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ABSTRACT Racist policing and the racially discriminatory use of force by police officers pose a serious challenge for a legal system committed to equal justice. Yet litigants cannot easily contest the systemic racism that permeates police departments across the country. Individuals injured by police violence may not have the resources to pursue systemic claims and there are barriers...

ABSTRACT Race scholars have voiced concerns about the field of criminology and how it examines issues pertaining to race, racism, and racial difference. Various critiques have been made, from the field’s overly positivist approach that privileges “white logics” that obscure the nuance of race relations to methodological critiques on how the field understands the significance of race in its models...

ABSTRACT This Article makes a simple claim that has been overlooked for decades and yet has enormous theoretical and practical significance: the constitutional guarantee of counsel adopted by the U.S. Supreme Court in Gideon v. Wainwright accrues largely to the benefit of men. In this Article, we present original data analysis demonstrating that millions of women face compulsory and highly...

ABSTRACT 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. The UCLA Law Review has regularly published these lectures, and proudly continues that tradition by publishing an Article based on this year’s Nimmer Lecture, presented by Professor...

ABSTRACT Public education looms large in criminal law reform. As states debate what to invest in—other than criminal law enforcement—to provide safety and security to the public, public schools have emerged as a popular answer. Today, legislatures move money from prisons to public education, arguing that this reinvestment can address the root causes of mass incarceration. This Article analyzes...

ABSTRACT Black trans life has recently taken center stage in the liberal mind. The machine of diversity, equity, and inclusion has increased visibility of Black transness in a variety of arenas. We are now seen on red carpets, earn book deals, and play prominent roles in television shows and films. Yet the potential for our violation remains constitutive of our embodiments as we are coerced to...

ABSTRACT Scholars and activists are urging a move away from policing and towards more care-based approaches to social problems and public safety. These debates contest the conventional wisdom about the role and scope of policing and call for shifting resources to systems of care, including medical, mental health, and social work. While scholars and activists in favor of reducing society’s...

ABSTRACT This Article identifies and analyzes features of the juvenile delinquency court that harm the people on whom children most heavily depend: their parents. By negatively affecting a child’s family—creating financial stress, undermining a parent’s central role in rearing her child, and damaging the parent-child bond—these parent-harming features imperil a child’s healthy growth and...

ABSTRACT This Article uses private law as a lens and a guide to excavate an unfamiliar story about labor and racial violence in the post-slavery south. It is the story of farmers like Colonel Bishop, whose landlord attacked him in the middle of the night in an effort to coerce him into breaching his contract. Violent breaches of contract such as these were not uncommon in the post-slavery south...

ABSTRACT The United States is changing, and its democratic process must change with it. A new non-white majority is emerging after decades of demographic shift. Federal voting rights doctrine, developed throughout the Civil Rights Era, is premised on a biracial conception of American society. Withering under sustained attack, federal protections have also become antiquated in a rapidly developing...

ABSTRACT Beginning in the 1880s, maritime unions sought federal legislation to prevent Chinese, Japanese, Filipino, and Asian Indian sailors from serving as crew members on U.S.-flag vessels. The campaign succeeded and mandatory citizenship requirements for crews remain in the U.S. Code to this day. Similarly, federal and state laws limited the ability of Asians to fish, own fishing boats, or to...

ABSTRACT For more than one hundred years, states have relied on ratemaking to ensure that electric utilities deliver affordable and reliable power to their customers. This process helped keep costs down, but it also produced an electricity system that is a cause of, and vulnerable to, some of the most pressing challenges now facing society: climate change, catastrophic wildfires, extreme storms...

ABSTRACT Legal scholarship tends to obscure how changes in criminal process relate to broader changes in the political and economic terrain. This Article offers a modest corrective to this tendency. By studying the U.S. Supreme Court’s right to counsel jurisprudence, as it has developed since the mid-70s, I show the pervasive impact of the concurrent rise of neoliberalism on relationships between...

ABSTRACT Wage theft is estimated to cost American workers more than $15 billion per year, but upwards of 60 million American workers cannot go to court to sue their employer if their rights are violated. This is because many American workers are subject to mandatory arbitration which forecloses their access to the court system—or an aggregate proceeding in arbitration. This problem has been long...