Legislatures, courts, and media outlets have manufactured legal and scientific uncertainty around gender-affirming care. This is the result of a phobic frame that vanishes the perspectives of minors and reduces decisionmakers’ confidence. This Note identifies that gender-affirming care bans should not be understood primarily as forms of sex discrimination, but instead as a form of unjustified impairment of minors’ self-determination. The solution,...
Issue Archives
Since 1898, Puerto Rico has been a territory of the United States, meaning that Congress wields plenary power over the Island. Although scholars have highlighted the history and some modern manifestations of this power, conversations about how plenary power affects the territories have largely ignored constitutional criminal procedure.
This Article is the first to center the territory’s criminal legal system within the broader debate over...
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...
The African Court on Human and Peoples’ Rights, the continental human rights court in Africa, is struggling. Many African states have yet to ratify the protocol that established the Court; and those that have, have begun to withdraw their declarations to allow individuals and nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) to bring cases against them before the Court. The Court’s expanding jurisdiction is part of the problem. Despite being an international...
Are refusals to provide services for same-sex weddings anti-gay discrimination? The answer, the Supreme Court seems to say, is “no.” Last Term in 303 Creative LLC v. Elenis, the Court held that the Constitution’s Free Speech Clause granted a web designer the right to refuse same-sex wedding services. In so doing, the Court also appeared to opine that the refusal involved no anti-gay discrimination.
Scholarship has yet to explore...
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...
Across the economy, monopolists of all kinds are engaged in “conditional dealing.” This is the practice of unilaterally offering benefits and penalties, or bribes and threats, to induce trading partners to refrain from competing against the monopolist or from dealing with its rivals. Pharma giants offer discounts conditioned on “loyalty,” agricultural monopolists impose “exit penalties” for switching to rivals, and social networks offer...
Commentators posit that reducing domestic abuse requires an increase in prosecutions and a decrease in criminal reform efforts. The “abuser” is as set a role as the “sympathetic victim,” with little room to examine how both may exist simultaneously within an individual. A deeper look into what occurs for survivors reveals that legal discourse often overlooks and scrutinizes Black women’s abuse, particularly with Black women who exist...
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...
The criminal and immigration systems in the United States have increasingly overlapped, adversely affecting noncitizens even distantly involved in criminal activity. Individuals without legal status who have engaged significantly with a criminal organization can cooperate with law enforcement in exchange for formal immigration benefits. There are no formal protections, however, for individuals residing in the country without legal status who have...