Mrs. Motley’s reputation has always been excellent . . . . [S]he is a woman, with great humanitarian instinct, but I have never seen it to disturb her judgment objectively and on questions of law. –U.S. Senator Jacob Javits (1966) Introduction Is justice truly blind—rendered without regard to wealth, race, sex, or other background characteristics? For centuries, that compelling […]
Issue Archives
The newest federal education law, the Every Student Succeeds Act of 2015 (ESSA), reflects a recent turn toward basing social policy on research evidence. Proponents suggest that evidence-based policymaking in education and other social policy areas can help cut through ideological debate and provide meaningful limits on the choices made by the federal executive branch, states, and localities. This Essay argues that such hopes for evidence-based...
When passed in 2001, the No Child Left Behind Act represented the federal government’s most dramatic foray into the elementary and secondary public school policymaking terrain. While critics emphasized the Act’s overreliance on standardized testing and its reduced school-district and state autonomy, proponents lauded the Act’s goal to close the achievement gap between middle- and upper-middle-class students and students historically ill served...
With recent rejections of plaintiff challenges in Colorado, Texas, and California, and continued battles over implementation of court orders in Kansas and Washington, state court judges may be sounding a cautious note on the limitations of the almost half-century-old educational finance reform litigation movement. Undeterred, advocates for economically disadvantaged schoolchildren have not abandoned the judiciary as an institution for advancing...
Introduction Policymakers and administrators periodically revise or jettison rules, enforcement priorities, and agency structures for a variety of reasons, from resource constraints to changes in administration. This is particularly the case when presidential administrations change, as evidenced, for example, by the transition from President Carter to President Reagan. As the current U.S. presidency undergoes one […]
Introduction Just Relationships develops a novel theory of private law for a liberal legal order. It argues that private law assumes the moral responsibility to determine just terms of interactions among private persons. Its most basic organizing ideas are substantive freedom and equality. We are grateful to Professors John Gardner, Robin West, and Benjamin Zipursky […]
Growing demands for privacy and increases in the quantity and variety of consumer data have engendered various business offerings to allow companies, and in some instances consumers, to capitalize on these developments. One such example is the emerging “personal data economy” (PDE) in which companies, such as Datacoup, purchase data directly from individuals. At the opposite end of the spectrum, the “pay-for-privacy” (PFP) model requires...
Sharing economy firms such as Uber and Airbnb facilitate trusted transactions between strangers on digital platforms. This creates economic and other value but raises concerns around racial bias, safety, and fairness to competitors and workers that legal scholarship has begun to address. Missing from the literature, however, is a fundamental critique of the sharing economy grounded in asymmetries of information and power. This Essay, coauthored...
Since the Supreme Court’s invalidation of anti-gay marriage laws, scholars and advocates have been debating the LGBT movement’s near-term strategies and priorities. This Article joins that conversation by developing the framework for a national campaign to repeal or invalidate anti-gay curriculum laws—statutes that prohibit or restrict the discussion of homosexuality in public schools. Anti-gay curriculum laws expose LGBT students to...
This Note examines the constitutionality of age-based handgun-purchase restrictions in the wake of the Supreme Court’s decision in District of Columbia v. Heller (Heller I). Part I explores Second Amendment jurisprudence since the Founding and provides an overview of current federal and state firearms restrictions. It also reviews current challenges in the courts to federal prohibitions on firearms purchases and possession by classes...