Is the Supreme Court Sometimes Irrelevant?: Race and the Southern Criminal Justice System in the 1940s

Supreme Court opinions involving race and the jury invariably open with the Fourteenth Amendment, the Civil Rights Act of 1875, or landmark cases like...

On January 1, 2022, the most radical change to the American jury in at least thirty-five years occurred in Arizona: peremptory strikes, long a feature...

At first blush, the debate between Stanley Fish and Ronald Dworkin that took place over the course of the 1980s and early 90s seems to have produced...

There is one group that the court does not put into an identity straitjacket—those claiming religious exemptions.

Courts routinely use low cash bail as a financial incentive to ensure that released defendants appear in court and abstain from crime. This can create...

The lawyer-client relationship is pivotal in providing access to courts. This paper presents results from a large-scale field experiment exploring how...

Originalism is becoming the coin of the realm at the conservative Supreme Court. Even newly appointed liberal Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson has drawn...

This chapter examines the intellectual and social contexts in which the American Law Institute (ALI) has operated and how they have influenced the...

offers a preliminary legal history of the white supremacist and anti-Semitic violence that took place in my hometown of Charlottesville, Virginia on...

This year marks the fiftieth anniversary of the Supreme Court’s decision in San Antonio Independent School District v. Rodriguez that our Constitution...

This lecture critiques Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization and assesses its implications for liberty and equality. Dobbs’ immediate effect...

The conventional wisdom is that the Commander-in-Chief Clause arms the President with a panoply of martial powers. By some lights, the Clause not only...

Sandy Levinson has always taken secession arguments seriously. This is, in my eyes, one of his great virtues. There are very few scholars who would be...

At the core of election law in the United States are contestations over the rights of African Americans to participate and be represented in the...

It was 1804, and Thomas Ruffin, future Chief Justice of the North Carolina Supreme Court, was having doubts about slavery. Ruffin was a young student...

IN DECEMBER, 1999, after William E. Jackson's death, members of his family found, in a closet of his Manhattan apartment, a folder labeled “Roosevelt...

This paper, prepared for the 2023 Clifford Symposium on “New Torts” at DePaul Law School, addresses the tort of offensive battery. This is an ancient...

Analysis based on Hohfeld’s analytical system shows that liability rules, as defined by Guido Calabresi and A. Douglas Melamed, are a false category...