Articles, notes, and symposia pieces published in CLR’s print volumes.

Print Edition

Volume 113, June 2025, Jennifer M. Chacón, Symposium California Law Review Volume 113, June 2025, Jennifer M. Chacón, Symposium California Law Review

Loving’s Borders

Department of State v. Muñoz was a critically important successor to Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization. In Muñoz, the Court continued efforts to shrink the protective force of the Due Process Clause. Even more significantly, the Court launched another attack on the equality principle undergirding cases including Loving v. Virginia. Through its rejection of substantive due process protections, the Court is intentionally weakening a broad swath of antidiscrimination protections and procedural due process rights.

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Volume 113, June 2025, Russell K. Robinson, Symposium California Law Review Volume 113, June 2025, Russell K. Robinson, Symposium California Law Review

The Incoherence of the “Colorblind Constitution”

The Students for Fair Admissions, Inc. v. President & Fellows of Harvard College majority opinion has been widely misunderstood as a victory for those who believe in the “colorblind Constitution.” By juxtaposing the opinion’s main rule with the exception for admitting students based on essays that discuss students’ lived experiences with race, Robinson reveals the opinion’s fundamental incoherence, as well as its furtive race-consciousness. This examination reveals the chasm between colorblind rhetoric and the inescapability of racially-forged realities.

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Volume 113, June 2025, Jerry Kang, Symposium California Law Review Volume 113, June 2025, Jerry Kang, Symposium California Law Review

Asians Used, Asians Lose: Strict Scrutiny from Internment to SFFA

This Essay connects Students for Fair Admissions to two earlier moments in equal protection history. The first is Japanese American internment during World War II and the Supreme Court’s creation of the strict scrutiny doctrine. The second is the affirmative action wars that occurred in the 1980s and 1990s, which resulted in the current doctrine requiring strict scrutiny even for “benign” affirmative action. In all three moments—internment, affirmative action wars, and SFFA—Asian Americans were curiously exploited.

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SFFA: Bakke’s Chickens Coming Home to Roost

Implicit in inquiries about Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard’s relationship to precedent is an assumption about the affirmative action cases that preceded SFFA—namely, that Regents of the University of California v. Bakke and its progeny represented a victory for proponents of affirmative action. This Essay complicates that view. Our central claim is that Bakke contained many losses for proponents of affirmative action and that the specific nature of those losses set the stage for precisely the outcome SFFA instantiates.

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Volume 113, June 2025, Vinay Harpalani, Symposium California Law Review Volume 113, June 2025, Vinay Harpalani, Symposium California Law Review

Missing the Trees for the Forest: How Progressives Neglect Anti-Asian Animus in Magnet School Admissions Controversies

Since the Supreme Court struck down race-conscious university admissions in 2023, magnet school admissions have become the next constitutional battleground for diversity in education. Harpalani illustrates how Asian Americans’ positioning intersected with litigation strategy and constitutional issues in Coalition for TJ v. Fairfax County School Board—an important recent ruling that deals with race-neutral public magnet school admissions policies. Harpalani aims to convince progressives to take anti-Asian animus more seriously, even as they support the admissions reforms that Asian American plaintiffs in several cases have challenged.

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Volume 113, June 2025, Kathryn Abrams, Symposium California Law Review Volume 113, June 2025, Kathryn Abrams, Symposium California Law Review

Lawyers on the Post-Dobbs Landscape: The Case of the Ballot Initiative

The Court’s unprecedented decision in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization relegated abortion regulation to a highly heterogeneous state institutional landscape. For lawyers, this institutional heterogeneity poses new questions of orientation, skill-building, and collaboration. In this Essay, Abrams examines the challenges facing lawyers in this new institutional landscape by focusing on one promising strategy for protecting abortion rights in conservative states: the initiative petition to amend a state’s constitution.

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Symposium, Volume 111, December 2023, Martha S. Jones California Law Review Symposium, Volume 111, December 2023, Martha S. Jones California Law Review

Response to Professor Blight’s Frederick Douglass and the Two Constitutions: Proslavery and Antislavery

In his essay Frederick Douglass and the Two Constitutions, Professor David Blight explores the constitutional thought of the nineteenth century’s great human rights advocate, statesman, and orator, Frederick Douglass. How should we understand, he asks, Douglass’s arrival at a natural rights interpretation of the 1787 Constitution?

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Symposium, Volume 111, December 2023, Annette Gordon-Reed California Law Review Symposium, Volume 111, December 2023, Annette Gordon-Reed California Law Review

Comment on Frederick Douglass and the Two Constitutions: Proslavery and Antislavery

Thank you for inviting me to participate in this symposium. I want to thank David Blight, in particular, for this rich and provocative Essay. It was fascinating for me to learn that he has come over to the position of my friends James Oakes and Sean Wilentz, with whom I have argued about the concept of the antislavery American Constitution.

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Symposium, Volume 111, December 2023, David Blight California Law Review Symposium, Volume 111, December 2023, David Blight California Law Review

Frederick Douglass and the Two Constitutions: Proslavery and Antislavery

Born a slave on the eastern shore of Maryland and spending the first twenty years of his life in bondage, Frederick Douglass possessed no conventional education. He did not spend a single day of his life in schools of any kind. His “education” came from people around him, from books, from journalism, from wide reading, and finally, from his personal experience and relationships.

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Symposium, Volume 110, December 2022, Miriam Seifter California Law Review Symposium, Volume 110, December 2022, Miriam Seifter California Law Review

Saving Democracy, State by State?

In his Jorde lecture, Professor Steven Levitsky offers an important account of the nation at a crossroads. Down one path is a thriving multiracial democracy; down the other lies democracy’s demise. To avoid the latter path, Levitsky presses the need for major institutional reform, including constitutional amendments to change the structure of the United States…

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Symposium, Volume 110, December 2022, Richard H. Pildes California Law Review Symposium, Volume 110, December 2022, Richard H. Pildes California Law Review

Democracies in the Age of Fragmentation

American democracy faces profound challenges in our era. Some of these challenges stem from features in the institutional design of democracy that are hard-wired into the Constitution; those challenges, unique to the United States, are the ones Steven Levitsky focused on in his provocative lecture. But other major challenges confronting American democracy are common to…

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Symposium, Volume 110, December 2022, Richard Albert California Law Review Symposium, Volume 110, December 2022, Richard Albert California Law Review

The World’s Most Difficult Constitution to Amend?

America’s frozen constitution could well be the world’s most difficult to amend. Far from being a badge of honor, the distinction of topping the global charts on constitutional rigidity is cause for alarm. Ancient and virtually impervious to amendment, the United States Constitution has withstood all modern efforts to renovate its outdated architecture on elections…

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Symposium, Volume 110, December 2022, Roberto Gargarella California Law Review Symposium, Volume 110, December 2022, Roberto Gargarella California Law Review

Restoring Democracy in a Multiracial Society

In this brief Essay, I present six comments to Steven Levitsky’s lecture. I suggest that the author (1) clarify some of the basic concepts he uses in his text, particularly the concept of democracy; (2) not confuse the problems of democracy with the problems of constitutionalism; (3) take more centrally into account the problem imposed on our democracies by the existence of profound…

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Symposium, Volume 110, June 2022, Katerina Linos, Elena Chachko California Law Review Symposium, Volume 110, June 2022, Katerina Linos, Elena Chachko California Law Review

Refugee Responsibility Sharing or Responsibility Dumping?

A silver lining of recent migration crises is increased reliance on responsibility-sharing arrangements in international actor responses. This new experience allows for evidence-based analysis of such arrangements. We distinguish between progressive arrangements—ones that shift responsibilities to more affluent, institutionally…

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Symposium, Volume 110, June 2022, E. Tendayi Achiume California Law Review Symposium, Volume 110, June 2022, E. Tendayi Achiume California Law Review

Empire, Borders, and Refugee Responsibility Sharing

International lawyers have been preoccupied with refugee responsibility sharing for decades, and with good reason. They have invested energy both in critiquing the existing regime and developing proposals for alternatives. However, the corresponding literature has largely, though not entirely, neglected two related but distinct phenomena: imperial domination and imperial intervention. I argue that attention to imperial domination and imperial intervention, which I define shortly, should unsettle the very frame of responsibility sharing and even asylum for many who are coerced into migration.

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Symposium, Volume 110, June 2022, Jennifer M. Chacón California Law Review Symposium, Volume 110, June 2022, Jennifer M. Chacón California Law Review

Recounting: An Optimistic Account of Migration

To be forced to move from a beloved home is a tragedy, no matter the cause. But such moves need not end tragically. Though the wounds of losing a homeland may never fully heal, people with the strength and resilience necessary to withstand these kinds of moves are also often well-equipped to build something positive out of pain. They can be tremendous assets to others in their newfound homes.

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