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Ever since the prison reform movement ended in the early 1980s, it has become increasingly difficult for inmates to challenge their conditions of confinement under the Eighth Amendment. Supreme Court rulings, statutes, and lower courts' conservative applications of precedent have worked together to create a culture of deference that constrains federal courts from intervening in prison affairs. At...

Over the past few decades, the number of Americans living in condominiums, master-planned communities, and other types of Common Interest Communities (CICs) has climbed to fifty million. In many of these communities, gates, leafleting bans, or no-solicitation rules prohibit solicitors from speaking or distributing written information to residents. In some, CIC governing boards reserve the...

One of the central tenets of fiscal federalism is that redistributive policies should be undertaken by the most central level of government rather than state or local governments. This Article highlights and critically examines the ways in which the current federal deduction for state and local taxes (SALT) frustrates this goal. The federal SALT deduction, as presently designed, encourages state...

The UCLA Law Review has been proud to present Articles based on the annual tribute to Professor Melville B. Nimmer that takes place at the UCLA School of Law. The Review continues that tradition by publishing an Article by this year's presenter, Professor David Nimmer. In the form of a tribute to the author's father, the Article evaluates each provision of the Copyright Act of 1976 and each...

In 2001, it was revealed that Enron and other American corporate giants had engaged in misleading and corrupt practices. The result was that investors lost hundreds of billions of dollars, and more importantly, their faith in corporate governance and the stock markets. As a result of this crisis, Congress, the SEC, and the major stock exchanges proposed new securities laws and regulations. There...

Are religious prisoners entitled to dietary accommodations consistent with their religious beliefs? The current answer for this question derives from two 1987 cases, Turner v. Safley and O'Lone v. Estate of Shabazz, in which the U.S. Supreme Court articulated a factor-driven balancing test. Under this test, a prison regulation may burden an inmate's rights only if, on balance, the regulation...

This Article presents the first comprehensive analysis of separation of powers under the California Constitution, and also lays the groundwork for a more general theory of separation of powers in state constitutional law. Such an effort is of more than academic interest, for the California Supreme Court will soon confront its most important separation of powers case in more than one hundred...

This Article reconceptualizes institutional reform lawsuits-big cases involving the structural reform of local government entities such as prisons and housing authorities-as the nodes of a nationwide network capable of generating national standards of administration for disparate local institutions. The repeat-playing litigators, parties, and experts who participate in this network facilitate the...

In the early 1980s, Fred Korematsu, Minoru Yasui, and Gordon Hirabayashi marched back into the federal courts that convicted them during World War II for defying the internment of persons of Japanese descent. Relying on suppressed exculpatory evidence discovered in the national archives, they filed writs of error coram nobis to overturn their convictions. Remarkably, this litigation was...

In several previous articles, I argued that California's famous school-finance decision, Serrano v. Priest, which required equalized school spending, caused Proposition 13, which decimated property taxes in 1978. In an article in this Review in 2003, Kirk Stark and Jonathan Zasloff contested my explanation of Prop 13. My statistical evidence was a strong correlation between tax base per pupil in...

Congress passed the Visual Artists Rights Act (VARA) in 1990 with hopes that a national system of moral rights would serve the purposes of (1) complying with the Berne Convention; (2) providing a uniform system of moral rights protections; (3) guaranteeing personal moral rights; and (4) encouraging art preservation. However, because VARA does not continue to provide consistent nationwide moral...

Because American courts do not traditionally provide for a prevailing party to recover attorneys' fees, the finance of civil lawsuits presents numerous problems for litigants. Insurance and contingent fees solve some of these problems, but in recent decades legislatures have in a number of instances provided for partial fee shifting. Such fee-shifting statutes require courts to set lawyers' fees...

This Essay is a slightly expanded version of the inaugural Mellinkoff Lecture in Law and Humanities, presented at the UCLA School of Law last April in honor of the memory of Professor David Mellinkoff, the distinguished author of ground-breaking work on the nature of legal language. It addresses four related questions. What is the nature of the kind of speech and expression that realizes most...

While political speech-speech intended to influence political decisions-is afforded the highest protection under the First Amendment, adjudicative speech-speech intended to influence court decisions-is regularly and systematically constrained by rules of evidence, canons of professional ethics, judicial gag orders, and similar devices. Yet court decisions can be as important, both to the...