Issue Archives

The law does not possess the language that we desperately need to accurately capture the totality of the Palestinian condition. From occupation to apartheid and genocide, the most commonly applied legal concepts rely on abstraction and analogy to reveal particular facets of subordination. This Article introduces Nakba as a legal concept to resolve this tension. Meaning “Catastrophe” in Arabic, the term “al-Nakba” (النكبة) is often...

This Piece responds to recent critiques of litigation articulating a religious liberty right to access abortion. It argues that under current and expansive religious liberty doctrine, patients seeking a religious right to abortion have standing to sue even prior to pregnancy, their sincerity should not be unfairly disputed, and existing secular exemptions in abortion laws undermine the state’s alleged compelling government interest in prohibiting...

For the past several decades, the Supreme Court has repeatedly sought to reinterpret the meaning of “property” within federal fraud statutes to limit the degree to which federal prosecutors can regulate state official misconduct. While the Court’s renewed interest in the federal fraud statutes has drawn varying degrees of praise and criticism from different sides of the legal community, this Note seeks to assess—in an apolitical, value-neutral...

Recently, a wave of state legislatures have enacted qui tam provisions to police citizen behavior in a variety of politically and legally contentious environments. The current literature on private enforcement views qui tam as a homogenous species of private enforcement and does little to identify any distinctions within qui tam itself. This gap in the scholarship has made it difficult to assess the legitimacy of the recently adopted state qui...

From subtle shifts in the procedural mechanics of self-defense doctrine to substantive expansions of justified lethal force, legislatures are delegating larger amounts of “violence work” to the private sphere. These regulatory innovations layer on top of existing rules that broadly authorize private violence—both defensive and offensive—for self-protection and the ostensible maintenance of law and order. Yet such significant authority for...

Social data production—accumulating, processing, and using large volumes of data about people—is a unique form of value creation that characterizes the digital economy. Social data production also presents critical challenges for the legal regimes that encounter it. This Article provides scholars and policymakers with the tools to comprehend this new form of value creation through two descriptive contributions. First, it presents a theoretical...

Anthropogenic climate change is altering humanity’s relationship to the natural world. As extreme weather events become more frequent and biodiversity plummets, humankind has three responsibilities: lower carbon dioxide emissions, preserve what remains of the natural world, and generate new pockets of nature to slowly rebuild what we have destroyed.

Trees—particularly when grouped together in forests—are humanity’s allies. Yet while...

There are currently over a million people enslaved in the United States. Under threat of horrendous punishment, they cook, clean, and even fight fires. They do this not in the shadow of the law but with the express blessing of the Thirteenth Amendment’s Except Clause, which permits enslavement and involuntary servitude as punishment for a crime.

Despite discussions of this exception in law reviews, news reports, and Netflix documentaries,...

Imagine the Supreme Court issuing an emergency order that signals interest in departing from precedent, as if foreshadowing a change in the law. Seeing this, should the lower courts start ruling in ways that also anticipate the law of the future? They need not do so in their merits rulings. That much is clear. Such a signal does not create new binding precedent. Rather, it reflects the Justices’ guess about the future of the law—and what if...

In criminal proceedings, courts are increasingly relying on automated decisionmaking tools that purport to measure the likelihood that a defendant will reoffend. But these technologies come with considerable risk; when trained on datasets or features that incorporate bias, criminal legal algorithms threaten to replicate discriminatory outcomes and produce overly punitive bail, sentencing, and incarceration decisions. Because regulators have failed...