As of December 2020, almost 1.9 million California tenants were behind on their rent, owing upwards of $1.67 billion to their landlords. Eviction cases in the state are projected to double over the next year. The individuals and families who are most at risk of mass displacement and crushing debt come from low-income, Black and…

Block grants can provide states with flexibility over SNAP requirements. However, keeping SNAP as an entitlement program will better provide benefits to individuals in need. Instead of reviving politically contentious debates each time Congress discusses SNAP block grants’ budget, Congress should maintain SNAP’s current entitlement program to better to prioritize anti-hunger goals…

HHS under the Trump administration finalized a new rule in June 2020 that officially stripped sexual orientation and gender identity from Section 1557’s safeguards. Whether the position taken by the Trump administration can stand is now the subject of several legal challenges, particularly in light of the recent Supreme Court decision Bostock v. Clayton Co., which held that sexual orientation…

The impact of slipping into poverty is all-encompassing; I mean that in the way that poverty will impact every step and crevice of your financial health, physical health, and mental health for the rest of your life. So why aren’t there more legal protections for poor Americans? As it stands, socioeconomic status is not a protected class under anti-discrimination laws. But it should be—and here’s why…

Individuals incarcerated in states that have enacted death penalty moratoria do not have their death sentences carried out in a timely and expeditious manner; instead, these incarcerated individuals sit on death row until they are either exonerated or die of natural causes. Individuals on death row in these states sit on death row for over two decades on average. This Article argues that capital…

My husband came running from his den, shouting something unintelligible. I stopped my work and looked up as he ran in. He said, “RBG died.” All I could do was stare at him. As one of Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s many law clerks, and one of four who clerked for her in the 2001 Term, I felt a tremendous loss: historical, political, and personal. The past year has been the abyss of hell. From wildfires…

Anti-mask laws ban the wearing of masks in public. Popularly understood to prevent Klan activity, these laws are often vague, with a history of selective enforcement. They also clash with the exhortations to wear personal protective equipment to prevent the spread of COVID-19, which by summer of 2020 was encouraged by all states and required by many…

This Essay will connect the persistent strategies, logics, and identities created by settler colonialism to the disparate health impacts of COVID-19 in Indigenous, Black, and immigrant of color communities in the United States. By offering a framework that uncovers the root causes of ongoing patterns of systemic oppression, this Essay hopes to inspire reform efforts that seek to…

For conservatives, what I have described is an occasion for great celebration. They have succeeded in their goal of a very conservative Court. For liberals, like me, the challenge is enormous. No longer can we imagine the Court as a possibility for progressive change. We must look to state courts and the political process for that, while fearing how the Court will strike down progressive federal, state, and local laws…

But, in 2020, lawyers cannot afford to buy the myth that trauma is an aberration in the profession of otherwise Teflon-coated lawyering machines. Negotiating trauma is perhaps as old as the profession, even though we may have never given that emotional labor nomenclature or visibility, to our detriment…

Courts around the country have adapted to the reality of socially distanced litigation, allowing virtual hearings and even trials to take place over the Internet. This infrastructure will outlast COVID-19 and will minimize the burden of traveling for litigation. In the face of these changes, the JPML should accordingly limit the importance of geographic centrality when choosing a forum for multidistrict litigation…

But in other cases, textualists proceed as if legal texts have an ordinary meaning even when they do not. Judges see a rabbit, or a duck, when other reasonable readers see a duck, or a rabbit. Such judges are “seeing as.” Nonetheless, they insist that they are “seeing that.” They do not think, do not know, and might not even believe, that “someone else could have said of [them]: ‘He is seeing the figure as a…

If the late Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s successor is confirmed before the 2020 presidential election or in the post-election lame-duck period, and if Democrats come to have unified control of government on January 20, 2021, how can they respond legislatively to the Court’s new 6-3 conservative ideological balance? This Essay frames a hypothetical 117th Congress’s options, discusses its…

Steven Universe, a children’s cartoon that follows the lives and adventures of the half-human, half-alien boy Steven Universe and his family of intergalactic space aliens, “the Crystal Gems,” upends these narratives, instead modeling restorative justice principles—empathetic, dialogue-based communication, non-punitive conflict resolution, and communal healing—for children…

Popular selection of judges offers a partial answer to the charge that the judiciary has usurped the role of the People in constitutional governance. Particularly in today’s intensely polarized environment, whether judges are selected through a process that actually reflects popular preferences is thus of critical importance to the democratic legitimacy of the constitutional order…

Proposition 16 would undo Proposition 209. Its passage would not create racial quota systems, which the Supreme Court, in University of California v. Bakke, deemed unconstitutional, but would make it possible for state offices to consider applicants’ identities when making decisions about where resources are allocated and access is granted…

Social justice movements must abandon their longstanding reliance on the Supreme Court to stave off the worst threats to the rights of members of marginalized and vulnerable groups. The fight for rights in the United States may well start to more closely resemble, for perhaps the first time since the civil rights movement, that in many places abroad…

To achieve adequate representation, House elections should strive to achieve as few distortions of the popular will as possible, while maintaining identifiable, local representation. Most U.S. elections are first-past-the-post, also known as single-member district plurality systems (SMDP). SMDP produces identifiable local representatives but fails to accurately reflect voter sentiment. Instead, House elections should implement a single-transferable vote system (STV) within multimember districts…

No state agents have been impressed into service. But the anti-commandeering doctrine is based on a theory of political accountability, which is undermined by these unmarked federal agents. Thus, while there is no formal commandeering happening, the federal government’s use of unmarked agents creates exactly the kind of confusion in the lines of political accountability that the anti-commandeering doctrine is designed to prevent…

The controversies over social media center on some fundamental ideas—namely, free speech and its societal value. Historians debate why the Framers chose to add the protection of free speech to the First Amendment. But depending on one’s legal philosophy, the Framers’ intentions should not be the only issue on this matter. Like with most normative questions, the value of free speech splits into two camps of thought: the utilitarian and the deontology…