Note

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...

In June 2022 the Supreme Court decided two unrelated cases, Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization and Ruan v. United States, each with significant implications for the criminal regulation of doctors. Dobbs removed abortion’s constitutional protection; in its wake, many states passed criminal statutes banning the procedure except in medical emergencies. The vagueness of those emergency exceptions, however, has...

Climate-change–induced sea-level rise threatens the very existence of Small Island Developing States. Not only will this crisis create extreme climate conditions that can physically devastate these states, it also threatens their place in the international legal system. For a country to gain or maintain access to the international legal system, it needs to be classified as a “state.” The common understanding is that a state needs to have...

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...

TAXING POLICE BRUTALITY BONDS

Likhitha Butchireddygari*

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...

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...