Oculus, a virtual reality company, recently announced that it will require all its users to have a personal Facebook account to access its full service. The announcement infuriated users around the world, who feared increased privacy risks from virtual reality, a computer-generated technology that creates a simulated world. The goal of virtual reality is to offer an immersive experience that appears as real as possible to its users. Providing such an experience necessitates collection, processing, and use of extensive user data, which begets corresponding privacy risks. But how extensive are the risks?
People over Profit: The Case for Abolishing the Prison Financial System
California Law Review · People Over Profit: The Case for Abolishing the Prison Financial System The term “mass incarceration” is used to describe a crisis that, to many, is both abstract and distant. But for Black, Latinx, Indigenous, low-income, and other communities whose lives are disproportionately affected by the criminal legal system, the reality of […]
Education Federalism in Action: English Learner Education Policy
Author’s Note: my interest in this topic is intensely personal. After college and before law school, I taught fourth grade at a public elementary school in Oakland, California. Over three-quarters of my students spoke a language other than English at home. Though the plurality spoke Spanish at home, my students collectively spoke over a dozen […]
An Environmental FOIA: Balancing Trade Secrecy with the Public’s Right to Know
This Note discusses the growing use of trade secrecy to withhold critical environmental information from the public. Over the last decade, trade secrecy has moved to the forefront of intellectual property law as an effective method for protecting valuable business information. Trade secrecy grants individuals and businesses the sole right to information they have obtained […]
The Real Enemies of Democracy
This article is a part of the 2020 Jorde Symposium. The other three pieces are linked below: The New Countermajoritarian Difficulty The New Pro-Majoritarian Powers Countering the Real Countermajoritarian Difficulty Professor Karlan argues that the Constitution is undemocratic and that the Supreme Court is not helping matters. There is some truth to those claims, but […]
Countering the Real Countermajoritarian Difficulty
This article is a part of the 2020 Jorde Symposium. The other three pieces are linked below: The New Countermajoritarian Difficulty The New Pro-Majoritarian Powers The Real Enemies of Democracy Introduction Writing about the countermajoritarian difficulty is a rite of passage for constitutional law scholars. Indeed, the sheer number of articles that have […]
The New Pro-Majoritarian Powers
This article is a part of the 2020 Jorde Symposium. The other three pieces are linked below: The New Countermajoritarian Difficulty Countering the Real Countermajoritarian Difficulty The Real Enemies of Democracy In her Jorde Lecture, Pam Karlan paints a grim picture of American democracy under siege. Together, the malapportioned Senate, the obsolete Electoral College, rampant […]
The New Countermajoritarian Difficulty
This article is a part of the 2020 Jorde Symposium. The other three pieces are linked below: The New Pro-Majoritarian Powers Countering the Real Countermajoritarian Difficulty The Real Enemies of Democracy Introduction The “countermajoritarian difficulty” was a central preoccupation for twentieth-century constitutional law scholars.[1] Alexander Bickel, who coined the phrase in The Least […]
Misgendering
Pronouns are en vogue. Not long ago, introductions were limited to exchanges of names. Today, however, they are increasingly enhanced with a recitation of the speaker’s appropriate gendered forms of address: he/him/his, she/her/hers, they/them/theirs, or neopronouns like zie/zir/zirs, xe/xem/xirs, or sie/hir/hirs. This development—like every other dimension of progress for LGBTQ+ people—has been met with fierce […]
Copyright and Disability
A vast array of copyrighted works—books, video programming, software, podcasts, video games, and more—remain inaccessible to people with disabilities. International efforts to adopt limitations and exceptions to copyright law that permit third parties to create and distribute accessible versions of books for people with print disabilities have drawn some attention to the role that copyright […]