CategoryPrint

The juvenile justice system was designed to empower its decisionmakers with a wide grant of discretion in hopes of better addressing youth in a more individualistic and holistic, and therefore more effective, manner. Unfortunately for girls of color in the system, this discretionary charter given to police, probation officers, and especially judges has operated without sufficiently acknowledging...

This Article analyzes how the U.S. prison and foster care systems work together to punish black mothers in the service of preserving race, gender, and class inequality in a neoliberal age. The intersection of these systems is only one example of many forms of overpolicing that overlap and converge in the lives of poor women of color. I examine the statistical overlap between the prison and foster...

The structural and political dimensions of gender violence and mass incarceration are linked in multiple ways. The myriad causes and consequences of mass incarceration discussed herein call for increased attention to the interface between the dynamics that constitute race, gender, and class power, as well as to the way these dynamics converge and rearticulate themselves within institutional...

Since Graham v. Connor, the U.S. Supreme Court’s 1989 opinion establishing the Fourth Amendment standard for assessing whether a police officer’s use of force was unconstitutionally excessive, the law has slowly developed through a body of narrow and fact-specific precedents that guide judges’ excessive force and qualified immunity analyses. Recently, the Ninth Circuit—the source of many of the...

Three years ago, the U.S. Congress passed the Credit CARD Act of 2009. This ambitious piece of consumer protection legislation sought to relieve consumer debt burdens by targeting credit card industry abuses and providing new disclosures. Congress acknowledged that the legislation would not help individuals who borrow irresponsibly on their credit cards, implicitly assuming that it could not...

In this Article, we argue that the U.S. Supreme Court should route most Federal Rules of Civil Procedure issues through the notice-and-comment rulemaking process of the Civil Rules Advisory Committee instead of issuing judgments in adjudications, unless the Court can resolve the case solely through the deployment of traditional tools of statutory interpretation. While we are not the first to...

Since the U.S. Supreme Court’s holdings in Daubert v. Merrell Dow Pharmaceuticals, Inc. and Kumho Tire Co. v. Carmichael, which articulated that judges have a gatekeeping responsibility to ensure that all expert testimony is sufficiently reliable, academic critics have reviewed forensic science evidence with greater scrutiny. While fingerprint identification has historically been touted as...

Given the substantial and growing scientific literature on implicit bias, the time has now come to confront a critical question: What, if anything, should we do about implicit bias in the courtroom? The author team comprises legal academics, scientists, researchers, and even a sitting federal judge who seek to answer this question in accordance with behavioral realism. The Article first provides...

Two recent high-profile U.S. Supreme Court decisions—Caperton and Citizens United—promise to fundamentally alter the landscape of campaign finance at all levels of government. At first glance, however, their holdings appear to be in considerable tension with one another. This Comment argues that we should overcome this tension by reading the decisions with reference to the form of power exercised...

The digital age has forever changed the role of copyright in promoting the progress of science and the arts. The era of instant authorship has provided copyright to countless authors who are not motivated by copyright incentives. It has also made it impracticable for copyright to return to a system requiring author adherence to formalities, such as notice and registration. Though many...

The field of intellectual property (IP) law today is focused, as the name itself advertises, on one particular institutional approach to scientific and cultural production: IP. When legal scholars explain this focus, they typically do so with reference to the virtues of price. Because price gives us a decentralized way to link social welfare to the production of information, IP is alleged to be...

Congress rarely participates in litigation about the meaning of federal law. By contrast, the executive branch joins in federal litigation on a regular basis as either a party or amicus curiae. Congress simply assumes that the president’s lawyers adequately represent its interests save in those rare instances when the two branches have a direct conflict. This Article questions that assumption...

An international debate continues to unfold in banking, corporate governance, and finance on whether the capital structure of the world’s largest financial institutions is too heavily dependent on debt, too little on equity. Two of us, with coauthors, have argued elsewhere that there is no socially beneficial purpose for this overreliance on debt, and that such reliance increases the likelihood...

Nationally, K–12 schools are increasingly relying on police officers and criminalized security measures like metal detectors and random searches in an attempt to make schools safer. In New York City, officers patrolling prison-like schools have acutely harmful effects, leading the New York Civil Liberties Union (NYCLU) to file a class action lawsuit in 2010 alleging the systemic violations of...