Department of State v. Muñoz was a critically important successor to Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization. In Muñoz, the Court continued efforts to shrink the protective force of the Due Process Clause. Even more significantly, the Court launched another attack on the equality principle undergirding cases including Loving v. Virginia. Through its rejection of substantive due process protections, the Court is intentionally weakening a broad swath of antidiscrimination protections and procedural due process rights.

The Students for Fair Admissions, Inc. v. President & Fellows of Harvard College majority opinion has been widely misunderstood as a victory for those who believe in the “colorblind Constitution.” By juxtaposing the opinion’s main rule with the exception for admitting students based on essays that discuss students’ lived experiences with race, Robinson reveals the opinion’s fundamental incoherence, as well as its furtive race-consciousness. This examination reveals the chasm between colorblind rhetoric and the inescapability of racially-forged realities.

This Essay connects Students for Fair Admissions to two earlier moments in equal protection history. The first is Japanese American internment during World War II and the Supreme Court’s creation of the strict scrutiny doctrine. The second is the affirmative action wars that occurred in the 1980s and 1990s, which resulted in the current doctrine requiring strict scrutiny even for “benign” affirmative action. In all three moments—internment, affirmative action wars, and SFFA—Asian Americans were curiously exploited.

Implicit in inquiries about Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard’s relationship to precedent is an assumption about the affirmative action cases that preceded SFFA—namely, that Regents of the University of California v. Bakke and its progeny represented a victory for proponents of affirmative action. This Essay complicates that view. Our central claim is that Bakke contained many losses for proponents of affirmative action and that the specific nature of those losses set the stage for precisely the outcome SFFA instantiates.

Since the Supreme Court struck down race-conscious university admissions in 2023, magnet school admissions have become the next constitutional battleground for diversity in education. Harpalani illustrates how Asian Americans’ positioning intersected with litigation strategy and constitutional issues in Coalition for TJ v. Fairfax County School Board—an important recent ruling that deals with race-neutral public magnet school admissions policies. Harpalani aims to convince progressives to take anti-Asian animus more seriously, even as they support the admissions reforms that Asian American plaintiffs in several cases have challenged.

The Court’s unprecedented decision in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization relegated abortion regulation to a highly heterogeneous state institutional landscape. For lawyers, this institutional heterogeneity poses new questions of orientation, skill-building, and collaboration. In this Essay, Abrams examines the challenges facing lawyers in this new institutional landscape by focusing on one promising strategy for protecting abortion rights in conservative states: the initiative petition to amend a state’s constitution.

This Note explores the idea of paying Americans to cast their ballots as a mechanism to increase electoral participation among lower income voters and rebalance the influence that wealthy Americans have on policy outcomes. The Note begins by exploring the rationale behind the idea, drawing on political science, economic, and legal literature to argue that subsidizing the franchise could help rebalance elected officials’ perception of the “median voter” away from the wealthy.

Hatred and disinformation on the internet have ushered in a state of emergency for gender-variant people. Among other effects, they have generated political will to enact sweeping regulations that threaten to eradicate gender variance “from public life entirely,” as one political commentator has announced. This Note turns to history—specifically the history of the sex/gender binary and cross-dressing laws—to understand why false and inflammatory representations of gender variance are so prolific in our digital milieu.

Occupational licensing has been under attack from across the political spectrum. Economists argue that it is inefficient and costly; policymakers argue that it limits employment opportunities and hurts consumers; and antitrust regulators argue that it limits competition and creates cartels. Politicians, regulators, and courts have come to a rare consensus that licensing regimes must be restricted or repealed. This Article reimagines licensing in the twenty-first century as a source of opportunity rather than a pure barrier to entry.

It’s widely understood today that inequality is a major social problem that in turn contributes to other crises. By most accounts, tax systems are supposed to be our engines of equality. Yet in today’s United States, state and local tax systems mostly do the opposite: They take a greater percentage of the resources of the poor and middle class than of the rich. This Article argues that a truly progressive state tax system is possible and how it couldoperate.

Scholars and advocates have long argued that a person’s consent to a warrantless police search is often so inherently coerced, uninformed, and shaped by race, class, gender, citizenship status, and disability that to call it a “choice” is fiction. This critique is not limited to police searches based on consent. Waiving rights and consenting to otherwise unconstitutional state action permeates criminal procedure. Given these concerns, this Article asks: What would happen if consent were eliminated from criminal procedure doctrines?