You live in Mississippi, work an hourly, minimum wage job, have no savings, and have young children. You are also seven weeks pregnant and want to have an abortion. Technically, you can go to an abortion clinic. But even though you have Medicaid, it won’t cover any of the procedure’s costs because Mississippi generally follows […]
Racial Justice for Street Vendors
This piece is part of the Reckoning and Reformation symposium, which brings together scholars writing broadly about the law, justice, race, and inequality. The California Law Review published two other pieces as part of this joint effort with other law reviews: The Racial Reckoning of Public Interest Law #BlackLivesMatter—Getting from Contemporary Social Movements to Structural Change […]
Redefining the Legality of Undocumented Work
Undocumented workers face a new harsh reality under the Trump administration. Federal law’s prohibition of undocumented work has facilitated exploitation because workers fear being brought to the attention of immigration authorities. The current administration’s aggressive stance towards worksite enforcement will only exacerbate abuses against undocumented workers, such as wage theft, dangerous working conditions, or human […]
Visible Policing: Technology, Transparency, and Democratic Control
Law enforcement has an opacity problem. Police use sophisticated technologies to monitor individuals, surveil communities, and predict behaviors in increasingly intrusive ways. But legal institutions have struggled to understand—let alone set limits on—new investigative methods and techniques for two major reasons. First, new surveillance technology tends to operate in opaque and unaccountable ways, augmenting police […]
Capital Controls as Migrant Controls
The disparate treatment of capital and labor reflects one of globalization’s central asymmetries: the law often allows financial capital, but not people, to move freely across borders. Yet scholars have largely neglected the intersection of these two regimes, the legal restrictions on migrants’ capital, particularly when the migrants themselves are deemed illegal. These restrictions on […]
A Pathway to Health Care Citizenship for DACA Beneficiaries
Since 2012, beneficiaries of Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) have enjoyed a certain normalization, however tenuous, of their status in the United States: they can legally work, their removal proceedings are deferred, and they cease to accrue unlawful presence. Regarding subsidized health coverage, however, DACA beneficiaries remain on the outside looking in. Although other […]
Hiding Homelessness: The Transcarceration of Homelessness
Cities throughout the country respond to homelessness with laws that persecute people for surviving in public spaces, even when unsheltered people lack a reasonable alternative. This widespread practice—the criminalization of homelessness—processes vulnerable people through the criminal justice system with damaging results. But recently, from the epicenter of the homelessness crisis along the West Coast, the […]
Looking to Hybrid Species for the Future of Coral Reefs
Although corals can hybridize and adapt to the threat of climate change, the existing legal framework in the United States is insufficient to ensure their protection. This regulatory gap leaves hybrid corals exposed to local and regional stressors. But legal protections, like the corals themselves, can adapt and evolve. If we value coral reefs, we should modify the legal framework that protects corals and related marine ecosystems to encompass naturally occurring resiliency tools such as hybrid corals. […]
Public Charge: The Beginning of the End for Nationwide Injunctions?
Immigrants would disenroll from Medicaid and federal housing assistance programs for fear that use of public benefits would weigh against them should they apply for a change in immigration status. This, in turn, would result in greater use of city and county health services and greater housing insecurity risking homelessness. Given these deleterious consequences, if the public charge rule—as multiple federal courts have found —appears to violate the Constitution, APA, and federal immigration laws, why shouldn’t it be enjoined uniformly nationwide? In this essay, I argue that it should, because nationwide injunctions are both a permissible exercise of judicial discretion and a desirable check on executive agencies. […]
The Law of Rescue
Diverse areas of law regulate acts of rescue, often inconsistently. For example, maritime law mandates rescue, immigrant harboring law prohibits it, and tort law generally permits it but does not require it. Modern legal scholarship has focused principally on mandatory and permissive forms of rescue. With humanitarian actors facing prosecution for saving migrants’ lives in […]