In Against Prosecutors, Bennett Capers presents thought-provoking arguments for empowering victims in criminal cases. He proposes that victims should be given greater authority to initiate and direct prosecutions of criminal cases, and should have the options to veto prosecutions or to serve as private prosecutors themselves…

At this unprecedented moment for criminal justice in the United States, the spotlight is directed at the “overs”: over-policing, over-prosecution, over-criminalization, and over-incarceration. This focus has led many to support bold anti-carceral reforms designed to curtail criminal law and its enforcement. But activists and other civilians have also expressed concerns about equity and under-enforcement that are often lost in overly simplistic media coverage…

In February 2022, the Texas Governor and the Texas Attorney General declared that parents who provide gender-affirming care to their children should be investigated for child abuse. These declarations expressly authorize the surveillance of, intervention in, and possible destruction of LGBTQ families…

In spring 2020, many parents of children in California schools closed during the global pandemic had had enough. A group filed a lawsuit challenging the executive orders requiring compliance with state public health directives that in turn mandated the shuttering of schools…

Throughout the coronavirus pandemic, strong executives emerged in the President and the country’s many Governors. While the situation required extraordinary measures, expanding executive powers evidence a worrying trend of unchecked, unilateral power…

When the police violate a person’s Fourth Amendment right, the Exclusionary Rule bars evidence resulting from that violation from being used against the person in trial. The rule is designed to deter police from engaging in illegal searches and seizures…

Despite the ever-growing number of exonerations in the U.S.—and the corresponding surge in scholarly interest in wrongful convictions in recent years—research on the carceral experiences of wrongfully-convicted persons remains strikingly limited. In this essay, we draw on in-depth interviews with 15 exonerated men to explore the moral dimensions of the experience of wrongful imprisonment…

This essay reveals that the “diversity justification” for affirmative action has its roots in part in the South African anti-apartheid movement of the 1950s, and that when Justice Powell wrote the controlling opinion in the Bakke case, placing diversity at the center of our discourse on race in America, he was relying on arguments developed in the anti-apartheid movement that the right to admit a racially diverse student body was a key element of academic freedom…

In The Tragedy of the Commons, Garrett Hardin argues that those who can use a resource for free consume more of it than they would if they had to pay for it. Public resources eventually collapse because people overuse them…

Article 1, Section 2 of the United Nations Charter enshrined the “self-determination of peoples”—the ability to choose one’s destiny—as a fundamental right of every country. In 1970, the UN General Assembly passed the Friendly Nations Declaration, which further defined this principle by making illegal any actions that would “dismember or impair, totally or in part, the territorial integrity or political unity of sovereign and independent states.” This declaration…

Roe v. Wade and Miranda v. Arizona are among the most notable decisions handed down by the Supreme Court. Issued less than a decade apart, these two opinions are widely recognized as being foundational to our legal system…

The Supreme Court’s decision in Arthrex is the latest in a growing set of decisions regarding administrative patent law. A close look at this entire series suggests that Arthrex is a culmination of a subtle shift in the Court’s approach to such cases…

The #MeToo Movement cast a spotlight on sexual harassment in various sectors, including higher education. Studies reveal alarming percentages of students reporting that they have been sexually harassed by faculty and administrators. Despite annually devoting hundreds of millions of dollars to addressing sexual harassment and misconduct, nationwide university officials largely take an ostrich approach when…

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…

Black Law Students experienced a different COVID-19 pandemic than their majority counterparts due in part to the emotional and physical toll caused by the violent, public mistreatment of Black persons at the hands of law enforcement. While some law faculty at some institutions were proactive in identifying the struggles that their Black students were facing…

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…

In 2018, the California legislature passed the Safe Sidewalk Vending Act (SSVA), which decriminalized street vending, an immigrant-dominated industry that operates within urban spaces in California and across the United States. Shortly thereafter, Los Angeles County supervisors created a regulatory system that would create formal opportunities for street vendors to sell food products through an…

Public interest law has played a critical role in American social movements and change. Abolitionist societies and lawyers litigated fugitive slave cases that led to the Civil War and the formal end of slavery. Lawyers figured prominently in organized efforts toward political reform thereafter. These include, but are not limited to, the Progressive movement of the late nineteenth and early twentieth…

When foreign labor recruiters, acting on foreign soil as agents of domestic growers, intentionally prefer young, non-disabled men as temporary agricultural workers in the United States, federal antidiscrimination law traditionally has offered no recourse because of the presumption against extraterritorial application of domestic statutes. Accordingly, prospective migrant workers face discrimination abroad by American employers’ agents…

No one likes being told what to do. It’s the reason that philanthropists prefer to contribute to the charitable causes of their choosing, rather than paying more in taxes. It’s the reason that courts have equated enforcing a contract with imposing involuntary servitude. It’s the reason for viewing government as a “necessary evil,” rather than a fortuitous collective agreement…