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Situating Dobbs
Full text linkThe recent decision in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health has been characterized as an outlier because its effect is to erase a previously recognized constitutional right. This paper situates Dobbs in a broader feminist constitutional history. It asks if this retrenchment is really such a unique turn in American jurisprudence when it comes to protections or “rights” that matter most to women’s lived experience. The paper argues that if one opens the aperture of constitutional history to embrace a more capacious view of rights, those afforded to women have often been eroded or erased by state legislatures, Congress, and courts. Using Reva Siegel’s work on constitutional memory, it theorizes about why commentators have not identified this thread in American constitutional history when discussing Dobbs. The paper then highlights three examples that illustrate a historical pattern of such erosion or erasure: voting, Prohibition, and protective labor legislation. It concludes that we can both note Dobbs’ outlier status and situate the decision in a historical continuum to correct the erasure of previous retrenchment in our constitutional memory. In so doing, we can more effectively respond to Dobbs’ implications for reproductive self-determination
Distinguishing Juvenile Law and Juvenile Education: Undoing the School-to-Prison Pipeline Approved in In Re S.F.
Full text linkMandating Climate-Related Risks and GHG Emissions: Does The Securities and Exchange Commission Have The Power?
Full text linkFourth Amendment Constraints on Automated Surveillance Technology in the Public to Safeguard the Right of an Individual to be “Secure in Their Person”
Full text linkPolitical Will to Amend the International Criminal Court’s Aggression Regime After Russia’s Invasion of Ukraine
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Remembering the Origins of Modern Legal Education
Full text linkAmerican legal education came under tremendous pressure in the wake of the 2008 financial crisis. That crisis precipitated a decline in law school applications and a concomitant decrease in the size of American law school enrollments during the 2011–2012 academic year. Commentators offered a myriad of proposals for reforming legal education during that period. Yet many of those proposals failed to gain traction, and a decade later legal education looks much the same, albeit with smaller enrollments. One of those proposals was to shorten the three-year course of study. In this Article, I revisit the origins of that long-standing feature of American legal education introduced by Christopher Columbus Langdell, Dean of Harvard Law School, in the nineteenth century and later embraced by the legal education’s regulatory bodies in the twentieth century. Viewed through a critical theory lens, its intractability can be explained, in part, by the persistence of exclusionary impulses and masculine norms in the legal profession from its origins to the current day. This Article proposes that American law faculty revive previous conversations about the value of this central design feature. And the subordinating effects of that feature should be a factor in weighing the costs and benefits of moving to a shorter course of study
