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Abstract Recent elections in the United States have commanded national and international attention with voting rights becoming a leading concern for Americans. Though the American public and the judicial and political institutions that represent the American people understand the importance of voting to the health of a democracy, the voting rate among eligible voters in the United States pales in...

Abstract Over the last decade, the United States has become the world’s top producer and leading exporter of oil and gas—a change with dramatic geopolitical and climate implications. At the root of this ascendency is a legal framework around oil and gas extraction in the United States that empowers extractive industry to dismantle community opposition, undermine local governance, and entrench...

Abstract Ilanoli isht unowa. We tell our own stories. A single historical event has many stories. Although this nation’s official chronicle expected and even hoped for Indigenous peoples to fade away, we are still here. Our histories are marked by resistance, survival, sovereignty, and renaissance. Only now, in the later stages of the American experiment, do our histories have the chance to...

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Abstract In September 2020, California Governor Gavin Newsom signed Assembly Bill (AB) 2147, a bill creating an expedited expungement process for prisoners in California’s Conservation Camp Program. This bill purportedly removed a barrier that kept formerly incarcerated firefighters locked out of postrelease employment as professional firefighters. Experts and fire camp workers alike praised the...

Free Speech Versus the First Amendment The digital age has widened the gap between the judge-made doctrines of the First Amendment and the practical exercise of free speech. Today, speech is regulated not only by territorial governments but also by the owners of digital infrastructure. This has made First Amendment law less central and the private governance of speech more central. When the free...

Abstract The abolitionist movement seeks to fundamentally dismantle the prison industrial complex. Modern abolitionists recognize that mass incarceration of Black and Brown people is twenty-first century slavery. True abolition, they note, cannot be realized by merely tinkering with the carceral state. Instead, the complete elimination of modern-day badges and incidents of slavery must occur. The...

Abstract To be incarcerated is to be deprived of the choices available to those in the free world. In the absence of those choices, carceral facilities dictate the ways that individuals may engage. If an incarcerated person wants to communicate with someone who is not in their facility, they have very limited options. Because of the extended erosion of attorney-client privilege, for years...

Abstract The United States is experiencing a significant rise in the prevalence of asthma and other debilitating respiratory and cardiovascular ailments that disproportionately burden low income and marginalized Americans. This is due in large measure to climate change, which is responsible for increasingly devastating air quality events—including wildfires and drought—that trigger these serious...

Abstract Nearly half a million people are currently held in pretrial detention across the United States. Legal scholarship has explored many of the actors and factors contributing to the deprivation of freedom of those presumed innocent. And while the scholarship in these areas is rich, it has primarily focused on certain system actors—including judges, prosecutors, and profit-seeking...

Abstract When corporations misbehave, the normal government response is to saddle the industry with more federal oversight requirements. But reactive policies fail to curb corporate misconduct and can incentivize corporations to ignore or break the law due to the ever-increasing cost of compliance. Even though shareholders have to foot the bill when the corporations get caught ignoring or...

Abstract Recent litigation about the Citizenship Clause’s applicability in American Samoa exposes tensions between competing goals of inclusion, self-determination, and cultural preservation. The noncitizen national category and the Insular Cases are both legacies of a long tradition of racial exclusion in the United States, but their current significance is more complicated, as shown by American...

Abstract The battle to protect abortion rights in the United States has not been this fierce in fifty years. From the U.S. Supreme Court’s recent Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization decision to a precipitously growing number of states passing draconian laws that drastically limit—and in some states, entirely ban—access to safe and legal abortion services, reproductive freedom is under...

Abstract Anti-protest legislation is billed as applying only in the extreme circumstances of mass-movements and large scale civil disobedience. Mass protest exceptionalism provides justification for passage of anti-protest laws in states otherwise hesitant to expand public order criminal regulation. Examples include a Virginia bill that heightens penalties for a “failure to disperse following a...