Print Edition
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.
Like all U.S. jurisdictions, California’s criminal legal system is largely administered via plea bargains. Although courts characterize plea bargains as fair and necessary, these characterizations do not enjoy strong empirical support. This Note concludes that plea bargaining practices likely violate California’s unconstitutional conditions doctrine and urges state actors to implement reforms.
Past efforts by the Advisory Committee on Civil Rules to substantially reform Rule 23 have been met with such controversy that more recently, the Advisory Committee has elected to pursue more modest reforms. The new criteria have been widely understood as introducing modest changes and have even been argued by some to have done nothing more than codify existing circuit practice. However, two circuits have sharply diverged in their interpretation of what the new Rule 23(e)(2) requires, calling into question whether the changes are so self-evidently modest and dashing the goal of unifying circuit practice.
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.
As patients become more sophisticated in managing their own health, they often turn to tracking apps to record and manage their health. Menstruation apps often track menstrual cycles, sexual activity, mood changes, and more.
CLR Online
The web edition of the California Law Review.
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…
Symposia
Articles accompanying CLR’s conferences. Published in the print edition.
In the summer of 1854, the Massachusetts Anti-Slavery Society sent out word of a large gathering to be held at Harmony Grove in Framingham—sixteen miles from Boston—on the Fourth of July. For fifty cents, picnickers were offered “Special Trains” to and from the grounds.
In his essay Frederick Douglass and the Two Constitutions, Professor David Blight explores the constitutional thought of the nineteenth century’s great human rights advocate, statesman, and orator, Frederick Douglass. How should we understand, he asks, Douglass’s arrival at a natural rights interpretation of the 1787 Constitution?
Even in a century notable for oratory, Frederick Douglass’s capacities as an orator were astonishing. He was a master of words, whether spoken or written.
Thank you for inviting me to participate in this symposium. I want to thank David Blight, in particular, for this rich and provocative Essay. It was fascinating for me to learn that he has come over to the position of my friends James Oakes and Sean Wilentz, with whom I have argued about the concept of the antislavery American Constitution.
Born a slave on the eastern shore of Maryland and spending the first twenty years of his life in bondage, Frederick Douglass possessed no conventional education. He did not spend a single day of his life in schools of any kind. His “education” came from people around him, from books, from journalism, from wide reading, and finally, from his personal experience and relationships.
In his Jorde lecture, Professor Steven Levitsky offers an important account of the nation at a crossroads. Down one path is a thriving multiracial democracy; down the other lies democracy’s demise. To avoid the latter path, Levitsky presses the need for major institutional reform, including constitutional amendments to change the structure of the United States…
Podcast
For more than a century, the United States has restricted Tribal governments’ powers over criminal law. It has diminished Tribal jurisdiction and imposed adversarial approaches on Tribal courts. But recently, some Tribal courts have begun to embrace Indigenous-based restorative justice models. UCLA School of Law Assistant Professor Lauren van Schilfgaarde discusses how these these models strengthen both Tribal courts and Tribal jurisdiction more broadly.
Each year, Child Protective Services investigates over one million families. Every investigation includes a room-by-room search of the family home, as well as the threat of the state’s coercive authority to remove children from their families. CUNY School of Law Professor Tarek Z. Ismail discusses how these investigations have evaded traditional Fourth Amendment scrutiny.
Americans have long persevered in the face of the national welfare system's inadequacies. But when a new challenge like climate change emerges, how can the United States adapt its welfare programs to assist its people?
Consumer Law practitioners and scholars have long argued that credit scores perpetuate historical social discrimination along lines of race, class and gender. But what happens when abusers weaponize this financial tool and the structural inequities baked into it and coerce debt from their partners? And what does the new California statute created to rectify such coercion actually do?
As law schools in the United States develop anti racist curricula and expand their experiential learning programs, the debate continues as to whether and how the purpose of legal education converges with societal efforts to reckon with America's legacy of white supremacy.
The Twenty-Fourth Amendment to the United States Constitution has received little attention from federal courts since its ratification. The Amendment’s language is broad and far-ranging, prohibiting conditioning the right to vote on payment of poll taxes or “any other” tax.
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