Batson v. Kentucky prohibits race-based discrimination in the exercise of peremptory challenges during jury selection in criminal and civil jury trials. In People v. Bridgeforth, New York’s highest court recently expanded this well-established protection to include discrimination based on skin color. Courts throughout the nation should adopt…

In this Note, Brittany S. Burns recommends that Congress enact a statute, which she calls the Pharmaceutical Access Act (“PAA”). The PAA, inspired by the Atomic Energy Act of 1954, would create a new executive agency with the power to grant compulsory licenses to pharmaceutical patents. She argues that this intervention would remedy high drug…

At Yale Law School, I had the great fortune of studying with Owen Fiss, who provided a riveting introduction to constitutional law. He encouraged me to go into teaching at a time when there were scarcely any women on the faculty at Yale. His work on antisubordination—the group-disadvantaging principle—orients much of my work on inequality…

In The Accumulation of Advantages, the picture that Professor Owen Fiss paints about equality during and since the Second Reconstruction is largely a picture in black and white. That makes some sense. The black/white experience is probably the most important throughline in the story of equal protection…

It is a special honor to be here with Owen Fiss, my first-year small group professor at Yale Law School. Among the many giants of the legal academy at Yale, it is fair to say that none more powerfully motivated me to probe the law’s relationship to justice…

The continued subjugation of a historically disadvantaged group is the product of policies that cut across all walks of life. Members of such a group are personally shunned, their educational opportunities are impaired, the jobs open to them are limited, and they are confined…

Before beginning law school in 2001, I knew the names of an embarrassingly small number of judicial decisions. The only case names that I readily possessed were Brown v. Board of Education, Roe v. Wade, Bush v. Gore, and a smattering of other opinions that had managed to escape the narrow confines of the legal community. I did, however, know the name of at least one relatively obscure opinion…

The United States Supreme Court has failed to grapple with the unique interpretive difficulties presented by social media threats cases. Social media make hateful and threatening speech more common but also magnify the potential for a speaker’s innocent words to be misunderstood. People speak differently on different social media platforms, and architectural features of platforms…

Over the last twenty years, state legislatures have passed a number of laws designed to support and encourage breastfeeding, including laws that protect public breastfeeding and lactating employees in the workplace. Both sides of the political aisle cheered the passage of these laws, and more recent federal laws, as an unqualified positive for women, families…

For decades, scholars have argued that the proper judicial response when democratically enacted laws burden politically powerless minority groups is more aggressive judicial review. This political process approach, however, has fallen on deaf ears at the Supreme Court since the 1970s. Justice Scalia was thus accurate (if not politic) when…