ABSTRACT This Comment focuses on the convergence of racialized policing and voter suppression of communities of color. While much attention has been given to the disenfranchisement of people upon felony conviction, there has been little attention paid to the policing and subsequent prosecution of people—disproportionately Black and Latinx—for voting or registering to vote. These prosecutions...
ABSTRACT A thriving body of literature discusses various legal issues related to blockchain. This literature often conflates the discussion about blockchain with cryptocurrency. But blockchain is not the same as cryptocurrency. Defined as a decentralized, immutable, peer-to-peer ledger technology, blockchain is a newly emerging data management system. The private sector and the public sector have...
ABSTRACT Progressive prosecutors have been widely hailed as the solution to mass incarceration. This Article argues, to the contrary, that the legal arm of law enforcement can never be the full answer to its problems. While scholars critique police and call to defund and dismantle them, they overlook prosecutors. Building on the work of abolitionist organizers to theorize and critique progressive...
ABSTRACT In the immediate aftermath of the murder of George Floyd at the hands of the Minneapolis Police, protesters engaged in acts of destruction, looting, and seizure of private and state property on a scale unseen since the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr., in 1968. An estimated $2 billion was caused in private property damage, by far the most expensive for an uprising in American...
ABSTRACT When people in law think about strict scrutiny, often they are also thinking about equal protection law’s treatment of race. For more than four decades, scholars have vigorously challenged that legal regime. Yet none of that contestation has interrogated the social manifestation of strict scrutiny. This Article does that work. Its central claim is that Black people live under a social...
ABSTRACT On January 5, 2022, Professor Kimberlé Williams Crenshaw received the 2021 Triennial Award for Lifetime Service to Legal Education and the Legal Profession from the Association of American Law Schools (AALS). In this modified acceptance speech delivered at the 2022 AALS Awards Ceremony, she reflects on the path that brought her to this moment and the crisis over antiracist and social...
ABSTRACT Equilibrium models of racial discrimination in law enforcement encounters suggest that in the absence of racial discrimination, the proportion of searches yielding evidence of illegal activity (the hit rate) will be equal across races. Searches that disproportionately target one racial group, resulting in a relatively low hit rate, are inefficient and suggest bias. An unbiased officer...
ABSTRACT In 1996, the U.S. Supreme Court decided Whren v. United States—a unanimous opinion in which the Court effectively constitutionalized racial profiling. Despite its enduring consequences, Whren remains good law today. This Article rewrites the opinion. We do so, in part, to demonstrate how one might incorporate racial justice concerns into Fourth Amendment jurisprudence, a body of law that...
ABSTRACT This Article observes that if the U.S. Supreme Court overturns Roe v. Wade, people of color—specifically black people—disproportionately will be impacted by the abortion restrictions that will proliferate in the wake of the decision. In many cases, those forced to terminate unwanted pregnancies under unsafe conditions will be black; some of these people will die. This Article asks about...
ABSTRACT This Article draws on prison abolitionist organizing, campaigns, and intellectual work around the country to offer a framework for thinking about radical reforms rooted in an abolitionist framework. A radical reform (1) shrinks the system doing harm; (2) relies on modes of political, economic, and social organization that contradict prevailing arrangements and gesture at new...
ABSTRACT This Article argues that this indiscriminate treatment of all websites as blackacres violates the First Amendment. Applying cyber-trespass rules identically across the internet undermines core constitutional values by giving platforms unlimited discretion to prevent access to information that’s already within the public sphere. To avoid these unconstitutional applications of cyber...
ABSTRACT In this Article, the Reporters for the American Law Institute Principles of Law, Data Privacy provide an overview of the project as well as the text of its black letter. The Principles aim to provide a blueprint for policymakers to regulate privacy comprehensively and effectively. The Principles propose comprehensive privacy principles for legislation that are consistent with key...
ABSTRACT In contemporary constitutional jurisprudence, capacious notions of individual liberty are ascendant. Under the First Amendment, due process, takings, nondelegation, and a range of interpretive doctrines, advocates are seeking greater respect for individual liberty, and greater constitutional restraints on the state—increasingly to successful effect. In the name of individual freedom...
ABSTRACT To many Native Hawaiians, Maunakea is a sacred place, central to their creation. To the astronomy community, it represents modern astronomy’s greatest opportunity for scientific advancement. The steady construction of observatories on Maunakea since the 1960s, and the resultant destruction of the mountain’s natural and spiritual landscape unfortunately mirrors the historic pattern of...