The COVID-19 pandemic has spotlighted the crisis low-wage immigrant and migrant (im/migrant) workers face when caught in the century-long collision between immigration enforcement and workers’ rights. Im/migrant workers toil in key industries, from health care to food production, that many now associate with laudable buzzwords such as “frontline” and “essential.” But these industries conceal jobs that pay little, endanger workers’ health and safety, and have high rates of legal violations by employers. Im/migrant…

Although the Bankruptcy Code is facially neutral, the consumer bankruptcy discharge provisions produce anomalies that run counter to bankruptcy’s internal principles of not forgiving debt that is based on misconduct or that implicates a public policy concern. For example, the discharge provisions allow some individuals to discharge debt that stems from civil rights violations or tortious discrimination. In contrast, the Bankruptcy Code precludes some debtors from debt relief based on narrow views of misconduct or misconceptions about moral hazards.

In the United States, law condemns poor people to their fates in states. Where Americans live continues to dictate whether they can access cash, food, and medical assistance. What’s more, immigrants, territorial residents, and tribal members encounter deteriorated corners of the American welfare state. Nonetheless, despite repeated retrenchment efforts, this patchwork of programs has proven remarkably resilient. Yet, the ability of the United States to meet its people’s most basic needs now faces an unprecedented…

Congress enacted the Bankruptcy Abuse Prevention and Consumer Protection Act of 2005 (BAPCPA) with the express purpose of limiting the number of consumer debtors eligible to file a Chapter 7 case, which typically lasts only a few months and eliminates the debtor’s unsecured debts. Under BAPCPA, bankruptcy courts…

There is widespread recognition that algorithms in criminal law’s administration can impose negative racial and social effects. Scholars tend to offer two ways to address this concern through law—tinkering around the tools or abolishing the tools through law and policy. This Article contends that these paradigmatic interventions, though they may center racial disparities, legitimate the way race functions to structure society through the intersection of technology and law.

While financial technology (fintech) has the potential to make financial services more accessible and affordable, hope that technology alone can solve the complex issue of wealth inequality is misplaced. After all, fintech companies are still subject to the same market forces as traditional financial institutions, with little incentive to address contributing causes such as unequal access to credit and financial services, lower rates of return, and discrimination.

From ending qualified immunity, to establishing community control over policing, to eradicating the institution of policing altogether, proposals to remedy the issue of “police violence” are on everyone’s lips. But, in the deep reservoir of proposals, the meaning of “police violence” has received relatively little attention.

Punishment as a social institution has failed to live up to the quixotic ideals of theory and has descended into the practice of mass incarceration, which is one of the defining failures of modern times. Scholars have traditionally studied punishment and incarceration as parts of a social transaction between the criminal offender, whose crime imposes a cost to society, and the state that ensures the offender repays this debt by correcting past harms and preventing future offenses.

Can political compromise harm democracy? Black advocates have answered this question for centuries, even as most academics have ignored their wisdom about the perils of compromise. This Article argues that America’s racial equality compromises have systematically restricted the rights of Black people and have generated inequality and distrust, rather than justice and unity. In so doing, these compromises…

For far too long, “unveiling” has been the subject of imperial fetish and Muslim women the expedients for western war. This Article reclaims the term and serves the liberatory mission of reimagining how Islamophobia distinctly impacts Muslim women. By crafting a theory of gendered Islamophobia centering Muslim women rooted in law, this Article disrupts legal…

From Standing Rock to San Francisco Peaks, Native American efforts to protect threatened sacred places in court have been troubled by what this Article identifies as the profanation principle: a presumption that places already profaned or degraded by development…

From global challenges such as climate change and mass extinction, to local challenges such as toxic spills and undrinkable water, environmental degradation and the impairment of Earth systems are well documented. Yet, despite this reality, the U.S. federal government has done little in the last thirty years to provide a comprehensive solution to these profound environmental challenges…

When President Donald Trump launched an assault on diversity training, critical race theory, and The 1619 Project in September 2020 as “divisive, un-American propaganda,” many law students were presumably confused. After all, law school has historically been doctrinally neutral, racially homogenous, and socially hierarchical. In most core law school courses, colorblindness and objectivity…

Qualified immunity has faced trenchant criticism for decades, but recent events have renewed focus on this powerful defense to liability for constitutional violations. This Article takes aim at the roots of the doctrine—fundamental errors that have never been excavated. First, this Article demonstrates that the Supreme Court’s qualified immunity jurisprudence is premised on a flawed…

For over forty years, scholars and advocates have responded to the criminalization of homelessness by calling for a “right to shelter.” As traditionally conceived, the right to shelter is a positive right—an enforceable entitlement to have the government provide or fund a temporary shelter bed for every homeless individual. However, traditional right-to-shelter efforts have failed…

The immigration system operates through the looming threat of the arrest, detention, and removal of immigrants from the United States. Indiscriminate immigrant arrests result in family separation. Immigrants languish in carceral facilities for months or even years. For most undocumented immigrants, there is no available pathway to citizenship. To protest this injustice, undocumented immigrants…

In the United States, Black cultural expressions of democratic life that operate within specific historical-local contexts, yet reflect a shared set of sociocultural mores, have been historically crowded out of the law and policymaking process. Instead of democratic cultural discourse occurring within an open and neutral marketplace of ideas, the discursive production and consumption of…

How do people, organizations, and even movements bounce back from losses and setbacks? For organized labor, the disappointments are routinely legal: an overturned precedent, a loss of coverage, or even the accelerated degradation of the National Labor Relations Act regime itself. In aggregate, these and other law-based defeats pose a serious, even existential, threat…

Millions of Americans live in food deserts, a term that describes urban neighborhoods and rural regions where residents do not have access to healthy, affordable food. Food deserts are neither natural nor inevitable. Many food deserts result from the deliberate choices of supermarkets to maximize their profits by shifting resources to suburban consumers while affirmatively blocking other grocery…

Waste is built into the American way of life. Yet the problem of what to do with waste remains largely unresolved. Indeed, our entire way of life hinges on overburdening with waste some communities, so that other communities may be underburdened, and thereby enjoy the benefits of clean air, water, and land. Perhaps the most…