In my response to reviews by Christopher Agee, Christopher Schmidt, Karen Tani, and Laura Weinrib, I explain some of the challenges of writing Vagrant Nation: Police Power, Constitutional Change, and the Making of the 1960s. In particular, I explore the challenge of creating narrative coherence without losing the essential multiplicity of the story or compromising my methodological commitment to constitutional history across the many actors involved in the legal change process. I ultimately constructed such coherence on three levels: narrative, thematic, and doctrinal. Narratively, I settled on a larger role for the Supreme Court than initially anticipated, while still decentering the Court substantively, methodologically, and causally. I located thematic coherence largely in a new vision of the “sixties.” The decade that emerges was marked by a common claim of people deemed out of place to make their own places in the world; an evolving if incomplete effort to disentangle difference from danger; and the crucial role of both sympathy and empathy in the success of the challenge to vagrancy laws. Though numerous legal arguments ran through that challenge, doctrinal multiplicity — the refusal to flatten or narrow the complex set of arguments and harms that vagrancy cases presented — became its own form of coherence.
For the over half-million people currently homeless in the United States, the U.S. Constitution has historically provided little help: it is strongly...
The Environmental Law and Community Engagement Clinic at the University of Virginia School of Law filed this amicus brief on behalf of San Bernardino...
Who has the legal right to challenge decisions by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration? And should the moral umbrage of a group of anti-abortion...
President Joe Biden promised during his State of the Union address on March 7, 2024, that he would make the right to get an abortion a federal law.
“If...
Gradualism should have won out in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health, exerting gravitational influence on the majority and dissenters alike. In general...
Today, legal culture is shaped by One Big Question: should courts, particularly the US Supreme Court, have a lot of power? This question is affecting...
On December 15, 2023, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit issued its decision in Illumina, Inc. v. FTC. Although the court vacated and...
On January 17, the Supreme Court heard arguments in what are potentially the most significant commercial law cases of the last decade. In the...
Constitutional review is the power of a body, usually a court, to assess whether law or government action complies with the constitution. Originating...
This Article introduces the Jurist-Derived Judicial Ideology Scores (JuDJIS), an expert-sourced measure of judicial traits that can locate nearly...
It is widely believed that President Donald Trump’s judicial appointments reflected a strategy of appeasing evangelical Christians and other religious...
Cyber stalking involves repeated, often relentless targeting of someone with abuse. Death and rape threats may be part of a perpetrator’s playbook...
There is a live debate going on over whether antitrust should take a broader view of the economics of market concentration. When antitrust reformers...
We apply a dynamic influence model to the opinions of the U.S. federal courts to examine the role of the U.S. Supreme Court in influencing the...
During times of crisis, governments often consider policies that may promote safety, but that would require overstepping constitutionally protected...
This casebook aspires to help students understand and think systematically about the techniques of statutory interpretation. It blends exposition with...
The United States has granted reparations for a variety of historical injustices, from imprisonment of Japanese Americans during the Second World War...