What do the Justices think they’re doing? They seem to act like appeals judges, who address questions of law as needed to reach a decision—and yet also like curators, who single out only certain questions as worthy of the Supreme Court’s attention. Most of the time, the Court’s “appellate mind” and its “curator mind” are aligned because the Justices choose to hear cases where a curated question of interest is also central to the...
No. 4
This Piece provides a novel framework guiding adjudication in cases of mistakes, such as unintended money transfers. We draw on Guido Calabresi’s seminal work, The Costs of Accidents, to introduce a parallel framework for mistakes and detail its operation and embodied policy considerations. We explain that mistakes, unlike accidents, can be socially harmless. When a mistake is harmless, the law acts to protect the mistaken party, thereby...
This Article addresses how to increase funding to nonprofit organizations that are led by minorities or serve communities of color and how to hold corporations and private foundations who make public commitments to fund these organizations accountable for those commitments. The Article makes two policy recommendations to address these problems, while engaging with Supreme Court jurisprudence on mandatory disclosures to ensure that the proposals...
Black communities have been surveilled by governmental institutions and law enforcement agencies throughout the history of the United States. Most recently, law enforcement has turned to monitoring social media, devoting an increasing number of resources and time to surveilling various social media platforms. Yet this rapid increase in law enforcement monitoring of social media has not been accompanied by a corresponding development in legal protections....
The Supreme Court has wide discretion to choose the cases it will decide. But how does the Court exercise this discretion? The Supreme Court’s rules explain that it may hear any case “important” enough for it to decide. Unsurprisingly, commentators have criticized this standard as “hopelessly indeterminate” and “intentionally vague.”
The Court, however, has said more about how it decides whether to grant review. We need simply...
Wildfires throughout the West are a drastic consequence of climate change. In California especially, the costs of wildfires have become unbearable. Current statutory solutions, such as Assembly Bill 1054 (AB-1054), focus on apportioning liability for damages between insurance companies, government programs, and the electric utilities that often spark the fires, but legislation often fails to address the factors that make damages so astronomical...
Recent calls to defund the police were quickly followed by calls to fund social service agencies, including the family regulation apparatus. These demands fail to consider the shared carceral logic of the criminal legal and family regulation system. This Essay utilizes the term “family regulation system” to more accurately describe the surveillance apparatus commonly known as the “child welfare system.” The general premise of this system...