Since the Supreme Court’s District of Columbia v. Heller decision in 2008, lower federal courts have wrestled with Second Amendment claims raised by categories of people excluded from gun possession. Among those cases, several have been brought by noncitizens challenging their prosecutions under 18 U.S.C. § 922(g)(5), the federal criminal ban on possession by unlawfully present noncitizens. In the post-Heller § 922(g)(5) cases,...
CLR Forum
In recent years, a growing number of litigants and scholars have argued that—despite the usual rule in federal court that only final orders are appealable—interlocutory orders denying church-autonomy defenses under the First Amendment can be appealed immediately. Proponents ground their claims in the belief that church autonomy provides religious institutions with an immunity from suit, rather than with a mere defense to liability. As a result,...
Police departments often adopt new surveillance technologies that make mistakes, produce unintended effects, or harbor unforeseen problems. Sometimes the police try a new surveillance technology and later abandon it due to a lack of success, community resistance, or both. Critics have identified many problems with these tools: racial bias, privacy violations, opacity, secrecy, and undue corporate influence, to name a few. A different framework...
In the United States, Europe, and elsewhere, museums are in possession of cultural objects that were unethically taken from their countries and communities of origin under the auspices of colonialism. For many years, the art world considered such holdings unexceptional. Now, a longstanding movement to decolonize museums is gaining momentum, and some museums are reconsidering their collections. Presently, whether to return such looted cultural heritage...
In March 2024, police killed Ryan Gainer, a Black teenager with autism, in his California home after his family sought help during a behavioral crisis. Several months later, police killed Sonya Massey, a Black woman experiencing a mental health crisis, in her Illinois home. This Comment examines the failure of U.S. privacy law to protect disabled people of color in their homes, using the deaths of Ryan Gainer and Sonya Massey as case studies. Through...
Engaging with the sociocultural dimensions of race and racism across U.S. history is essential when creating, critiquing, and reforming the law. Building on Robin West’s exploration of the law and culture movement, this Piece introduces a novel “hermeneutic” project that reads Black American culture throughout U.S. history to gain critical insights into the nature and function of law in America. Black American culture, deeply rooted in the...
This Piece operates at the intersection of comparative environmental law and legal history. It introduces a novel distinction between two paradigms of technology-based pollution standards: the first, uniform across all places and environmental conditions, and the second, tailored to local environmental and economic circumstances. It then compares the air pollution regimes of the United States and the European Union with an eye to the relative place...
Introduction In his compelling new book, Invisible Atrocities, Professor Randle DeFalco explores the function of the aesthetics of violence in international law. In particular, he questions international law’s preference for sanctioning spectacular demonstrations of violence rather than more banal, bureaucratic actions that cause massive scales of suffering and misery. The book resonated with us because […]
People routinely refer to copyright and trademark as “soft IP” to distinguish these practices from another area of intellectual property: patent. But the term reflects implicit biases against copyright and trademark doctrine and practitioners. “Soft IP” implies that patent law alone is hard, even though patents are no more physically, metaphorically, or intellectually hard than copyrights and trademarks. Despite stereotypes to the contrary,...
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...