Education policy is today a flashpoint in public discourse at both the national and state levels. This focus is for good reason. Public schools are highly segregated. School spending is stratified. The need for infrastructural renovations is extensive and expanding. Student debt has reached historic highs. For-profit companies are exploiting school districts’ limited resources for […]
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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...
In 2021, California became the first U.S. state to require that public high schools teach ethnic studies. Given polarized politics over what that mandate might mean, this Essay reflects on the role of ethnic studies curriculum in one place, through the voices of three people. The place is Stockton—the most diverse city in America and home to more than twenty years of grassroots investment in ethnic studies courses. Oral histories from three generations...
In the vast majority of federal cases, interpretive decisions by the U.S. Courts of Appeals are never reexamined by the U.S. Supreme Court. Over time, the circuit courts may also come to reach a longstanding, substantial consensus about the meaning of the words in a particular federal statute. Practically speaking, these circuit court decisions become the last word. For decades, the public and the legal community rely on these interpretations as...
In view of decades of devastating police violence and efforts to reform policing, this Note points to two concurrent phenomena that result in the federal tax code granting benefits to the wealthiest taxpayers who lend to municipalities for police brutality settlements. The first phenomenon is cities electing to issue bonds to satisfy these costly payouts. These bonds have been coined “police brutality bonds.” The second phenomenon is the tax...
Coercive policing is conducted mostly by means of commands, and officers usually cannot use force unless they have first issued an order. Yet, despite widespread concern about force and coercion in policing, commands are both underregulated and misunderstood. Officers have no clear legal authority to give many common commands, almost no departmental guidance about how or when to issue them, and almost no legal scrutiny for many commands they give....
Most American workers labor at will, meaning that employers may fire employees for any nondiscriminatory reason or no reason at all. Employers can even dismiss workers for seemingly unfair or arbitrary reasons. This fraught employment relationship has long resulted in a power imbalance for workers. That imbalance is particularly pronounced for pregnant and postpartum workers, who face disproportionate rates of discrimination at work. Even though...
This Essay offers a revisionist account of the Slaughter-House Cases. It argues that the opinion’s primary significance lies not in its gutting of the Privileges or Immunities Clause but in its omission of a people’s archive of slavery.
Decades before the decision, Black abolitionists began compiling the testimonies of refugees who had fled slavery. By 1872, this archival practice had produced a published record of Black struggle and...