Unsexing Breastfeeding
By Naomi Schoenbaum. Full Text. For half a century, constitutional sex equality doctrine has been combating harmful sex stereotypes by invalidating laws that treat women as caregivers and men as breadwinners. Yet decades after the constitutional sex equality revolution unsexed parenting roles, one area of parenting has escaped this doctrine’s exacting gaze: breastfeeding. In the…
Continue ReadingRethinking the Crime of Rioting
By Nick Robinson. Full Text. The fear of riots has long loomed large in the public imagination. This fear is at least partly justified. Riots can present unique challenges, both in the harm they can cause and in the government’s ability to control them. However, from the American colonies to the Civil Rights era, there…
Continue ReadingCitizenship Disparities
By Emily Ryo and Reed Humphrey. Full text. Citizenship is “nothing less than the right to have rights,” wrote Chief Justice Warren in his Perez v. Brownell dissent. Yet no study to date has been able to systematically investigate agency decisions to grant or deny citizenship in an administrative process called naturalization adjudication. This Article…
Continue ReadingA Hill to Die On: Federal Court Reform in the 2020s
Symposium Foreword by Daniel P. Suitor. Full Text. Is the Federal Judiciary broken and, if so, what can we do to fix it? To that end, Minnesota Law Review hosted its annual Symposium on March 25, 2022. Titled “A Hill to Die On: Federal Court Reform in the 2020s,” the event gathered some of the…
Continue ReadingPsychological Parenthood
By Anne L. Alstott, Anne C. Dailey, and Douglas NeJaime. Full Text. Family law in the United States is governed by an assortment of familiar legal doctrines and policies that often undermine, and sometimes sever, the relationships between children and the adults with whom children are most closely bonded. For example, the “best interests of…
Continue ReadingConstraining Criminal Laws
By F. Andrew Hessick and Carissa Byrne Hessick. Full Text. Most criminal law is statutory. Although the violation of criminal statutes can result in significantly more serious consequences than violations of other types of statutes, the dominant theories of statutory interpretation do not distinguish between criminal statutes and non-criminal statutes. Those theories say that, when…
Continue ReadingPublic Undersight
By Christina Koningisor. Full Text. The laws governing transparency and accountability in government are deeply flawed and plagued by steep financial costs, high barriers to access, and widespread corporate capture. While legal scholars have suggested a wide variety of fixes, they have focused almost exclusively on legal solutions. They have largely overlooked a growing set…
Continue ReadingThe Character of Jury Exclusion
By Anna Offit. Full Text. Encounters with the legal system are unevenly distributed throughout the American population, with Black and poor citizens targeted as disparate subjects of surveillance, arrest, and criminal conviction. At the same time, these encounters, as well as a stated belief in the unfairness of the legal system, are commonly viewed as…
Continue ReadingPirate Arbitration
By David Horton. Full Text. The U.S. Supreme Court’s expansion of the Federal Arbitration Act (FAA) has transformed the American civil justice system. In a series of controversial opinions, the Court has held that the FAA preempts state law, bars class actions, and empowers companies to delegate questions about the arbitration itself to arbitrators. For…
Continue ReadingUnderstanding Chilling Effects
By Jonathon W. Penney. Full Text. With digital surveillance and censorship on the rise, the amount of data available unprecedented, and corporate and governmental actors increasingly employing emerging technologies like artificial intelligence and facial recognition technology for surveillance and data analytics, concerns about “chilling effects,” that is, the capacity for these activities to “chill” or…
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