In criminal proceedings, courts are increasingly relying on automated decisionmaking tools that purport to measure the likelihood that a defendant will reoffend. But these technologies come with considerable risk; when trained on datasets or features that incorporate bias, criminal legal algorithms threaten to replicate discriminatory outcomes and produce overly punitive bail, sentencing, and incarceration decisions. Because regulators have failed...
Note
The Colorado River Basin is drying up, and with it, the water supply of seven states in the American West. Historically, the West relied on consumption-based laws to fuel development despite the arid landscape. The Colorado River Compact allocated water among the states, but those allocations suffered from two basic flaws: (1) The agreed-upon water flow of the river was based on a particularly wet season in the region, and (2) the Compact was not...
This Note addresses the ever-growing series of privacy laws being enacted throughout the United States and the danger that the “opt-out” data collection system poses to many populations. There is a disparity in the level of “digital literacy” throughout the United States, and as more consumer data privacy laws emerge and continue to replicate the existing legislation, that disparity deepens.
Patterns among who does and who does not...
Law was central to the homophile movement, the main movement for queer rights between World War II and Stonewall. But examinations of this movement’s engagement with law have exclusively focused on public law. Private law has received virtually no attention. This Note corrects that oversight. It unearths instances in which groups advocating for queer rights invoked contract law during the 1950s and 1960s. These moments reveal contract law’s...
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...
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...
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...
In 2021, the Supreme Court decided City of Chicago v. Fulton, a landmark bankruptcy case that addressed the issue of whether passive retention of estate property violates § 362(a)(3) of the U.S. Bankruptcy Code, commonly known as the “automatic stay” provision. The automatic stay, as its name suggests, is a breathing spell that prevents creditors from taking certain collection actions against the debtor after a bankruptcy petition...
Recent years have seen the dramatic growth of Buy Now, Pay Later (BNPL), a class of unregulated fintech products that permit consumers to finance purchases by dividing payments into several interest-free installments. BNPL presents novel regulatory challenges because it is primarily marketed to consumers as an interest-free alternative to credit, and its distinctive market structure is characterized by lender–merchant agreements that promote...
Against rising calls to expand carceral psychiatry and increasingly pervasive mischaracterizations of neurodivergence in law, this Note accurately introduces the neurodiversity paradigm to call for the abolition of psychiatric incarceration. This Note challenges empirical narratives that render Neurodivergent people incapable of producing knowledge and holding expertise on their own embodied experiences by rejecting dominant conceptions of “mental...