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This Special Issue is the product of countless hours of unpaid student work, many cups of terrible coffee from the Law Review’s Keurig, and the mistakes I made that brought me to the NYU School of Law.

I attended the NYU Gallatin School of Individualized Study, where my undergraduate concentration was titled “Reconstructing Asian American History through Literature.” The motivation behind the project was simple: I wanted to study disaporic history but struggled to figure out how exactly to do that. My professors and advisors provided me with the guidance I needed to begin this study. They filled in the gaps of Asian American history that I couldn’t find in classrooms, using artwork, poetry, short stories, and novels written by diasporic Asian communities. But even with those narratives— explaining the conditions under which they came to live in the United States and experiences excluded from the zeitgeist—I realized that my understanding of diasporic history was incomplete without a sufficient understanding of the law. Specifically, I needed to understand how the law creates conditions of exclusion, how narratives we tell about the law enforce that exclusion, and the ways in which legal mythmaking renders invisible experiences under the law.

And then I got to law school and realized that those are not really things we talk about in the classroom. Doctrinal classes were about learning just that: doctrine. We learned the law and not quite what the law does. We didn’t engage in the process of recovering experiences under the law; we didn’t learn how to work with interdisciplinary scholarship. What drew me to the NYU Law Review was the fact that student-selected scholarship could send a signal of what was needed in academic discourse. I wanted to see more discussions of the theories underlying literary expression and their role in the law, jurisprudence of visual art, and history of experiences under and in spite of the law. Thankfully, this Special Issue answers the call of what I had wanted to see the most from legal scholarship, and I am proud of the Law Review’s work to platform work that is so desperately needed.

As the Special Issue exemplifies, Law and Literature as a movement is more than the simple intersection between law and literature. Law and Literature finds its home in the intellectual history of law and curiosity about how literary meaning-making in text could provide guidance for understanding our use of language. In this regard, the Law and Literature movement is really two movements: Law in Literature, how law is depicted in literature and what that means for the sociocultural meaning of the law; and Law as Literature, employing techniques of literary criticism, theory, and interpretation to understand and reform legal systems. The Special Issue responds to these sub-movements within Law and Literature, while also forcing the movement to respond to live debates. Professor Brandi Lupo’s In the Court’s Image critiques the rise of “visual opinions” and the Supreme Court’s embrace of visual rhetoric; Professor Etienne Toussaint’s After the Comet: Du Bois, Afrofuturism, and Constitutional Renewal uses Du Bois’s The Comet as a framework to trace “comet cycles” between Black protest movements and constitutional interpretation; Professor Devon Carbado’s Can You Be Black and Teach That? examines the epistemological burdens Fourth Amendment law imposes on Black students and faculty and presents a poem that seeks to embody and represent these concepts and constraints; and Professor Jesse M. Cross’s Amending Linguistic Textualism and Professors Kevin Tobia and Brandon Waldon’s Linguistics and Textualism debate the strengths and weaknesses of using linguistics in textualism.

This Special Issue is not possible without the generosity and scholarship of our authors. After all, this Special Issue is, in many ways, an exercise in building the plane as we’re flying it. It’s a collection of many “firsts”: first special issue, first law and literature pieces, and first time publishing an Article and a Response Essay. Our authors’ patience was invaluable to the production of the book. Along those lines, the Law Review’s editors—overworked, underappreciated, and still very much learning—are the reasons why the Law Review is able to explore, platform, and engage with scholarship. While our authors provide the voice, our students provide the means to making sure their voices are heard. I learned how to articulate my understanding of the law through the plays of Ayad Akhtar, poetry of Cathy Park Hong and Mitsuye Yamada, and prose of James Baldwin and Toni Morrison. My hope is that this book provides a means for students and scholars of the law to find texts to articulate their understandings of the law, as well. I am grateful to Professor George Shulman, who taught me the power of words and introduced me to many of these texts that form the foundation of my interests; Professor Kenji Yoshino, for his guidance during the first stages of development for the book; Professor Noah Rosenblum for the encouragement to make a special issue and create a home for my interests; and Ian Leach, Editor-in-Chief of volumes 99 and 100 of the NYU Law Review, for his mentorship. Most importantly, I am indebted to the student editors of the NYU Law Review. I am grateful to have worked with all of you, and I am grateful that this is the book that ends my tenure as Editor-in-Chief of the NYU Law Review. Student editors are why law journals are possible, and I believe the NYU Law Review’s student editors are a cut above, not just because they joined me on this ride when I started our first editorial board meeting with “I think I want to do a Special Issue.”

With Epilogue by Emmanuel Mauleon

Notwithstanding the broad literature on race and constitutional criminal procedure, scholars have rarely engaged the epistemological burdens Fourth Amendment law imposes on Black students and faculty. Those burdens derive from a fundamental and insufficiently acknowledged disjuncture: despite the rights-protecting language in the Fourth Amendment (in particular, its prohibition against “unreasonable searches and seizures”), Fourth Amendment law is, for Black people, a domain of existential violence. It is Fourth Amendment law that determines when and how the police may engage us in our homes, in our cars, at school, and on our streets— and it is Fourth Amendment law that produces and governs the anti-Black border between surveillance and death. This fraught and necrological feature of Fourth Amendment law sets the doctrinal terms on which Black students must learn, and Black faculty must teach, the law. In that regard, the violence Black people encounter in the context of engaging with Fourth Amendment jurisprudence is against the very Black body they occupy. This Article describes that normalized epistemological environment. One might think of the account the Article provides as a pedagogy of the Black body, or more precisely, as an articulation of what the Black body can teach us about the racialized “field of pain and death” Fourth Amendment law produces. That field includes a constitutional archive that requires Black people to learn and teach law through our legally sanctioned disposability. Fourth Amendment law is thus not merely violent in its social effects; it is epistemologically violent—and legal pedagogy is one of the sites where that violence is reproduced.

In Bondi v. VanDerStok, the Supreme Court issued a consequential decision for statutory interpretation. Drawing on law-and-linguistics research, it infused new empiricism into the search for word meanings, introducing a method this Article labels “Linguistic Textualism.” It is incumbent upon the legal community to reckon with Linguistic Textualism, the Article asserts—because if VanDerStok is the future of statutory interpretation, we are in some trouble.

To make that argument, the Article first diagnoses the pathologies of Linguistic Textualism. It chronicles multiple artificial constraints that Linguistic Textualism imposes upon interpreters, including a striking tendency to erase the historical evolution of a statute. This can undermine interpretation of amended statutes, in particular, which now dominate the Court’s docket. Attempting to do better, the Article then develops a competing interpretation of the statute from VanDerStok. Through an increased attention to amendment history, the Article uncovers the untold story of the Gun Control Act of 1968. In so doing, it provides a vivid illustration of why courts should be attentive to the rich, layered nature of statutory law—and it gives a methodological template for how to accomplish that goal.

The result is a comparative interpretive project with numerous insights—both doctrinal and theoretical. It provides a new understanding of the GCA, a statute whose unresolved questions will shape the future of gun control in America. The Article reveals the shortcomings of Linguistic Textualism, an interpretive approach only increasing in prevalence. The Article develops new tools and strategies to better interpret amended statutes—including a proposed “dead-hand canon,” which can resolve the inconsistencies that amendments often produce. And the Article outlines a new principle for assessing interpretive methods—one that offers a useful baseline for interpretive debates. Through these many lessons, the Article aims to help transform VanDerStok into a productive moment for statutory interpretation.

The U.S. Supreme Court is experiencing a visual boom. In a break from its text-based tradition, the Court is increasingly incorporating images directly into its opinions. In the past fifteen years, pictures of prison dormitories, prayer circles, and stolen artwork have graced the pages of the U.S. Reports. Recently, the Court’s visual vocabulary has grown to include a 150-year-old political cartoon, fifty-nine license plate designs, and a series of gun diagrams alongside a gif. Even more, in just the last five years, visuals have started appearing more frequently in the main body of opinions rather than being relegated to appendices.

While this rise in “visual opinions” may seem inevitable in today’s visual age, it raises significant questions about the foundations of judicial authority and the nature of judicial reasoning. But while scholars have extensively analyzed visual advocacy by lawyers, the Court’s own embrace of visual rhetoric—and its implications for the Court and the institution of judicial decisionmaking—has received surprisingly little attention.

This Article explores the Court’s visual practices and their implications for judicial legitimacy. It makes three key contributions. First, drawing on a review of over 400 visual opinions, it provides the first account of the Court’s use of images from the Founding to the present. It finds that while the Court’s use of visuals has accelerated in recent years, its use of visual content finds deep and expansive roots in the nineteenth century. Second, it connects the Court’s visual practices to legitimacy theory, analyzing how visuals reshape the Court’s performance as a principled decisionmaker, impartial decider, and public servant. Visual content can enhance judicial reasoning by clarifying complex concepts and connecting abstract law to concrete reality. But it can also undermine core legitimacy values by compromising analytical rigor, embedding hidden biases, and transforming legal discourse into political performance.

Third, this Article advances a counterintuitive recommendation. If a picture is worth a thousand words, judges may need to write a thousand “more” words when they include pictures. Because visuals invite multiple interpretations and can overwhelm legal reasoning, courts should consider providing enhanced justification when they use images. Rather than letting visuals “speak for themselves,” judges must explicitly explain their relevance, anticipate competing interpretations, and directly confront visual counternarratives. Visual opinions require more explanation, not less.

Should linguistics inform textualism? When legal theories make claims about another discipline’s subject, that discipline is often illuminating: History impacts originalist debates, economics shapes “law and economics” analysis, and psychology imbues behavioral legal studies. Linguistic claims abound in textualist decisions and debates, but linguistics—the scientific study of human language—less often informs these. Now, critics question whether it should.

This Essay defends the relevance of the field of linguistics to the theory, practice, and critique of textualism. We offer examples, including the Supreme Court’s 2025 VanDerStok decision. Our argument implies neither that textualism is the correct interpretive theory nor that linguistics invariably bolsters it. Indeed, linguistics often challenges textualist assumptions and conclusions. The Essay’s claim is simply that for both textualists and their critics, considering—rather than eschewing—linguistics makes discussion more sophisticated and productive.

American constitutional development has long followed cycles of crisis and restoration, resisting linear narratives of progress. This pattern is especially evident in the interplay between Black protest movements and constitutional interpretation, where transformative possibilities emerge during periods of social rupture but are later constrained by institutional restoration. This Essay argues that W.E.B. Du Bois’s 1920 speculative fiction, The Comet, offers a framework for understanding these cyclical dynamics. The short story’s three-part structure—normalcy, rupture, and restoration—reveals how genuine equality surfaces during catastrophic disruption yet proves unsustainable once hierarchical “normalcy” returns. Using interdisciplinary analysis that combines legal theory, historical inquiry, and literary criticism, this Essay traces “comet cycles” within major Black protest movements from abolition to contemporary struggles. It demonstrates that literary imagination can illuminate constitutional dynamics that conventional doctrinal analysis cannot reach.

Specifically, this Essay argues that Black protest movements function both as catalysts of constitutional rupture and as interpreters of constitutional possibility during suspended moments of normalcy. Examining the abolitionist era, the Civil Rights movement, and present-day struggles through Du Bois’s framework highlights how social movements advance foundational promises of liberty and equality while revealing the fragility of constitutional gains. Even radical critiques of constitutional legitimacy often arise because movements have taken these promises seriously, exposing the inadequacy of conventional reform. This approach offers strategic insight for contemporary movements, clarifying when transformative possibilities emerge and how restoration dynamics undermine them. By centering Black lived experiences as integral to constitutional interpretation, this Essay reframes American constitutionalism as shaped fundamentally by those historically excluded from legal discourse, yet central to its most transformative moments.