Columbia Law Review

The Supreme Court has adopted divergent interpretations of the Equal Protection Clause as applied to race and redistricting. Vote dilution doctrine requires mapmakers to consider race to ensure that racial minorities are not packed or cracked. Congress, moreover, has embraced vote dilution doctrine in Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act. By contrast, racial gerrymandering doctrine triggers strict scrutiny if mapmakers subordinate traditional redistricting[...]

What kinds of reasons should matter in choosing an approach to constitutional or legal interpretation? Scholars offer different types of reasons for their theories of interpretation: conceptual, linguistic, normative, legal, institutional, and reasons based on theories of law. This Article argues that normative reasons, and only normative reasons, can justify interpretive choice. This is the “normative choice thesis.” This Article formulates[...]

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[...]

This Piece operates at the intersection of comparative environmental law and legal history. It introduces a novel distinction between two paradigms of technology-based pollution standards: the first, uniform across all places and environmental conditions, and the second, tailored to local environmental and economic circumstances. It then compares the air pollution regimes of the United States and the European Union with an eye to the relative place[...]

Clarifying the extent to which existing legal regimes afford protection to climate migrants must be part of an effective and coordinated response to climate change. This Note argues that climate refugees, a group which it narrowly defines as those who meet the requirements of the 1951 Refugee Convention because they have experienced climate change–induced harm amounting to persecution, should qualify for asylum under U.S. immigration law. To[...]