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Existing theories of discrimination focus on discrimination at the individual, societal, or organizational level. We highlight the importance of the dynamic relationship between different institutional actors who jointly give rise to discriminatory outcomes. This reveals that discrimination can be contagious: discrimination that would otherwise not occur at one institutional level can arise due to discrimination at another institutional level. Therefore, discrimination by some actors can trickle down and create disparate impacts in processes that would otherwise be free of discrimination. This phenomenon, which we term “contagious discrimination,” can manifest itself in various settings such as employment and commercial trade negotiations. To illustrate its importance, we focus on the dynamic relationship between plea-bargaining—a critical part of the criminal justice system—and policing. We demonstrate that a defendant who anticipates racially discriminatory arrest by the police may accept a less favorable plea-bargain from the prosecutor in comparison to a similarly situated defendant who does not expect such discrimination by the police. This occurs even when the prosecutor is completely race-blind, highlighting how discrimination by law enforcement can lead to discriminatory outcomes at the plea-bargaining stage, thereby illustrating that discrimination can be contagious. We discuss the implications for policies focused on defendants’ perceptions, plea-bargain reform, and legal representation.

One of the longest running disputes at the intersection of education law and the First Amendment has involved conflict over evolutionary biology in American public schools. Through a century of nearly continuous litigation, creationist legislation and parental demands to exempt students from science instruction have been constrained by longstanding First Amendment doctrines.

That settlement is now unraveling. In Kennedy v. Bremerton School District, the Supreme Court abandoned its prior approach to the Establishment Clause in favor of a history-and-tradition analysis that is ill-suited to questions about modern scientific education. And in Mahmoud v. Taylor, the Court held that students’ compulsory exposure to ideas conflicting with their parents’ faith burdens religious exercise rights and triggers strict scrutiny.

This Essay provides the first comprehensive account of how these twin doctrinal shifts imperil the teaching of evolution. By tracing conflicts over evolution through three different eras—before, during, and after the regime ushered in by Lemon v. Kurtzman—this Essay shows how prior First Amendment doctrine cabined antievolution strategies, which included criminal statutes, “balanced-treatment” mandates, teacher-speech claims, and parental-rights suits. The Essay then evaluates Mahmoud, identifying two doctrinal disruptions: (1) exposure to disfavored ideas now constitutes a burden on religious exercise, and (2) strict scrutiny now reaches a broader swath of curricular challenges. Finally, the Essay forecasts the fallout: a surge in opt-out demands, heightened litigation risk, and an administrative chilling effect likely to erode already fragile scientific instruction.

As the first piece to frame Kennedy and Mahmoud as pivotal developments in the ongoing contest over science education, this Essay illuminates the doctrinal and institutional stakes of the Court’s Religion Clause revisionism. It also offers a roadmap for those seeking to preserve evidence-based curricula in the face of resurgent antievolution advocacy and a decline in the public acceptance of scientific consensus.

It is not often that the Supreme Court creates constitutionally required exceptions to established evidentiary rules. For that reason, when the Court created a racial bias exception to the centuries-old no-impeachment rule in Peña-Rodriguez v. Colorado, the decision was billed as a significant step in addressing racial bias in jury deliberations. But nearly a decade later, the decision has fallen far short of its promise. This Essay explains why.

This Essay argues that two structural impediments—juror non-disclosure instructions and no-contact rules—combine to make juror racial bias effectively undetectable and as a result, irremediable. Recognizing that relaxing no-contact rules or instructing jurors to report bias each comes with serious tradeoffs, this Essay does not propose a single reform. Instead, it calls on trial courts to serve as laboratories of racial justice, experimenting with locally tailored approaches to surface juror racial prejudice while balancing competing values.

Ultimately, if the legal system is committed to ensuring defendants are judged for what they are accused of and not the color of their skin, courts must confront not only the substance of bias but also the hidden procedural barriers that keep it from ever coming to light.

Section 1 of the Fourteenth Amendment provides that “[a]ll persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside.” Much of the debate over the meaning of this provision in the nineteenth century, especially what it meant to be “subject to the jurisdiction” of the United States, concerned the distinctive status of Native peoples—who were largely not birthright citizens even though born within the borders of the United States. It is unsurprising, then, that the Trump Administration and others have seized on these precedents in their attempt to unsettle black letter law on birthright citizenship.

But their arguments that this history demonstrates that jurisdiction meant something other than its ordinary meaning at the time—roughly, the power to make, decide, and enforce law—are anachronistic and wrong. They ignore the history of federal Indian law.

For most of the first century of the United States, the unique status of Native nations as quasi-foreign entities was understood to place these nations’ internal affairs beyond Congress’s legislative jurisdiction. By the 1860s, this understanding endured within federal law, but it confronted increasingly vocal challenges. The arguments over the Fourteenth Amendment, then, recapitulated this near century of debate over Native status. In crafting the citizenship clause, Congress largely agreed that jurisdiction meant the power to impose laws; where they heatedly disagreed was whether Native nations were, in fact, subject to that authority. Most concluded they were not, and in 1884, in Elk v. Wilkins, the Supreme Court affirmed the conclusion that Native nations’ quasi-foreign status excluded tribal citizens from birthright citizenship.

But the “anomalous” and “peculiar” status of Native nations, in the words of the nineteenth-century Supreme Court, means that the law governing tribal citizens cannot and should not be analogized to the position of other communities—or at least any communities who lack a quasi-foreign sovereignty and territory outside most federal and state law but within the borders of the United States. Indeed, the Court in Wong Kim Ark expressly rejected the attempt to invoke Elk v. Wilkins to deny birthright citizenship to a Chinese immigrant born of non-citizen parents, ruling that the decision “concerned only members of the Indian tribes within the United States.” The analogy has no more validity today than it did then, and the current Court should continue to reject it.

On February 5, 2022, Russia launched Cosmos 2553 into orbit. On December 5, 2024, the world learned that the satellite carried a dummy nuclear warhead, designed to test components for a nuclear-armed anti-satellite (ASAT) weapon. That satellite, if detonated in space, would have the potential to destroy the infrastructure on which much of modern life depends. Although the prospect of a nuclear-armed anti-satellite weapon is new, the threat to satellites is not. As satellite technologies have proliferated to facilitate civilian and military operations around the globe, so too have ASAT weapons. China, Russia, India, and the United States have all tested ASAT weapons, which can create millions of pieces of space debris in a realm where anything larger than one centimeter may damage spacecraft.

These new threats raise pressing questions that legal scholarship is only beginning to answer: Does the deployment of some or all ASAT weaponry violate international law? What lawful responses are available to states facing such threats? Do threats from weapons positioned in space meaningfully differ from those posed by ground-based systems? At what point may states lawfully invoke the right of self-defense and use force to counter these threats? This Essay aims to fill this gap. It begins by describing the novel threats posed by the rise of ASAT weaponry and outlining the legal framework governing spacefaring and hostilities. It then presents a framework to determine the lawful measures states can take to respond to ASAT threats and examines the threshold at which states may lawfully invoke their right of self-defense. The Essay urges caution in responding to novel ASAT technology, arguing that overreacting to space-based threats might trigger the very global catastrophe that states hope to avoid.

The second Trump administration has begun a concerted effort to reorganize the labor force of the entire United States. As federal workers are fired and higher education workers face funding cuts, the government is leaning into the bipartisan trend of using tariffs and subsidies to create jobs in sectors that serve a public purpose. Called “industrial policy,” the intervention of the federal government in private markets has spiked in popularity over the past decade. Bucking a longstanding tradition of laissez-faire capitalism and free trade, the executive and Congress have shown a willingness to put a visible hand on the market by subsidizing some sectors and taxing others. These interventions can easily backfire, as economists have warned, due to mistakes in the selection of subsidized sectors, high costs from tariffs, and ultimately slowed growth. Less discussed is the key role played by workers, whose unwillingness or inability to mobilize as directed by industrial policy could have dire consequences.

This Essay describes the barriers that may prevent American workers from participating in modern industrial policy, thereby undermining the success of the economy as a whole. The United States is already facing a labor shortage and employment rates are high, meaning there is little excess capacity for workers to move into domestic manufacturing or other jobs subsidized by industrial policy. Markets for services and goods that support workers, such as healthcare, housing, and childcare, have major gaps that further decrease labor supply. Instead of filling these gaps, however, industrial policy has chosen to target more esoteric markets. Workers then choose not to participate in the labor force, making it even more difficult to achieve the aims of industrial policy.

To support this thesis, we introduce novel empirical analysis on a key example of labor infrastructure—childcare. We build the most comprehensive existing dataset of childcare facilities in California and use it to document that more than sixty-five percent of children live in cities with no childcare, labeled “deserts,” or in cities with an inadequate supply of childcare. Labor supply is lower in deserts and underserved cities, even when controlling for other city characteristics, suggesting that there may be scope for interventions to increase childcare availability and increase labor supply.

The Essay then lays out a policy agenda that would give industrial policy a better chance for success. The first sectors to target should be domestic industries that support labor productivity. These policies are the least likely to have unintended negative consequences and will enable the success of other reforms. Then, industrial policy can target missing labor markets already prioritized by the Biden and Trump administrations—manufacturing, construction, and new technologies. By prioritizing workers over artificial intelligence and other forms of non-human capital, industrial policy is more likely to create long-term value for the American economy.

Current frameworks for compensating victims of police violence inadequately address collective healing and repair. Overlooked are those who suffer policing’s harmful effects without direct police contact, e.g., bystanders and family members of those directly impacted. Consider 17-year-old Darnella Frazier, who documented George Floyd’s murder by Minneapolis police and subsequently required her mother’s comfort to sleep through the resulting trauma. While strangers far and wide rallied to support her healing through GoFundMe donations, most indirect victims receive no such widespread support. Typically, bystanders traumatized by police violence must rely solely on their families and local communities—often the same race-class subjugated circles that experience policing’s worst excesses. This Essay proposes a new direction: when local governments breach Fourth Amendment guarantees, liability should include damages for communal harms, or what I call “reparative” damages.

Section 1983 was intended to be strong medicine for the enduring problem of state-enabled racialized violence in the United States. Reconstruction lawmakers recognized that such violence left entire communities under siege, so they responded with unbounded federal power to address these harms. As the 2020 uprisings spotlighted, police violence today similarly harms entire communities, particularly Black and Brown ones. Yet current remedial schemes fail to capture these broader harms. I propose that at the damages stage of a successful Fourth Amendment suit against cities under Section 1983, courts should aim to repair policing’s collective harms by considering five factors in awarding compensation: (1) the police department’s overall budget; (2) evidence of historically troubling or abusive departmental practices; (3) annual frequency of excessive force litigation against the department; (4) existence of any consent decrees governing the department; (5) if applicable, the department’s compliance with decree requirements. When a department demonstrates a troubling history, faces numerous constitutional claims, operates under consent decrees, and shows minimal reform progress, courts could reasonably conclude it inflicts systemic harm on the community it is supposed to serve, warranting reparative damages.

Rather than awarding damages to individual plaintiffs, courts would direct compensation to a community reparative fund—a hybrid model incorporating key features of both Victims Compensation Funds (VCF) and cy pres distributions. People harmed by police in that locality could thereafter apply to the program for compensation. Self-certification would enable anyone who could credibly establish that they were vicariously harmed by police to receive compensation. Embracing a dynamic approach to statutory interpretation, this approach aligns with Section 1983’s sweeping remedial vision and meets the equity demands of our time. And because the judiciary has played a principal role in enabling police violence by manufacturing stringent immunity doctrines and eroding the Fourth Amendment, enlisting courts to make collective amends for policing’s harms has stronger moral force than a legislative approach.

In mass tort multidistrict litigation (MDL), existing scaling-up devices have failed to generate significant efficiency gains. This essay suggests a novel device: issue presumption. Where courts possess the greater power to apply issue preclusion, courts may instead apply issue presumption to shift the burden of persuasion against the losing party in subsequent cases. By scaling up through this softer, more flexible approach, MDL courts can capture lost efficiency gains.

The Supreme Court’s decision in Loper Bright Enterprises v. Raimondo calls on courts to apply a broad range of rules of statutory construction instead of engaging in a deferential inquiry about whether an agency’s views are reasonable. Courts of appeals face the question how to apply their new interpretative responsibilities in the absence of Chevron deference. This Essay argues that courts of appeals must now apply the long- standing rule of strict construction of deportation statutes, also known as the immigration rule of lenity, which provides that ambiguities in deportation statutes be resolved to limit the sanction of deportation. This Essay shows that the Court developed the rule of strict construction of deportation statutes as a substantive check against the harsh consequences of deportation statutes. It further shows that the Court treated it as a strong substantive rule that applied to ambiguous statutes, even in situations where the agency’s position found support in its contemporaneous interpretation of the statute. By 1966, the Solicitor General as well as majority and dissenting Justices treated the rule as settled, leaving only the question whether a particular statutory provision contained an ambiguity sufficient to trigger the rule in the case before the Court. This established rule of strict construction is supported by the same justifications as the criminal rule of lenity and is further supported by unique aspects of deportation statutes, which typically have no statute of limitations and may apply retroactively. While much remains to be seen about how courts will apply their interpretive powers in the wake of Loper Bright, the rule of strict construction of deportation statutes has the pedigree of a strong substantive rule that ought to be considered fully in determining the scope of deportation laws.