Michigan State University College of Law Professor Matthew L.M. Fletcher examines the late Berkeley Law Professor Philip P. Frickey’s call for more grounded and empirical American Indian legal scholarship. Fletcher analyzes the state of American Indian legal…

In Masculinity As Prison: Sexual Identity, Race, and Incarceration, Professor Russell Robinson explores the creation of the KG6 unit of the Los Angeles County Jail. Robinson describes how this unit, designed to protect prisoners who may be targets because of non-normative gender and sexual orientation, operates as a site for the enforcement of racialized and classed norms about sexual…

California once led the country in sterilizations of mentally disabled people. In the first half of the twentieth century, this practice, inspired by the then-socially-acceptable “science” of eugenics, was considered progressive. Such sterilizations became common around the country and were authorized by state law in California and many other states…

On January 23, 2012, the Supreme Court held unanimously that the installation and use of a GPS tracker on a suspected drug dealer’s Jeep constituted a search under the Fourth Amendment. The outcome had been fairly well foreshadowed: At oral argument, the Justices had seemed perturbed by the thought that police could put trackers on cars—even the Justices’s own cars—seemingly at will…

We are sympathetic to the institutional innovations Leib and Elmendorf propose, and to the concept of democracy at the heart of their recommendations. They resist the opposition of “popular democracy” and “party democracy,” and their models of reform ingeniously blend the two. Popular democracy tries to make real the injunction that “the people should rule” by engaging “the people”…

Human trafficking is big business, with industry estimates running in the billions of dollars annually. Much of that profit accrues to traffickers, illegal profiteers, and organized crime groups. However, the private sector-including legitimate businesses and industries-also reaps economic benefits, directly and indirectly, from the trafficking and related exploitation of persons…

Like many who attend law school, I was an undergraduate history major. The humanities, my college pre-professional advisor assured me, were ideal preparation for the rigors of law school. I believed the hype. Three years later, on my first day of Contracts, my blind faith in…

Why do I include films, art and novels in the study of property law? The reason for this, as I argue in this Essay, is quite simple. I contend that deploying these materials in the classroom deepens my students’ understanding of property law. The study of property law…

I began teaching Contract Law in 1997, and because I wanted my students to benefit from an interdisciplinary approach to the subject, I chose a wonderful casebook edited by Amy Kastely, Deborah Waire Post, and Sharon Hom, called Contracting Law. Rather than…

I spend a full month on marriage in Family Law, and I use a fair range of what I’ll call “extrinsic evidence” from the humanities. Because there is so much one could use, I am fairly strict with myself about what I do use. It seems important that when we take the time to…

I am currently in my fifth year as a law professor at Drexel University, where I teach Civil Procedure, Jurisprudence, and a Literature & the Law seminar. While Jurisprudence and Literature & the Law are fields arising directly out of the humanities, Civil Procedure…

The Professional Responsibility course has the potential to have the greatest impact on our students’ futures in the profession. Paradoxically, however, it remains one of the most undervalued courses in most law school curricula. The complexity of teaching…

My assignment for this symposium is to discuss ways of integrating the humanities into the core law school courses on criminal law, criminal procedure, and evidence—what you might call the Dick Wolf courses. In one respect the topic is trivial and almost…

Tort law is frequently taught in terms of economic concepts: efficiency, capture, cost distribution, risk allocation, and so on. Alternatively, or in parallel, a philosophical perspective may wend its way into the first-year tort curriculum through discussions of…

When I teach the dying declarations hearsay exception in my Evidence course, I always show the opening scene from Mel Brooks’s darkly comedic film, The Twelve Chairs. A film clip is a particularly dense piece of storytelling, in that it presents story…

In an effort to curb sexual assault behind bars, the Los Angeles County Jail currently houses inmates deemed homosexual and transgender in a special unit called “K6G.” Professor Russell Robinson’s Article, “Masculinity as Prison: Race, Sexual Identity…

Russell Robinson has done it again. With “Masculinity as Prison: Sexual Identity, Race, and Incarceration,” he has given us another provocative Article, which illuminates a phenomenon in the world and, indirectly, in ourselves.The Article represents much of what…

A short time ago, a three-judge panel of the United States Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit issued its decision in Ass’n for Molecular Pathology v. USPTO (Myriad Genetics), one of the most important patent cases in recent history. The Myriad case addresses…

Almost no one in the legal academy has written more (or better) about guilty pleas and plea bargains than Stephanos Bibas. It is, therefore, fitting that he should author one of the first articles on Padilla v. Kentucky—a guilty-plea decision that may be the most…

In Fixing Failed States, John Yoo shows why intervening states that seek to massively transform the social, economic, and political framework of failed states aim to do too much and ultimately fail. Yoo proposes that the role of intervening states should be minimal…