Do criminal courts meaningfully accommodate psychiatric disability? A review of competency proceedings across the United States suggests not. In competency to stand trial (CST) proceedings, criminal courts offer a narrow vision of psychiatric disability that excludes many defendants. Ultimately, the institutional context of criminal court under-mines even the meager accommodations that the competency framework provides.
CST proceedings...
Among the most powerful barriers to relief under § 1983 is Monell v. Department of Social Services—the Supreme Court decision recognizing that municipalities can be liable for constitutional violations by their officers but setting an exceedingly high standard for such claims. This Essay suggests a litigation strategy that sidesteps several challenges posed by Monell: Plaintiffs should pursue Monell claims based on...
The Supreme Court has recently adopted a new rule of religious equality: Laws unconstitutionally discriminate against religion when they deny religious exemptions but provide secular exemptions that undermine the law’s interests to the same degree as would a religious exemption. All the Justices and a cadre of scholars have agreed in principle with this approach to religious equality. This Essay argues that this new rule of religious equality...
Should individual tax data be public or confidential? Within the United States, secrecy has been the rule since the Tax Reform Act of 1976. But at three critical junctures—the Civil War, the 1920s, and the 1930s—Congress made individual tax records open for public inspection, and newspapers published the incomes of the billionaires of the time. Today, Finland, Norway, and Sweden all mandate significant transparency for individual tax information.
This...
Most jurisdictions that permit expungement draw the line at certain crimes—usually those implicating one or more victims, serious risks to public safety, corruption, or breach of the public trust. This is unsurprising given how these crimes relate to the moral underpinnings of the criminal law in a democratic society. This Essay explores, given the overall direction of expungement reform, whether expungement should reach more offenses and by...
Boys and men in all racial and ethnic groups and across most socioeconomic groups are struggling on many fronts, including education, employment, physical and mental health, and social integration. In these areas and more, boys and men are much worse off than they were only a few decades ago. The crisis—which is concentrated among men without college degrees—is rooted in large-scale structural changes to the economy that have decimated jobs...
The Supreme Court has adopted divergent interpretations of the Equal Protection Clause as applied to race and redistricting. Vote dilution doctrine requires mapmakers to consider race to ensure that racial minorities are not packed or cracked. Congress, moreover, has embraced vote dilution doctrine in Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act. By contrast, racial gerrymandering doctrine triggers strict scrutiny if mapmakers subordinate traditional redistricting...
This Essay surfaces an obstacle to decarceration hiding in plain sight: progressives’ continued support for the carceral system. Despite progressives’ increasingly prevalent critiques of criminal law, there is hardly a consensus on the left in opposition to the carceral state. Many left-leaning academics and activists who may critique the criminal system writ large remain enthusiastic about criminal law in certain areas— often areas in which...
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...
In a historical moment defined by massive economic and political inequality, legal scholars are exploring ways that law can contribute to the project of building a more equal society. Central to this effort is the attempt to design laws that enable the poor and working class to organize and build power with which they can countervail the influence of corporations and the wealthy. Previous work has identified ways in which law can, in fact, enable...