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Transitioning from our current energy infrastructure to a smart grid will be essential to meeting future challenges. One key component of the smart grid is advanced metering infrastructure (AMI). AMI allows for the grid to be run more effectively and efficiently by making granular near real-time data about customers’ energy usage available. Coupled with the input and innovation of third-party...

Channeling the Queen of Hearts, the California Supreme Court drafts and votes on its merits opinions before the case under review is orally argued. The court can, and does, alter those opinions in light of the argument, often sprinkling in citations to oral argument before publishing the decision. Nevertheless, given that a majority has already signed onto a written opinion, oral argument in that...

Judges, like all public officials, are used to criticism. The task of resolving important legal controversies seldom pleases all sides, and scholars, pundits, and dissenting colleagues often spare no pains to remind us that we are not “infallible.” On many issues, no matter how we decide, we must take our lumps. That goes with the job. But it is one thing to be told that the outcome of a judicial...

Justice Liu’s response to Opinions First—Argument Afterwards treats Opinions First as an attack on the court—which it is not—rather than a wellsupported proposal for reform, which is the ground I had hoped to occupy. Instead of addressing the ways out of the box the court unfortunately finds itself in post-Stevens v. Broussard (I identified several), the Liu Response chooses to deny the existence...

Family law is now replete with proposals advocating for the legal recognition of nonmarital relationships: those between friends, relatives, unmarried intimate partners, and the like. The presumption underlying these proposals is that legal recognition is financially beneficial to partners. This assumption is sometimes wrong: Legal recognition of relationships can be harmful to unmarried...

Courts and commentators have long assumed, without significant analysis, that immigration detention is a form of civil confinement merely because the immigration proceedings of which it is part are deemed civil. This Article challenges that deeply held assumption. It harnesses the U.S. Supreme Court’s instruction that detention’s civil or penal character turns on legislative intent and...

School quality and resources vary dramatically across school district boundary lines. Students who live mere miles apart have access to disparate educational opportunities based on which side of a school district boundary line their home is located. Owing in large part to metropolitan fragmentation, most school districts and the larger localities in which they are situated are segregated by race...

Each year, the UCLA School of Law hosts the Melville B. Nimmer Memorial Lecture. Since 1986, the lecture series has served as a forum for leading scholars in the fields of copyright and First Amendment law. In recent years, the lecture has been presented by many distinguished scholars. The UCLA Law Review has published these lectures and proudly continues that tradition by publishing an Article...

Neuroimages and, more generally, neuroscience evidence are increasingly used in the courtroom in hope of mitigating punishment in criminal cases. Many legal commentators express concern because they fear that the prejudicial effect of such evidence significantly outweighs its probative value. In light of earlier empirical studies, this concern is predominantly directed toward the visual impact of...

As mineral prices continue to rise and high-quality terrestrial supplies dwindle, hardrock mining will soon spread to the one place on this planet it currently does not occur: underwater. The United States has regulations permitting the issuance of offshore mineral leases, but these regulations rest on questionable authority from 1953 and are already obsolete even though they have never been used...

Laws send messages, some of which may be heard at the moment of enactment. But much of a law’s expressive impact is bound up in its enforcement. Although scholars have extensively debated the wisdom of expressive legislation, their discussions in the context of domestic criminal law have focused largely on enactment-related messaging, rather than on expressive enforcement. This Article uses hate...

Deep confusion reigns over federal insider trading law, even over the essential elements of an insider trading violation. On the one hand, this uncertainty seems to have encouraged the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) and some lower courts to push the boundaries well beyond the limits previously established by the U.S. Supreme Court. On the other hand, influential academics continue to...

When California’s Proposition 8 (Prop. 8) eliminated the right to marry a person of the same sex, it aggravated a fissure between the black community and the gay community. Though Prop. 8 had nothing to do with race on the surface, the controversy that followed its passage was charged with racial blame. This Article uses the Prop. 8 controversy, including the ensuing Perry litigation challenging...

This empirical legal study examines Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives (ATF) trace data from crime guns seized in Mexico and traced back to their states of origin in the United States. It uses Ordinary Least Squares (OLS) regression to analyze the relationship between U.S. states’ crime gun export rates to Mexico and state gun control laws. The presence of four state gun control...