In 2023, the Supreme Court decided Mallory v. Norfolk, Southern Railway Company, which held that consent remains a method of establishing personal jurisdiction independent of the minimum contacts test, first introduced by International Shoe Company. Washington. On the surface, this decision resolved ambiguities in personal jurisdiction doctrine. But, to explain to us how Mallory failed to consider the many complexities underlying consent to personal jurisdiction, Scott Dodson, a Distinguished Professor of Law at UC San Francisco, joins us to discuss his article, The Complexities of Consent to Personal Jurisdiction.

The amorphous administrative state is often oversimplified and misunderstood. Now, with the Trump Administration pushing for mass deportation and the DOGE dissecting and even disemboweling federal agencies, it is increasingly important to understand the different types of agencies, how they are run, and how agencies like the CBP, ICE, and the Bureau of Prisons create “at a massive scale the ‘field of pain and death’ that the law occupies.” From detaining federal criminal prisoners and immigrants to engaging in armed conflicts and carrying out domestic arrests, these agencies are governed by statutes, regulations, and internal guidelines that nonetheless fail to stop violence and the misuse of force.

People usually think that all tax agencies do is ensure tax laws are followed. But for decades, the IRS has regularly facilitated immigration raids. These raids target employees even as the IRS investigates their employers’ potential tax violations. What can this state of affairs teach us about agency overreach? And what alternate paths could better align the IRS’s efforts with its mission? In this episode, UC Davis School of Law Professor Shayak Sarkar discusses the IRS's underappreciated role in immigration enforcement.

Traffic courts resolve over half of the cases in the U.S. legal system. These cases are easy for some defendants to handle by paying a fine, but they can have devastating effects for those with fewer means. And despite the key role these courts play in funding state judicial branches and other state and local programs, they have not been comprehensively studied in decades. What’s going on in traffic courts? And what can they teach us about the legal system more broadly? In this episode, Arizona State University Sandra Day O’Connor College of Law Professor Justin Weinstein-Tull explains his research on traffic courts.

Immigration adjudications regularly use information from the criminal legal system to justify a discretionary denial of relief or benefits, even when charges have been dismissed. This practice faces little scrutiny due to the assumption that adjudicators are merely importing facts already found by the criminal system. But what if this practice actually constitutes “hidden factfinding”? Sarah Vendzules, a Senior Staff Attorney at the Office of the Appellate Defender in New York City, uncovers this hidden factfinding and offers a framework that could rein it in.

The U.S. carceral system disproportionately harms racial minorities and people living in poverty. Penal abolitionist frameworks have helpfully reframed the conversation to foreground those harmful social consequences. But how do those consequences affect our understanding of work, and particularly work that is both criminalized and undertaken in order to survive? In this episode, Indiana University Maurer School of Law Professor Yvette Butler explains her concept of survival labor and why it should be included in our general understanding of work.

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?