Issue: 1 - Fall

 18 U.S.C. §§ 1461 and 1462, originating in the Comstock Act of 1873, prohibit the mailing and importation of any abortion-related material within the United States. Whatever protection there was against the application of these laws by the government and private individuals from the constitutional right to an abortion was overturned by Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization in 2022. Recent trends from the last year show that conservative lawmakers are now eager to start enforcing the Comstock Act mailing prohibitions; some are relying on the existence of these century-old laws to justify new abortion restrictions. Pushback from the Biden Administration’s Office of Legal Counsel suggests that a limiting construction should be read into the Comstock Act statues so that the prohibition on mailing would apply only to “illegal abortions.” This Note engages with the enforcement history of the statutes and criticism of OLC’s interpretation to ultimately conclude that the Comstock Act Laws are unenforceable because they are unconstitutionally vague. In doing so, this Note advances a conception of the void for vagueness doctrine that would place greater emphasis on enforcement and fair notice considerations. 

People with disabilities sometimes have impairments that manifest in unacceptable and disruptive behavior, such as inappropriate language, angry outbursts, and conflict-generating harassment. Such behavior, which I call “impairment-related misconduct,” often leads to exclusion from work or public places. Notwithstanding the Americans with Disabilities Act’s goal of promoting the full and equal social participation of disabled people, legal challenges to those exclusionary responses have generally failed.

Using cases involving employees with Borderline personality disorder, this article criticizes this outcome as grounded in a conceptual conflation of duty and sympathy, which in turn arises from a tragic view of disability. It also offers an original approach to resolving these cases. Specifically, this article develops a novel category of reasonable accommodations for persons with disabilities. I call them “moral accommodations.” These are duties to tolerate, to various degrees, unacceptable behavior related to an impairment. They involve, for instance, giving people second chances, reassigning them to different positions or service providers, or exempting them from certain rules of conduct. Establishing the theoretical foundations for this new category, I argue that, like other reasonable accommodations moral accommodations are plausibly grounded in various conceptions of justice, most notably egalitarianism and the “capabilities approach.” I also address potential objections, both pragmatic and philosophical. For example, although misconduct causes harm to others, I argue that moral accommodations are nevertheless justifiable. By expanding the duties owed to persons with disabilities, moral accommodations develop our conception of a just society as one in which inappropriate behavior is sometimes tolerated.

This paper seeks to analyze the historical and political outcomes of the federal recognition process within the Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA) and suggests that the BIA should eliminate the continuous existence requirement from that process. This paper also suggests that the BIA should consider ratifying state tribal recognition through an alternative criterion rather than the federal acknowledgment process. Without taking action, the current structure of recognition fails the United States’ duties to its Indigenous population and underscores its role in extinguishing the continuous existence of many Indian tribes.

Since they returned to power in August 2021, the Taliban are again imposing a regime of gender apartheid in Afghanistan in violation of international law, just as they did in the 1990s.  Given that it is pervasively discriminatory, gender apartheid poses specific human rights problems requiring particular, heightened responses. A system of governance based on subordination of women institutionalizes sex discrimination across state political, legal, and cultural infrastructures. It necessitates different counter-strategies.

This Article suggests conceptual architecture for analyzing and responding to this aspect of the current Afghan crisis.  Specifically, the robust international legal framework that helped end racial apartheid should be urgently adapted to address gender apartheid and concert the responses of other states to it. 

There are three principal arguments in favor of this approach. 1) It is essential for fulfilling states’ international legal commitments on sex discrimination across every document in the International Bill of Human Rights, as well as the specific target they affirmed in the Sustainable Development Goals to achieve gender equality by 2030. 2) Any other stance leads to an unacceptable imbalance in the manner in which international law addresses discrimination on the bases of sex and race. 3) This may be the only way to effectively tackle systematic Taliban abuses, as the organization is deeply committed to its violations of women’s rights and already sanctioned by the United Nations Security Council. Such an approach marshals the resources of the international community to constrain the Taliban, and is the best hope for ensuring the credibility, legitimacy and effectiveness of the international legal response.

In December 2021, following a year of sustained mass protests, farmers in India forced the repeal of three controversial Farm Laws that attempted to deregulate India’s agricultural sector in service of corporate interests. Farmers feared that the laws would dismantle price supports for key crops, jeopardize their livelihoods, and facilitate a corporate takeover of India’s agrarian economy. This Article situates India’s historic farmer protests in the context of the country’s longstanding agrarian crisis and the corporate capture of agriculture worldwide. I argue that the protests arose in response not only to the Farm Laws, but also to decades of state-sponsored ecological and economic violence that have relegated millions of Indian farmers to a state of precarity and desperation. I further argue that the protests hold key insights for social movements around the globe, and for the future of food in India and beyond.

The Article analyzes the farmers’ protests using a four-part paradigm to assess contemporary movements for social change: Roots, Resistance, Reform, and Reconstruction. In so doing, it makes several contributions to legal scholarship. First, it makes visible the lived realities of India’s rural masses who have been left behind amidst the country’s celebrated economic growth. Second, it reveals the many ways in which State violence manifests, and how that violence is mediated through agricultural policies. Third, it demonstrates the power of mass nonviolent resistance as a strategic tool to confront State violence. And fourth, it explores the tension between reform and revolution. I argue that the farmers’ reformist demands do not sufficiently address the ecological harms and caste-based inequities that underpin India’s agrarian crisis. But the movement’s building of broad-based alliances across caste and class has opened the door to more transformative change.

The phrase “legal name” appears everywhere. And wherever it appears, it seems to come with an assumption that it picks out one, clear such name for each person. So, do “legal” names as the phrase is commonly understood really exist? As far as federal and most state law is concerned, it turns out the answer is a clear no.

This article seeks to highlight the legal, moral, and philosophical wrongness of the notion that people have one uniquely identifying legal name. To do that, we survey the status of names in various legal domains, highlighting that legal consensus tends to be that there is no one “correct legal name” for individuals (if anything, people often have many “legal” names). We argue this common notion that every person has a single, clearly defined “legal” name is a kind of collective delusion we all seem to share (emerging somewhere in the late twentieth century), but is not grounded in legal or social reality. To address this harmful delusion, we present a series of ready-to-cite conclusions about the current state of the law and introduce a normative framework for how institutions and individuals ought to choose between people’s various legal names. Engaging with legal theory, feminist philosophy, and philosophy of language, we discuss the social function of names and argue that names enable people to communicate important social information about themselves—which can include their gender, religion, and familial relations. Thus, we conclude by arguing that individuals and legal institutions have a normative responsibility to respect peoples’ preferred legal names, thereby allowing them to authentically represent these facets of their social identities.

History is deeply embedded in federal Indian law. According to jurisprudence, Indians were nonagricultural “savages” prior to 1492. Indians’ supposed lack of sophistication played a vital role in foundational cases determining Indian rights and the extent of tribal sovereignty. The process of stare decisis has resulted in repetition of the principles formulated on the belief in Indian simplicity; consequently, historic ideas of Indians continue to impact present-day Indian rights—often for the worse. This is the time trap.

The time trap is the popular belief that Indian cultures were simple, non-commercial, hunter-gatherers prior to European arrival. Encapsulated within this belief is the idea that indigenous cultures are static and erode as they merge with mainstream society. However, this perception is incorrect: the indigenous peoples of North America had complex societies prior to 1492, including agriculture and expansive trade networks. Indian tribes organically incorporated previously unknown items from Europe, such as the horse and gun, into their cultures. This Article asserts that reexamining how society and the law view Indian history is the key to unlocking the time trap.

This Note considers the question of how to protect cultural property in an era of rising cyberwarfare. The Note argues that the law of armed conflict (LOAC)—also referred to as international humanitarian law (IHL)— should apply to protect the three categories of cultural property which cyberwarfare could affect: real-word cultural property, digitized cultural property (cultural property which has been converted into digital form), and digital cultural property (cultural property which has always existed in digital form). Lastly, this Note argues for a novel interpretation of the 1954 Hague Convention for the Protection for Cultural Property that would encompass digital and digitized cultural property.

At least 228 people executed in the modern era—or more than one in every seven—were right too soon. That is, they had claims in their case that today would render their execution unconstitutional, but were killed because of a legal regime that arrived too late. Roughly 30% of our total include the children and persons with intellectual disability who were executed prior to Roper v. Simmons and Atkins v. Virginia, respectively. But the great majority of the people identified in our study raised claims based on doctrine that had already been clearly established by the Supreme Court. If the lower courts had applied Supreme Court caselaw correctly, these people would have gotten relief. Yet the lower courts resisted the doctrine and for years the Supreme Court did nothing to correct them. This resistance was particularly egregious in Texas and Florida. In Texas, at least 108 people were executed after the Supreme Court had already established the relevant basis for relief, and in Florida, the total is at least 36. At least when it comes to the death penalty, the lower courts seem especially unwilling to follow Supreme Court doctrine that would save a person from execution. The result is a system that routinely kills people even when they are right.