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?

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.

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.

In recent decades, the U.S. labor market has shifted to more contingent work or work disguised as entrepreneurship. These attenuated relations between worker and firm reflect the “fissuring” of work. Some firms now go beyond fissuring work: they treat the workers themselves as consumers by offering them services and credit products. And when firms expand employment contracts to extend services and credit products to workers, workers are entitled to consumer law protections.

For more than a century, the United States has sought to restrict Tribal governments’ powers over criminal law. Tribes are increasingly embracing Indigenous-based restorative justice models, which have regenerated Tribal jurisdiction and enhanced the well-being of Tribal members.

In his 1989 essay The Embarrassing Second Amendment, Sanford Levinson suggested that left-leaning scholars avoid studying the Second Amendment because they are embarrassed that its text might mean what gun-rights proponents claim it means—an individual right to bear arms. Levinson urged such scholars to better engage the text, both to model intellectual integrity and to avoid unnecessarily ceding the terms of a critical constitutional debate. This Article makes a similar argument with respect to the right to counsel granted by the Sixth Amendment.

In June of 2022, the Supreme Court reversed two hundred years of precedent in Oklahoma v. Castro-Huerta, holding in a 5-4 opinion that states have concurrent criminal jurisdiction over crimes committed by non-Indians against Indians in Indian country.

It is virtually a tenet of modern federal jurisdiction that judges, at least when they are acting as judges, are inappropriate defendants in civil suits. Yet on rare but salient occasions, state judges might be the sole or primary party responsible for violating the constitutional rights of citizens, for instance by imposing excessive bail or by opening their courtrooms to oppressive private suits like those under Texas’s Senate Bill 8 bounty regime.

In the past ten years, lower federal courts have quietly but regularly abstained from hearing federal claims challenging state court procedures, citing concerns of comity and federalism. Federal courts have dismissed a broad range of substantive challenges tasked to them by Congress, including those under the Americans with Disabilities Act and the Indian Child Welfare Act.

Almost all national constitutions contain one or more ways to disqualify specific individuals from political office. Indeed, the U.S. Constitution incorporates at least four overlapping pathways toward disqualification. This power of disqualifying specific individuals or groups stands at the heart of the complex project of maintaining democratic rule.

Each year, Child Protective Services (CPS) investigates over one million families. Every CPS investigation includes a thorough, room-by-room search of the family home, designed to uncover evidence of maltreatment. Most seek evidence of poverty-related allegations of neglect; few ever substantiate the allegations.

Property technologies (PropTech) are innovations that automate real estate transactions. Automating rental markets amplifies racial discrimination and segregation in housing. Because screening tools rely on data drawn from discriminatory—and often overtly segregationist—historical practices, they replicate those practices’ unequal outcomes in the form of algorithmic redlining.

Both formal policies and informal norms encourage a consumerist vision of American belonging, with credit/debt as a primary means of consumption. Consequently, debt-based consumption implicates dignity in the American market society.

This Article argues that “punishment exemption”—the assumption that criminal punishment is exempt from traditional constitutional scrutiny—has no legal basis. Drawing on original empirical research, this Article first exposes a maze of modern non-carceral punishments that infringe on constitutional rights, justified by nothing more than the assertion that they are punishment and therefore permissible.

The COVID-19 pandemic has spotlighted the crisis low-wage immigrant and migrant (im/migrant) workers face when caught in the century-long collision between immigration enforcement and workers’ rights. Im/migrant workers toil in key industries, from health care to food production, that many now associate with laudable buzzwords such as “frontline” and “essential.” But these industries conceal jobs that pay little, endanger workers’ health and safety, and have high rates of legal violations by employers. Im/migrant…

Although the Bankruptcy Code is facially neutral, the consumer bankruptcy discharge provisions produce anomalies that run counter to bankruptcy’s internal principles of not forgiving debt that is based on misconduct or that implicates a public policy concern. For example, the discharge provisions allow some individuals to discharge debt that stems from civil rights violations or tortious discrimination. In contrast, the Bankruptcy Code precludes some debtors from debt relief based on narrow views of misconduct or misconceptions about moral hazards.

In the United States, law condemns poor people to their fates in states. Where Americans live continues to dictate whether they can access cash, food, and medical assistance. What’s more, immigrants, territorial residents, and tribal members encounter deteriorated corners of the American welfare state. Nonetheless, despite repeated retrenchment efforts, this patchwork of programs has proven remarkably resilient. Yet, the ability of the United States to meet its people’s most basic needs now faces an unprecedented…

Congress enacted the Bankruptcy Abuse Prevention and Consumer Protection Act of 2005 (BAPCPA) with the express purpose of limiting the number of consumer debtors eligible to file a Chapter 7 case, which typically lasts only a few months and eliminates the debtor’s unsecured debts. Under BAPCPA, bankruptcy courts…

There is widespread recognition that algorithms in criminal law’s administration can impose negative racial and social effects. Scholars tend to offer two ways to address this concern through law—tinkering around the tools or abolishing the tools through law and policy. This Article contends that these paradigmatic interventions, though they may center racial disparities, legitimate the way race functions to structure society through the intersection of technology and law.