failed to articulate a consistent approach to determine which rights corporations should receive and how those rights should be delineated. As a result, the Court has issued a long line of...

Given the emerging consensus that solitary is a weapon used with distressing frequency in U.S. prisons, researchers and practitioners must seriously consider existing tools that allow prisoners to contest their confinement. Thus, although most states now have policies and procedures detailing how prisoners are assigned to solitary, this Comment analyzes policies on the opposite end of the...

Public protests from Occupy to Ferguson have highlighted anew the offense of unlawful assembly. This Article advances the simple but important thesis that contemporary understandings of unlawful assembly cede too much discretion to law enforcement by neglecting earlier statutory and common law elements that once constrained liability. Current laws also ignore important First Amendment norms...

In recent years, a particular strain of argument has arisen in response to decisions by courts or the government to extend certain rights to others. Grounded in religious freedom, these arguments suggest that individuals have a right to operate businesses or conduct their professional roles in a manner that conforms to their religious identity. For example, as courts and legislatures have...

Public companies in the United States must comply with both federal securities law and state corporate law. This division of labor is premised on the assumption that there is a meaningful distinction between securities and corporate law. The most common view is that securities law is characterized by its use of disclosure, while corporate law sets forth substantive requirements. Critics respond...

This Comment seeks to reframe Obergefell v. Hodges as a product of kinship formation and interest convergence. Obergefell v. Hodges is not merely a case about LGBTQ and marriage equality, or the moral triumph of oppressed sexual minorities over the majority. It is through marriage that unrelated people come together and form a legal relationship that surpasses any other in terms of state...

This Comment brings together scholarship from feminists, criminal justice reformers, and social theorists to understand sexual violence in carceral settings and to evaluate reforms to prevent rape in prisons and jails. After introducing the sexual nature of modern incarceration itself, the Comment explains a framework for understanding prison and sexual assault that emerges from social thinkers...

Scholars of Federal Indian law have often celebrated President Richard Nixon for advancing tribal interests through legislation and policy initiatives. Far less attention has been paid to his impact on Federal Indian law through the appointments he made to the U.S. Supreme Court. During the time his four appointees served together, the Supreme Court rendered three decisions that are among the...

A growing body of international legal principles recognizes the right of indigenous people to water resources as a key component of their rights to self-determination, land, and economic self-sufficiency. These legal norms impose obligations on states both to recognize this right and to take affirmative steps to allow indigenous people to realize it. While the United States has not formally...

Criminal jurisdiction in Indian country is defined by a central, ironic paradox. Recent federal laws expanding tribal criminal jurisdiction are, in many respects, enormous victories for Indian country, as they acknowledge and reify a more robust notion of tribal sovereignty, one capable of accommodating increased tribal control over safety and security on Indian reservations. At the same time...