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Congress will not enact meaningful campaign finance reform. Under the nation’s current legislative, regulatory, and judicial regimes, remedies to the problem of money in politics appear unattainable. This Comment provides an entirely novel approach toward reducing the corrosive influence of outside money on the U.S political system. Aided by the power of the profit motive, this Comment proposes...

This Article argues that because of its historical and ongoing investments in settler colonialism, the Canadian state has long been complicit and continues to be complicit in the human trafficking of indigenous women and girls in Canada. In addition to providing indigenous bodies for labour and sexual exploitation, Canada’s trafficking of indigenous people has been essential not only to securing...

This Article explores the role of race in the prostitution and sex trafficking of people of color, particularly minority youth, and the evolving legal and social responses in the United States. Child sex trafficking has become a vital topic of discussion among scholars and advocates, and public outcry has led to safe harbor legislation aimed at shifting the legal paradigm away punishing...

This Essay examines the potential influence of a new breed of actor in the global antitrafficking arena: the venture philanthropist, or “philanthrocapitalist.” Philanthrocapitalists have already helped rebrand “trafficking” as “modern-day slavery,” and have expressed their ambitions to lead global efforts to eradicate the problem. With their deep financial resources and access to powerful...

Many immigrants’ rights advocates and scholars have recognized the undocumented worker exploitation that takes place when immigration restrictions enter the workplace, which create incentives for employer misconduct and increase the vulnerability of workers without status. However, little has been discussed about the broader implications of the currently expansive immigration enforcement regime...

Over the last twenty years, domestic sexual trafficking of children has received increased attention from state and national policymakers and advocates. Indeed, states across the country have enacted laws establishing harsh new penalties for individuals convicted of domestic sexual trafficking. At the same time, arrest and conviction rates for Black girls within the juvenile justice system are...

The Trafficking Victims Protection Act (TVPA) considers all youth less than eighteen years of age trafficking victims without a showing of force, fraud, or coercion. The presumption is that minors cannot legally consent to sex and thus are always victims. Being characterized as a victim helps youth access support services and avoid prosecution in certain circumstances. However, local and state...

Traditional wills doctrine was notorious for its formalism. Courts insisted that testators strictly comply with the Wills Act and refused to consider extrinsic evidence to construe instruments. Yet the 1990 Uniform Probate Code revisions and the Restatement (Third) of Property: Wills and Donative Transfers replaced these venerable bright-line rules with fact-sensitive standards in an effort to...

This Article introduces to legal scholarship the first sustained discussion of prison abolition and what I will call a “prison abolitionist ethic.” Prisons and punitive policing produce tremendous brutality, violence, racial stratification, ideological rigidity, despair, and waste. Meanwhile, incarceration and prison-backed policing neither redress nor repair the very sorts of harms they are...

The traditional justification for intellectual property (IP) rights has been utilitarian. We grant exclusive rights because we think the world will be a better place as a result. But what evidence we have doesn’t fully justify IP rights in their current form. Rather than following the evidence and questioning strong IP rights, more and more scholars have begun to retreat from evidence toward what...

Many scholars, some lower courts, and at least one Supreme Court justice support the idea that if a law contains secular exceptions, the Free Exercise Clause compels similar religious exemptions from the law. They argue, for instance, that if a police department with a no-beards policy allows exceptions for medical reasons, it must also allow those who wish to grow their beards for religious...

In 1965, Congress enacted the Voting Rights Act (VRA) to enforce the Fifteenth Amendment of the U.S. Constitution. Specifically, Section 2 of the VRA, as originally adopted in 1965, closely tracked the language of the Fifteenth Amendment and prohibited voting practices that denied or abridged the right to vote on account of race or color. But in 1980, the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision in City of...

This Article examines the developments leading to the U.S. Supreme Court’s decisions in the 1930s that legitimated the extraterritorial application of state law in civil litigation. Today, these decisions are thought of as having established the basic constitutional limitations on choice-of-law rulings by state courts. But they are better understood as the culmination of an historical process in...

This Article examines the federal government’s community engagement efforts with American Muslim communities as part of a larger infrastructure for policing radicalization and countering violent extremism (CVE). While the federal government presents community engagement as a softer alternative to policing, community engagement is integrated into a larger policing apparatus, making the reality far...