The Fourteenth Amendment’s Section One is central to our constitutional law. Yet its underlying principles remain surprisingly obscure. Its drafting history seems filled with contradictions, and there is no scholarly consensus on what rights it protects, or even on what kind of law defines those rights. This Article presents a new lens through which to…
The family regulation system is increasingly notorious for harming the very families that it ostensibly aims to protect. Under the guise of advancing child welfare, Black, Brown, Native, and poor families are disproportionately surveilled, judged, and separated. Discrimination and ingrained prejudices against disabled parents render their families especially vulnerable to separation and termination. Once enmeshed…
In 2021, over three million children interacted with the child welfare system and over six hundred thousand were in foster care. These child welfare systems, striving as they may to help children and families in crisis, are themselves in crisis. Seeking relief from these dysfunctional state systems, children and advocacy groups have turned to the…
In recent years, the Supreme Court has repeatedly deployed a new doctrine with potentially seismic implications for the future of the federal administrative state. The “major questions doctrine,” formally embraced by a majority of the Court for the first time in West Virginia v. EPA, requires administrative agencies to demonstrate “clear congressional authorization” when they…
