Once, over lunch, I recall a law professor reflecting on scholarly work’s ephemeral nature. Legal academics, he thought, should consider themselves lucky if their articles sparked a discussion that lasted for even a few years. By that standard, Professor Stephen Sugarman’s seminal work on school finance reform, done in collaboration with John Coons and William Clune, must count as a…

I first met Steve Sugarman at an annual meeting of the Association for Public Policy Analysis and Management (APPAM), probably in the early 1990s. As a teacher of torts, among other things, I had of course read some of his often seminal, always bracing torts scholarship—especially his iconoclastic, pathbreaking book Doing Away with Personal Injury Law (1989)…

Professor Steve Sugarman has been a man for all seasons in the world of tort law. His published work runs across the spectrum of responsibility for injurer-based harm—embracing intentional misconduct, fault-based recovery, strict liability, no-fault compensation schemes, and social insurance. Much of Sugarman’s scholarship on tort and alternative compensation systems, up to…

Steve Sugarman joined the Berkeley faculty nearly fifty years ago. Since then, he has made unparalleled contributions to the law school and to legal scholarship. This Festschrift provides the opportunity to honor someone whose career has contributed enormously to the University of California’s missions of teaching, scholarship, and service…

Scholars have long debated whether surrogacy furthers or inhibits equality and reproductive liberty. What has gone almost entirely unremarked upon, however, is whether and to what extent the ways U.S. jurisdictions regulate surrogacy further these principles. This oversight is produced and re-produced by existing scholarship that focuses on the threshold question of whether to ban…

Medicines and vaccines are complex products, and it is often extraordinarily difficult to know whether they help or hurt. The Food and Drug Administration (FDA) holds an enormous reservoir of data that sheds light on that precise question, yet currently releases only a trickle to researchers, doctors, and patients. Recent examples show that data secrecy…

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…

The Immigration and Nationality Act (INA) deems an individual inadmissible to the United States for having engaged in terrorist activity. Both “engaged in terrorist activity” and “terrorist activity” are terms of art that are broadly defined under the INA to include activity that courts, scholars, and advocates agree stretches the definition of terrorism. An individual…

The right to vote and the right to representation are often, to each of their detriment, conflated. But to combat voter disenfranchisement most effectively and honestly, we must conceive of these as two separate rights with a distinct relationship. Part I defines representative government. It then highlights the differences between the right to vote and…

Pro bono at big law firms is often viewed as an altruistic way for attorneys to give back to society. But when big law firms partner with public interest law organizations (PILOs) to do pro bono work, conflicting interests among the parties involved may interfere with the aims of pro bono work. In this Note…