For over a century, the Supreme Court has characterized the franchise as instrumental—a right that is preservative of all other rights. Statistics confirm that federal protection of the right to vote has produced higher levels of minority electoral participation and greater shares of minority politicians over the past half century. To voting rights advocates, indicators…

In Peña-Rodriguez v. Colorado, the Supreme Court recognized that racial bias influencing jury deliberations violates the Sixth Amendment’s impartial jury guarantee and is incompatible with the Fourteenth Amendment’s anti-discrimination principles. The Court therefore created a racial bias exception to the centuries-old no-impeachment rule, claiming the decision reflected “progress”…

A vast array of copyrighted works—books, video programming, software, podcasts, video games, and more—remain inaccessible to people with disabilities. International efforts to adopt limitations and exceptions to copyright law that permit third parties to create and distribute accessible versions of books for people with print disabilities have drawn some attention to the role that copyright…

Pronouns are en vogue. Not long ago, introductions were limited to exchanges of names. Today, however, they are increasingly enhanced with a recitation of the speaker’s appropriate gendered forms of address: he/him/his, she/her/hers, they/them/theirs, or neopronouns like zie/zir/zirs, xe/xem/xirs, or sie/hir/hirs. This development—like every other dimension of progress for LGBTQ+…

The “countermajoritarian difficulty” was a central preoccupation for twentieth-century constitutional law scholars.1 Alexander Bickel, who coined the phrase in The Least Dangerous Branch, located that difficulty institutionally in the courts. Judicial review, he wrote, involved the “reality that when the Supreme Court declares unconstitutional a legislative act or the action of an…

In her Jorde Lecture, Pam Karlan paints a grim picture of American democracy under siege. Together, the malapportioned Senate, the obsolete Electoral College, rampant voter suppression and gerrymandering, and a Supreme Court happy to greenlight these practices threaten the very notion of majority rule. I share Karlan’s bleak assessment. I’m also skeptical that conventional tools…

Writing about the countermajoritarian difficulty is a rite of passage for constitutional law scholars. Indeed, the sheer number of articles that have discussed the countermajoritarian difficulty have corroborated that this phenomenon was, and continues to be, a “central preoccupation” and a “central obsession” of constitutional law scholarship. Coined by Professor Alexander…

This Note discusses the growing use of trade secrecy to withhold critical environmental information from the public. Over the last decade, trade secrecy has moved to the forefront of intellectual property law as an effective method for protecting valuable business information. Trade secrecy grants individuals and businesses the sole right to information they have obtained…

Author’s Note: my interest in this topic is intensely personal. After college and before law school, I taught fourth grade at a public elementary school in Oakland, California. Over three-quarters of my students spoke a language other than English at home. Though the plurality spoke Spanish at home, my students collectively spoke over a dozen…