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The current system of administration of the Bankruptcy Code is highly anomalous. It stands as one of the few major federal civil statutory regimes administered almost exclusively through adjudication in the courts—not through a federal regulatory agency. This means that rather than fitting bankruptcy into a regulatory model, the U.S. Congress has chosen to give the courts primary interpretive...

One of medicine’s open secrets is that patients routinely refuse or demand medical treatment based on the assigned physician’s racial identity, and hospitals typically yield to patients’ racial preferences. This widely practiced, if rarely acknowledged, phenomenon—about which there is new empirical evidence—poses a fundamental dilemma for law, medicine, and ethics. It also raises difficult...

The U.S. Supreme Court’s Johnson v. California decision creates a new legal context for gender equal protection claims in the prison context. Johnson’s language and justifications create a space in prison jurisprudence where the deferential norms of Turner v. Safley are inapposite, and where deference rationales have no place. This Comment argues that this change is significant, and that it...

The Sixth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution guarantees all criminal defendants the right to trial by an impartial jury—a jury that is free of bias and that decides the case solely on the evidence before it. If even one juror is biased or prejudiced, the defendant is denied this fundamental right. Federal Rule of Evidence 606(b) generally prohibits jurors from testifying as to what occurred...

Cuisine exists in intellectual property law’s “negative space”: It is relatively unprotected by formal intellectual property (IP) laws, yet creativity and innovation flourish. This runs contrary to the given economic wisdom that propertization is required to incentivize creation. Community norms and the first-mover advantage help to explain how cuisine thrives in this low-IP equilibrium. However...

This Article is the first to examine the routine—but problematic—practice of courts forgiving prosecutors for failing to disclose Brady evidence if the defendant or his lawyer knew or with due diligence could have known about the evidence. This Article begins by explaining the insidious emergence of the “due diligence” rule and catalogs how courts have defined, justified, and applied the rule...

Although human trafficking has gained unprecedented national and international attention and condemnation over the past decade, the legal instruments developed to combat this phenomenon have thus far proved insufficient. In particular, current efforts help an alarmingly small number of individuals out of the multitudes currently understood as falling under the category of trafficked persons, and...

Recent developments in abortion politics and prenatal genetic testing are currently on a collision course that has the potential to change the way we think about reproduction and reproductive rights. In the fall of 2011, the first noninvasive prenatal genetic test for Down syndrome entered the commercial market, offering highly accurate prenatal genetic tests from a sample of a pregnant woman’s...

The U.S. criminal justice system is striking in its severity. Developments in criminal sentencing practices over the past several decades make the criminal justice system not only harsher than it was at the beginning of the twentieth century, but significantly more punitive than any other Western criminal justice system. Mandatory minimums, recidivist statutes, and the war on drugs, among other...

In our society, individual acts of intentional discrimination function in concert with historically created vulnerabilities; these vulnerabilities are based on disfavored identity categories and amplify each injustice and injury. Although anyone can be a victim of housing discrimination, women of color suffer distinct collateral injuries from barriers to housing that are collective and cumulative...

It is well known that sexual abuse occurs within the correctional system. That female correctional staff commit a significant proportion of that sexual abuse is met with discomfort bordering on disbelief. This discomfort has limited the discourse about female correctional workers who abuse men or boys under their care. Scant scholarship exists that addresses the appropriate response to sexual...

This Article highlights a systematic bias in the academic, correctional, and human rights discourse that constitutes the basis for prison rape policy reform. This discourse focuses almost exclusively on sexual abuse perpetrated by men: sexual abuse of male prisoners by fellow inmates, and sexual abuse of women prisoners by male staff. But since 2007, survey and correctional data have indicated...

Over the course of more than a century, structural gender bias has been a remarkably durable feature of U.S. juvenile justice systems. Consequently, as these systems have developed over the years, reducing gender bias and addressing girls in helpful, rather than harmful, ways has required specific and concerted efforts on the part of federal and state governments. Currently, there are a number of...

This Article explores the race, gender, and class dynamics that render poor Black women vulnerable to racial surveillance and harassment in predominately white communities. In particular, this Article interrogates the recent phenomenon of police officers and public officials enforcing private citizens’ discriminatory complaints, which ultimately excludes Black women and their children from...