A few years ago, I published, in this journal, an article on the thirtieth birthday of the Americans with Disability Act. That article, The Americans with Disabilities Act at Thirty, 11 CALIF. L. REV. ONLINE 308 (2020), has seen a great deal of success over the past three years. Inspired by that essay, this article celebrates the fiftieth anniversary of another very important disability rights law—the forerunner of the Americans with Disabilities Act—the Rehabilitation Act of 1973 (RA).

In July 2022, transitional U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) requirements for milk in school meals went into effect. These requirements further ensconce milk as a nutritional cornerstone of the USDA’s school breakfast and lunch programs, with milk serving as a key source of calcium, vitamin D, potassium, and calories for children.

Many may recognize the “land grant” moniker that several dozen U.S. universities like the University of California carry, but what many do not realize is that the land “granted” to fund these universities was land that the federal government had recently expropriated from Native Nations through violent seizures and coercive treaties.

Public debate over the U.S. legal response to White supremacist violence is on constant simmer, bound to boil over whenever an attack draws national attention. In recent years, that’s happened often. Like in 2015, when a White nationalist gunman killed nine worshippers at a Black church in Charleston, South Carolina. And in 2019, when a White man who decried the “Hispanic invasion of…

In 2019 and 2020, the Supreme Court denied two petitions for certiorari concerning the provision of gender confirmation surgery to incarcerated individuals. These denials solidified a circuit split over whether a prison must provide gender confirmation surgery to incarcerated people…

Bennett Capers’s article Against Prosecutors challenges us to imagine a world where we “turn away from prosecution as we know it,” and shift “power from prosecutors to the people they purport to represent.” In this world, crime victims decide whether to prosecute their own cases, and public prosecutors play a subsidiary role, taking primary responsibility only for cases “where…

When I was a prosecutor, I relished closing arguments, especially standing in front of the jury to deliver my rebuttal to defense attorney summations—plural since many of my trials involved multiple co-defendants and hence multiple defense summations. When I tell my students this, they assume I loved rebuttals for the intellectual one-upmanship. And they’re…

In “Against Prosecutors,” Bennett Capers proposes that we largely abandon the current system of public prosecutions and return to private prosecutions. His goal is to empower the victims of crime to make decisions currently made by public prosecutors—whether to bring charges, what the charges should be, and how the cases should…

In his provocative essay, Against Prosecutors,[1] Professor Bennett Capers contributed to a now-robust conversation that was on the fringes just a decade ago. Although it remains to be seen whether the pendulum will swing away from the engagement with abolitionist theory that intensified in the wake of the May 2020 murder of…

In the summer of 2019, I first heard Bennett Capers describe an early draft of Against Prosecutors. We were at a national conference of criminal law professors, and Capers was presenting to a crowded room. The draft that would turn into Capers’s 2020 Cornell Law Review article posed a novel question: given prosecutors’ role in driving…

In Against Prosecutors, Professor Bennett Capers discusses domestic violence, among other crimes, to propose reforming our current system of public prosecution in favor of a model in which the victim could decide whether to pursue a criminal case and what punishment (if any) her assailant would receive. He invokes the spirit of private prosecution, including the imposition of peace bonds on wife-beaters in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, not to “idealize or romanticize the past,” but “to show that the public prosecutor, a ‘historical latecomer,’ is not inevitable…

In Against Prosecutors, Bennett Capers presents thought-provoking arguments for empowering victims in criminal cases. He proposes that victims should be given greater authority to initiate and direct prosecutions of criminal cases, and should have the options to veto prosecutions or to serve as private prosecutors themselves…

At this unprecedented moment for criminal justice in the United States, the spotlight is directed at the “overs”: over-policing, over-prosecution, over-criminalization, and over-incarceration. This focus has led many to support bold anti-carceral reforms designed to curtail criminal law and its enforcement. But activists and other civilians have also expressed concerns about equity and under-enforcement that are often lost in overly simplistic media coverage…

In February 2022, the Texas Governor and the Texas Attorney General declared that parents who provide gender-affirming care to their children should be investigated for child abuse. These declarations expressly authorize the surveillance of, intervention in, and possible destruction of LGBTQ families…

In spring 2020, many parents of children in California schools closed during the global pandemic had had enough. A group filed a lawsuit challenging the executive orders requiring compliance with state public health directives that in turn mandated the shuttering of schools…

Throughout the coronavirus pandemic, strong executives emerged in the President and the country’s many Governors. While the situation required extraordinary measures, expanding executive powers evidence a worrying trend of unchecked, unilateral power…

When the police violate a person’s Fourth Amendment right, the Exclusionary Rule bars evidence resulting from that violation from being used against the person in trial. The rule is designed to deter police from engaging in illegal searches and seizures…

Despite the ever-growing number of exonerations in the U.S.—and the corresponding surge in scholarly interest in wrongful convictions in recent years—research on the carceral experiences of wrongfully-convicted persons remains strikingly limited. In this essay, we draw on in-depth interviews with 15 exonerated men to explore the moral dimensions of the experience of wrongful imprisonment…

This essay reveals that the “diversity justification” for affirmative action has its roots in part in the South African anti-apartheid movement of the 1950s, and that when Justice Powell wrote the controlling opinion in the Bakke case, placing diversity at the center of our discourse on race in America, he was relying on arguments developed in the anti-apartheid movement that the right to admit a racially diverse student body was a key element of academic freedom…

In The Tragedy of the Commons, Garrett Hardin argues that those who can use a resource for free consume more of it than they would if they had to pay for it. Public resources eventually collapse because people overuse them…