For over a century, the Supreme Court has characterized the franchise as instrumental—a right that is preservative of all other rights. Statistics confirm that federal protection of the right to vote has produced higher levels of minority electoral participation and greater shares of minority politicians over the past half century. To voting rights advocates, indicators…

In Peña-Rodriguez v. Colorado, the Supreme Court recognized that racial bias influencing jury deliberations violates the Sixth Amendment’s impartial jury guarantee and is incompatible with the Fourteenth Amendment’s anti-discrimination principles. The Court therefore created a racial bias exception to the centuries-old no-impeachment rule, claiming the decision reflected “progress”…

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…

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+…

Disorderly conduct laws are a combination of common law offenses aimed at protecting the public order, peace, and tranquility. Yet, contrary to common legal conceptions, the criminalization of disorderly conduct is not just about policing behavior that threatens to disrupt public order or even the public’s peace and tranquility. Policing disorderly conduct reflects and reinforces…

Progressives are taking Supreme Court reform seriously for the first time in almost a century. Owing to the rise of the political and academic left following the 2008 financial crisis and the hotly contested appointments of Justices Neil Gorsuch and Brett Kavanaugh, progressives increasingly view the Supreme Court as posing a serious challenge to the…

With the rise of extreme polarization, intense political divisiveness, and gridlocked government, many Americans are turning to reforms of the democratic processes that create incentives for candidates and officeholders to appeal to broader coalitions. A centerpiece of these efforts is ranked-choice voting (RCV). RCV allows voters to rank candidates in order of preference: first, second…

How does the Supreme Court decide difficult questions of constitutional law? Standard accounts point to a range of interpretive approaches such as originalism, common law constitutionalism, political process theory, interest-balancing, and constitutional pluralism. And once the list of commonly used interpretive approaches is set, normative debates often follow…

Labor and employment laws are systematically underenforced in low-wage, franchised workplaces. Union contracts, and the benefits and protections they provide, are nonexistent. The Fight for Fifteen movement has brought attention to the low wages, systemic violations of workers’ rights, and lack of collective representation in fast-food franchises. Given that franchisees can be judgment…

Police officers have become permanent fixtures in public schools. The sharp increase in the number of school police officers over the last twenty years has generated a substantial body of critical legal scholarship. Critics question whether police make students safer. They argue that any safety benefits must be weighed against the significant role the police…

Over the last four decades, scholars from diverse disciplines have documented a wide variety of cultural appropriations from Indigenous peoples and the harms these have inflicted. Copyright law provides at least some protection against appropriations of Indigenous culture—particularly for copyrightable songs, dances, oral histories, and other forms of Indigenous cultural creativity…

The fossil fuel industry has filed an increasing number of dormant Commerce Clause lawsuits against coastal states and cities that have rejected proposals for new coal and oil export facilities in their jurisdictions. These lawsuits are creating a wholly new “law of energy exports” that to date has been underexplored in the academic literature, even…

The disparate treatment of capital and labor reflects one of globalization’s central asymmetries: the law often allows financial capital, but not people, to move freely across borders. Yet scholars have largely neglected the intersection of these two regimes, the legal restrictions on migrants’ capital, particularly when the migrants themselves are deemed illegal. These restrictions on…

Although the U.S. Supreme Court has famously spoken of a “historic kinship” between patent and copyright doctrine, the family resemblance is sometimes hard to see. One of the biggest differences between them today is how much ingenuity they require for earning protection. Obtaining a patent requires an invention so innovative that it would not have…

Law enforcement has an opacity problem. Police use sophisticated technologies to monitor individuals, surveil communities, and predict behaviors in increasingly intrusive ways. But legal institutions have struggled to understand—let alone set limits on—new investigative methods and techniques for two major reasons. First, new surveillance technology tends to operate in opaque and…

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 electricity sector is often appropriately called the linchpin of efforts to respond to climate change. Over the next few decades, the U.S. electricity sector will need to double in size to accommodate electric vehicles, while transforming to run entirely on clean energy. To drive this transformation, states are increasingly adopting 100 percent clean energy…