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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...

Current thinking about trademark law is dominated by economic analysis, which views the law as a system of rules designed to promote informational efficiencies. Yet the economic analysis has failed to explain, because it is unequipped to do so, a number of concepts of fundamental importance in the law, most notably the concepts of trademark "distinctiveness" and trademark "dilution." This Article...

Unlike most states, California generally prohibits noncompete agreements between an employer and its employees through section 16600 of the California Business and Professions Code. In recent years, state and federal courts in California have encountered noncompete agreements that contain choice of law clauses specifying the law of a state that allows reasonable noncompete agreements. When...

Slippery slopes have been the topic of a spate of recent literature. In this Article, the authors provide a general theory for understanding and evaluating slippery slope arguments and their associated slippery slope events. The central feature of the theory is a structure of discussion within which all arguments take place. The structure is multilayered, consisting of decisions, rules, theories...

Most Americans receive their healthcare from a managed care organization (MCO), which makes state regulation of MCOs a significant policy issue. Most Americans also obtain their MCO membership through an employer-sponsored benefits plan subject to federal regulation. Consequently, courts must determine whether and to what extent federal law preempts state MCO regulation. Over the last quarter...

This Article argues that corporate status became popular in the nineteenth century as a way to organize production because of the unique manner in which incorporation permitted organizers to lock in financial capital. Unlike participants in a partnership, shareholders in an incorporated enterprise could not extract capital from the firm without explicit approval of a board of directors charged...