Prof. Kim Forde-Mazrui of the University of Virginia responds to Sonja Starr’s print Article, The Magnet School Wars and the Future of Colorblindness. Forde-Mazrui argues that even if courts adopt the “ends-colorblindness” framework described by Starr, “alternative action” policies meant to promote diversity may still be constitutionally permissible.
In this response piece to the Abortion Pills piece in the Stanford Law Review, Prof. Susan Morse and Leah Butterfield of the University of Texas explain why most administrative challenges to abortion pill regulations are untimely.
Craig Konnoth’s Article, using “medical civil rights” as an angle onto disability, captures the ostensible benefits of disability legal claiming. We partially agree with him on this, but we also believe that he does not fully account for the weight on the other side of the negative aspects of medical framing. This Response contextualizes the benefits and recognition granted to medicalized individuals by noting the drawbacks to medicalization. We conclude by proposing a new way forward for disability justice.
Craig Konnoth’s article, Medicalization and the New Civil Rights, shows how medical framing and evidence of physically identifiable and measurable harms have been providing new pathways to vindicate civil rights harms. Longer-term, however, this Response wonders whether medicalization of civil rights might tell a more ambivalent narrative. First, medicalization could produce a sociological narrowing that could eventually limit how we think about justice. Second, and more speculatively, even the utilitarian benefits that medical framing is now producing might diminish as medicalization becomes a new situs for civil rights contests.
Migration as Decolonization telegraphs the essence of a postcolonial approach to the assertion of sovereign territorial exclusion. Tendayi Achiume’s concept of “de-imperial migration” clarifies and enhances a set of important critiques and should justly impact not just legal scholarship but also broader public discourse. This Response brings out two of the concepts in Migration as Decolonization and relates them to Professor Thomas' earlier discussions of “interconnectedness” between migration-sending and migration-receiving territories.
Professor William Baude’s recent article Constitutional Liquidation outlines such a theory, by which indeterminate constitutional meaning can be “liquidated”—clarified and settled—through a “course of deliberate practice” by non-judicial public officials. Baude’s article makes a good start but leaves certain critical questions unaddressed. If Baude develops his theory further, he will have to analyze numerous examples of non-judicial precedent to define the contours and limits of liquidation.
Henry Vanderlyn, an antebellum lawyer from the small town of Oxford, New York, whom I discuss in Inventing American Exceptionalism, kept a daily diary for a thirty-year period and was in the habit of regaling visitors with selected readings from his collected thoughts. Confident that his visitors eagerly attended to his every word, Vanderlyn never…
In Against Data Exceptionalism, Andrew Keane Woods explores “one of the greatest societal and technological shifts in recent years,” which manifests in the “same old” questions about government power. The global cloud is an important feature of modern technological life that has significant consequences for individual privacy, law enforcement, and governance. Yet, as Woods suggests,…
This Essay is a response to Pamela K. Bookman’s Litigation Isolationism.
Introduction In The Fourth Amendment and the Global Internet, Orin Kerr highlights several important Fourth Amendment questions that few courts have addressed. But in “offer[ing] a general framework for applying the Fourth Amendment to a global computer network in a way that maintains the existing territorial conception of the Fourth Amendment,” Kerr’s article focuses too narrowly…
Although the solutions to many modern economic and societal challenges may be found in better understanding data, the dramatic increase in the amount and variety of data collection poses serious concerns about infringements on privacy. In our 2013 Symposium Issue, experts weigh in on these important questions at the intersection of big data and privacy.
This essay is a reply to Daniel A. Crane’s Has the Obama Justice Department Reinvigorated Antitrust Enforcement?.
I must start out with a confession: When it comes to technology, I’m what you might call a troglodyte. I don’t own a Kindle or an iPad or an iPhone or a Blackberry. I don’t have an avatar or even voicemail. I don’t text. I don’t reject technology altogether: I do have a typewriter—an electric…
At the end of January, the European Commissioner for Justice, Fundamental Rights, and Citizenship, Viviane Reding, announced the European Commission’s proposal to create a sweeping new privacy right—the “right to be forgotten.” The right, which has been hotly debated in Europe for the past few years, has finally been codified as part of a broad…
A recent case in the Northern District of California, Fraley v. Facebook,[1] recalls singer-songwriter Momus’s prescient parody of Andy Warhol: “In the future, everyone will be famous for fifteen people.”[2] Although Momus was discussing the revolution in the recording and distribution of music made possible by digital technologies that allowed performers outside the mainstream to…
The poor quality and high cost of health care in the U.S. is well documented. The widespread adoption of electronic medical records—for purposes of improving quality and reducing costs—is key to reversing these trends.[1] But federal privacy regulations do not set clear and consistent rules for access to health information to improve health care quality.…
caucus living within one hundred miles of the straw poll in Ames, Iowa.[1] In the months leading up to the caucuses Mitt Romney’s presidential campaign purchased ads that ran before all YouTube videos watched by voters in Iowa and New Hampshire.[2]Meanwhile, through sophisticated voter modeling, targeted communications based on voters’ political interests, and tracking the…
We live in an age of “big data.” Data has become the raw material of production, a new source of immense economic and social value. Advances in data mining and analytics and the massive increase in computing power and data storage capacity have expanded, by orders of magnitude, the scope of information available to businesses,…
In the oral argument this fall in United States v. Jones,[1] several Supreme Court Justices struggled with the government’s view that it can place Global Positioning System (GPS) tracking devices on cars without a warrant or other Fourth Amendment limit. Chief Justice Roberts asked: “You think there would also not be a search if you…
