Police departments nationwide train their officers to assume that a member of the community is armed using the “characteristics of an armed person” (CAP) framework. This framework, composed of multiple characteristics that ostensibly allow police to determine whether a person is carrying a handgun, has become a pseudoscientific justification for stop-and-frisk.
The CAP framework is a form of proactive policing: patrolling to find potential[...]
In recent years, the Supreme Court has developed a robust antidiscrimination principle rooted in the Free Exercise Clause that commands that generally available public benefits may not be denied to religious organizations because of their religious identity. In St. Isidore v. Drummond ex rel. Oklahoma, school-choice advocates sought to extend this principle to Oklahoma’s public charter school program, arguing that excluding a Catholic[...]
Historically, we have known little about the law enforcement actors who oversee a punitive deportation machine. Slowly, this is changing. Using the insights from Professor Irene Vega’s groundbreaking book on immigration enforcement agents and officers, this Book Review makes three points. First, these agents and officers utilize a range of strategies to justify morally ambiguous job duties, and at least a part of the moral ambiguity comes from[...]
This Essay identifies mechanisms by which the law regulates access to marriage for adults with intellectual disabilities, exploring how statutes and court decisions give meaning to the concept of “capacity to marry.” The Essay identifies two previously unstudied and contradictory understandings of the relationship between marriage and capacity. One notion of “capacity to marry” operates to exclude adults with intellectual disabilities from[...]
Courts and scholars have long disagreed about whether arbitrators follow the law. It is difficult, however, to assess whether arbitration is lawless. For one, the process is private, usually confidential, and often generates unreasoned unwritten awards. In addition, determining whether an arbitrator decided a case “correctly” is highly subjective. Thus, the literature on point relies on crude proxies such as surveys of arbitrators, the frequency[...]
Native Americans pay taxes. Territories, by contrast, tax in place of the federal government. Both live with the legacy of American imperialism. Both seek the elusive fiscal self-governance and autonomy promised by Congress. The Supreme Court—through preemption, the plenary power doctrine, and interpretive principles—has hollowed out the Native tax base, forcing tribes to compete fiercely with Congress, states, and localities for revenue. By[...]