Despite a burgeoning conversation about the centrality of information management to governments, scholars are only just beginning to address the role of legal information in sustaining authoritarian rule. This Essay presents a case study showing how legal information can be manipulated: through the deletion of previously published cases from China’s online public database of court decisions. Using our own dataset of all 42 million cases made...
Essay
Jurisdiction stripping is seen as a nuclear option. Its logic is simple: By depriving federal courts of jurisdiction over some set of cases, Congress ensures those courts cannot render bad decisions. To its proponents, it offers the ultimate check on unelected and unaccountable judges. To its critics, it poses a grave threat to the separation of powers. Both sides agree, though, that jurisdiction stripping is a powerful weapon. On this understanding,...
Drawing from the experience of coauthoring scholarship with two activists who were sentenced to life without parole over three decades ago, this piece outlines the theory and practice of Participatory Law Scholarship (PLS). PLS is legal scholarship written in collaboration with authors who have no formal training in the law but rather expertise in its function and dysfunction through lived experience. By foregrounding lived experience in law’s...
American racial justice opponents regularly wield a desire for peace, stability, and harmony as a weapon to hinder movement toward racial equality. This Essay examines the weaponization of peace historically and in legal cases about property, education, protest, and public utilities. Such peace claims were often made in bad faith and with little or no evidence, and the discord they claimed to address was actually the result of hostility to racial...
Over the past several years, the landscape of K–12 education policy has shifted dramatically, thanks in part to increasing prevalence of parental-choice policies, including intra- and inter-district public school choice, charter schools, and private-school choice policies like vouchers and (most recently) universal education savings accounts. These policies decouple property and education by delinking students’ educational options from their...
Many states turn in sizable part to local property taxes to finance public education. Political and academic discourse on the extent to which these taxes should serve in this role largely centers on second-order issues, such as the vices and virtues of local control, the availability of mechanisms to redistribute property tax revenues across school districts, and the overall stability of those revenues. This Essay contends that such discourse would...
This Essay problematizes the increased propertization and commodification of education and calls for a rethink of the emergent concept of “education theft” through the lens of intellectual property and human rights. This concept refers to the phenomenon where parents, or legal guardians, enroll children in schools outside their school districts by intentionally violating the residency requirements. The Essay begins by revisiting the debate...
Across the country, violent tactics were employed to create and maintain all-white municipalities. The legacy of that violence endures today. An underexamined space in which that violence endures is within school districts. Many school district boundary lines encompass geographic areas that were created as whites-only municipalities through both physical violence and law. Yet principles that inform how school district boundary lines are drawn fail...
Previous work suggests that excludability is the main attribute of educational property and residence is the lynchpin of that exclusion. Once a child is non-excludable, the story goes, he should have complete access to the benefits of educational property. This Essay suggests a challenge to the idea that exclusion is the main attribute of educational property. By following four fictional children and their quests to own educational property in...
Property law is having a moment, one that is getting education scholars’ attention. Progressive scholars are retooling the concepts of ownership and entitlement to incorporate norms of equality and inclusion. Some argue that property law can even secure access to public education despite the U.S. Supreme Court’s longstanding refusal to recognize a right to basic schooling. Others worry that property doctrine is inherently exclusionary. In their...