This Article makes one simple, novel claim: crime is labor when it generates income, allows individuals to pursue self-sufficiency, or allows them to fulfill societal expectations of providing for or caring for dependents. When individuals engage in survival crimes, instead of seeing them as criminals, we should see them as workers engaged in survival labor.

Jurists and scholars have long debated (and often decried) the practice of forum shopping. Such debates have overlooked the effects of forum shopping on an important constituency: litigants who have little choice over forum. When forum shopping causes a sudden influx of cases—when, that is, it crowds a forum—what happens to other cases that have nowhere else to go?

Redistricting litigation has entered a new era. In 2020, for the first time, state legislatures completed post-census redistricting without preclearance under Section 5 of the Voting Rights Act (VRA). After Shelby County v. Holder, plaintiffs challenging unlawful maps must rely upon private litigation alone. Meanwhile, the Supreme Court has resuscitated the Purcell Principle, an equitable election law doctrine that prohibits federal courts from changing election rules on the eve of a political contest.

Many equal protection challenges to the recent onslaught of anti-transgender legislation ask courts to determine the constitutional limits of the state’s ability to define sex. The canonical cases addressed the state’s ability to treat men differently from women—not the state’s ability to define “men” and “women.” This difference between the canonical cases and what this Article calls “sex-defining” cases does not necessitate any monumental shifts in equal protection doctrine, but it does require courts to tweak their intermediate scrutiny analyses.

Courts should recognize a presumption of exclusive Tribal regulatory authority over all on-reservation water resources. This approach safeguards Tribal health and welfare while providing sorely needed predictability to Tribal-state regulatory disputes over water. States can be confident that their interests will be adequately accounted for because Tribes have a proven track record of equitably regulating water resources, and there are plentiful opportunities for state-Tribal cooperation.

This Article explores the role of lawyers in democratic backsliding—the degradation of democratic institutions and practices using law rather than violence. The Article’s central aim is to set an agenda and outline an approach to studying the professional paradox at the center of backsliding: why and how lawyers attack the rule of law. It thus seeks to shift the scholarly lens from the conventional view of lawyers as defenders of democracy to investigate lawyers as authors of autocracy.

This Note proposes a novel way of applying the Anderson-Burdick balancing test, using the court response to tort claims based on phobia of and misinformation surrounding HIV/AIDS in the 1980s and ‘90s. When considering state regulatory interests, courts should not ask if the state interest is reasonable, but if the state interest should be reasonable.