The California Voting Rights Act (CVRA) spurred hundreds of cities, school districts, and other local governments to transition from at-large to district-based elections. Although the CVRA attempts to address racial vote dilution, this Note finds that the CVRA creates unique incentives to adopt district-based elections, and that hundreds of California school districts have adopted district-based elections in the last twenty years. Drawing on data collected from school districts in the Bay Area, this Note finds that although the CVRA has likely had a positive effect on Latine and Asian American Pacific Islander (AAPI) officeholding in Bay Area school districts, our findings align with existing literature that some Bay Area school districts see no or even negative changes in Latine and AAPI officeholding. This Note argues that California law should be reformed to permit alternatives to district-based elections, that might better improve minority officeholding. This Note further argues that the CVRA should be amended to remove current incentives which have discouraged the use of alternative election systems.

Between 2020 and 2024, the Department of Education undertook two massive experiments on the student loan system. These were the “Biden Reforms.” These efforts were almost entirely the result of administrative interpretation of longstanding statutory law, with Congress playing at most a supporting role. The Biden Reforms, which engendered intense partisan opposition, were mostly stopped before they took effect. And the Trump administration has begun to use its own administrative interpretations (or executive ignoring of statutes) to tear up core parts of federal higher education finance. This Article explains how these initiatives came about, how the Biden Reforms were foiled, and how the conflicts around both have reshaped the law and politics of student loans moving forward. We argue that the federal student loan system enabled insider-driven politics that allowed for legislative compromise.

“Punishment” is an all-important category in criminal legal thought. Conventional scholarship adopts a narrow definition and focuses on justifying penal sanctions. Much critical work, in contrast, seeks to expand the category—defining more practices and institutions as “punishment.” In this Article, I argue that the focus on the purposes of punishment and on what constitutes punishment distracts from a larger theoretical and practical issue: Much of what the criminal system does probably isn’t punishment as such. Certainly, a carceral sentence is punishment. But what about a curfew requirement for a defendant awaiting trial? What about a restriction on gun ownership postconviction? What about a traffic stop? Each of these restrictions on liberty or interactions with the criminal system might be stigmatizing or cause great hardships. So, it might be tempting to categorize them as “punishment.” While I am skeptical of conventional formalist definitions of “punishment,” I argue that striving to define more acts or institutions as “punishment” actually doesn’t accomplish much—as a doctrinal matter, judges are reluctant to afford defendants increased substantive or procedural rights in this realm.

Where do—and should—future disabilities fit within the law? Disability civil rights laws expressly extend rights to individuals with present or past disabilities, but it remains unsettled how the prospect of acquiring a disability in the future should be understood within these laws. Resolving this question is crucial not only for continued refinement of disability civil rights doctrine, but the inquiry has broader civil rights and healthcare implications given racial disparities in exposures to potentially disabling circumstances and the negative health effects of racism itself. This Article is the first to provide a comprehensive taxonomy of how future disabilities can be understood within disability civil rights laws. I articulate two overarching frameworks for situating future disabilities in the law. The Article addresses a critical doctrinal gap by articulating and analyzing each framework. I conclude that only a narrower subset of claims within the anticipatory accommodations framework appears apt for resolution under disability civil rights laws, but claims under the preemptive disability stigma framework align with the laws’ scope and could meaningfully advance their nondiscrimination purpose. I then call for clarification of the proper application of disability civil rights laws to future disabilities through judicial interpretation and, to the extent needed, regulatory and statutory reform. Lastly, this Article sets the stage for further work evaluating potential interventions beyond civil rights law that can more directly target the ways that racial subordination disparately produces both future disabilities and negative health outcomes.

Nearly every Chapter 11 filing is “voluntary,” in that it’s initiated by the company’s managers. Yet the Bankruptcy Code also allows unsecured creditors to force a company to reorganize under an “involuntary Chapter 11.” Involuntary Chapter 11s are rare and largely ignored by scholars. That’s potentially because bankruptcy and corporate law largely defer to managers’ business judgment on how to maximize the company’s value, and investors have several contract and corporate law tools designed to discipline underperforming managers. So, what work can involuntary Chapter 11s do? This Article shows that an involuntary Chapter 11 can be the optimal solution for a company with going-concern value that simultaneously faces two kinds of distress: financial and managerial distress such. This Article makes three main contributions. First, it shows that involuntary Chapter 11s have an important, but underappreciated, role to play in salvaging firms that have going-concern value. Second, it reveals how the current involuntary Chapter 11 system isn’t geared to serve that role because it allows a narrow class of investors to throw a company into Chapter 11 without having to show that the company faces managerial distress. Third, it sketches a new involuntary Chapter 11 system that incentivizes a wide range of investors to file involuntary Chapter 11s against companies facing both kinds of distress, while penalizing them for filing such cases against companies that face only one or neither kind of distress.