The Reconstruction Congress provided for civil rights removal jurisdiction to enable a state-court defendant with defenses based on federal civil rights to remove the case against them to federal court. A series of late nineteenth-century Supreme Court decisions rendered the provision practically useless until Congress invited federal courts to reinterpret the statute in the Civil Rights Act of 1964. New archival research reveals how lawyers at...
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On January 1, 2022, the Arizona Supreme Court announced the most radical change to the American jury in nearly thirty-five years: the elimination of peremptory strikes. Arizona’s move is part of a broader trend of states experimenting with new ways to counter racial exclusion in the selection of juries after decades of federal inaction. Perhaps as noteworthy as the reforms themselves is the way in which many have come about: Rather than announcing...
For people experiencing homelessness, lack of access to public bathroom facilities often forces the humiliating need to urinate or defecate in public. The bathroom options available to those experiencing homelessness do not meet the population’s needs. One solution that scholars and local leaders have proposed is to ban customers-only bathroom policies. Such bans pose difficult legal and political questions. Most significantly, the recent Supreme...
This Piece embraces a fictional narrative to illustrate deep flaws in our legal system. It borrows its basic structure and a few choice lines from George Orwell’s classic novel Nineteen Eighty-Four. Like Orwell’s novel, it is set in the not-too-distant future to comment on problems already emerging in the present. The footnotes largely provide examples of some of those problems and how courts have treated them in a constitutional law...
Scholars, policymakers, and the media acknowledge that surveillance can threaten privacy and increase the risk of discrimination. Surveillance of people with disabilities, however, is positioned as being a convenient way of averting a host of problems: It can be seen as a way to protect people with disabilities from abuse and neglect, to prevent Medicaid fraud, and to proactively protect school communities from mass shootings. Increasingly, as...
In states with restrictive Medicaid statutes, many transgender people seeking gender-affirming care look to the courts for injunctive relief to receive gender-affirming surgery. The standard to obtain injunctive relief necessitates, in part, a finding that the plaintiff would be irreparably harmed without the relief—in this case, without being able to access surgery. This Comment outlines dangerous implications embedded in the Ninth Circuit’s...
Book bans and censorship battles have garnered considerable attention in recent years, but one of the most critical battlegrounds is kept out of the public eye. Prison officials can ban any book that threatens the security or operations of their facility. This means that the knowledge access rights of incarcerated people are subject to the judgments of the people detaining them. This Note focuses on books about Black people in America and books...
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...
In myriad areas of public life—from voting to professional licensure—the state collects, shares, and uses sex and gender data in complex algorithmic systems that mete out benefits, verify identity, and secure spaces. But in doing so, the state often erases transgender, nonbinary, and gender-nonconforming individuals, subjecting them to the harms of exclusion. These harms are not simply features of technology design, as others have ably written....
In a series of recent cases, the Supreme Court has reconfigured the administrative state in line with a particular version of Article II. According to the Court’s scheme, known as the theory of the “unitary executive,” all of the government’s operations must be housed under one of three branches, with the head of the executive branch shouldering unique and personal responsibility for the administration of federal law.
Guiding the...