American legal scholarship focuses almost exclusively on federal, state, and local law. However, there are 574 federally recognized tribal governments within the United States, whose laws are largely ignored. This Article brings to the fore the exclusion of tribal governments and their laws from our mainstream conception of “American law” and identifies this exclusion as…
This Article empirically illustrates that legal doctrines permitting police officers to engage in pretextual traffic stops may contribute to an increase in racial profiling. In 1996, the U.S. Supreme Court held in Whren v. United States that pretextual traffic stops do not violate the Fourth Amendment. As long as police officers identify an objective violation…
In the decade since District of Columbia v. Heller, the paradigm-shifting 2008 Supreme Court case affirming the right of individuals to keep handguns in the home for self-defense, lower courts have struggled to reconcile the case’s broad conception of the Second Amendment with longstanding restrictions on the keeping and bearing of firearms. A burgeoning literature…
After more than a century of failure, Congress now stands closer than ever to making lynching a federal crime. As the pending legislation acknowledges, at least 4,742 people were lynched in the United States between 1882 and 1968, but Congress continually declined to pass any of the nearly 200 bills introduced during those decades. Although…
