What would happen if states stopped equalizing districts’ total populations and started equalizing their citizen voting-age populations (CVAPs) instead? This is not a fanciful question. Conservative activists have long clamored for states to change their unit of apportionment, and the Trump administration took many steps to facilitate this switch. Yet the question remains largely unanswered. […]
Bolstering Faith with Facts: Supporting Independent Redistricting Commissions with Redistricting Algorithms
Redistricting has seen progress in two seemingly distinct areas. On the technology side, a quantum leap in the development and maturation of redistricting algorithms has made it possible to generate and analyze large numbers of random, simulated districting plans that satisfy stated redistricting criteria. Analysis based on these algorithms and the simulated maps they drew […]
Democracy Reform Symposium
The California Law Review hosted the “Democracy Reform for the 21st Century” symposium from September 10 to 18, 2020. This piece is the opening keynote address. Thanks so much, Jeff, for that introduction and for your remarkable work. We’re so appreciative of all your leadership and all your work as well. And thank you too […]
Creating a “Great Pro Bono Practice”
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, […]
The Means and the End: Understanding the Right to Vote as a Tool in Protecting the Right to Representation
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 […]
Terrorism and the Inherent Right to Self-Defense in Immigration Law
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 […]
Hiding Homelessness: The Transcarceration of Homelessness
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 homelessness crisis along the West Coast, the […]
The Big Data Regulator, Rebooted: Why and How the FDA Can and Should Disclose Confidential Data on Prescription Drugs and Vaccines
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 […]
(Not) Just Surrogacy
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 […]
Our Colleague Stephen Sugarman: Teacher, Scholar, and Policy Entrepreneur
This piece is a part of a Festschrift that celebrates the long and impactful career of Professor Stephen D. Sugarman. The Festschrift contains three other pieces: School Finance Reform and Professor Stephen D. Sugarman’s Lasting Legacy Stephen Sugarman and the World of Responsibility for Injurious Conduct Professor Sugarman’s Contribution to Public Health Scholarship Steve […]