By Osamudia R. James. Full text here. Popular engagement with black racial identity is steadily increasing. From the protest slogan “Black Lives Matter,” to the visibility of black racial identity on number-one-debuting visual albums like Lemonade, blackness is increasingly visible in mainstream American culture. At the same time, “Black Lives Matter” gave way to “All Lives…

By Brandon L. Garrett. Full text here. The concept of reasonableness pervades constitutional doctrine. The concept has long served to structure common law doctrines from negligence to criminal law, but its rise in constitutional law is more recent and diverse. This Article aims to unpack surprisingly different formulations of what the term reasonable means in constitutional…

By Jill E. Fisch. Full text here. Despite the increasing importance of shareholder voting, regulators have paid little attention to the rights of retail investors who own approximately thirty percent of publicly traded companies but who vote less than thirty percent of their shares. A substantial factor contributing to this low turnout is the antiquated mechanism…

By Toni M. Massaro, Helen Norton, & Margot E. Kaminski. Full text here. The First Amendment may protect speech by strong Artificial Intelligence (AI). In this Article, we support this provocative claim by expanding on earlier work, addressing significant concerns and challenges, and suggesting potential paths forward. This is not a claim about the state of…

By Aziz Z. Huq. Full text here. Beginning in the 1990s, police departments in major American cities started aggressively deploying pedestrian stops and frisks in response to escalating violent crime rates. Today, high-volume use of “stop, question, and frisk” (SQF) is an acute point of friction between urban police and minority residents. In numerous cities, recent…

By Sanne H. Knudsen. Full text here. Chemicals and pesticides permeate the natural world. They are woven (sometimes quite literally) into the fabric of our lives. Because chemicals are everywhere, the key to protecting public health in the chemical age is regulating cumulative risk—that is, the combined risk from exposure to multiple chemicals and pesticides through…

By Jasmine B. Gonzales Rose. Full text here. Scholars, judges, and lawyers have long believed that evidence rules apply equally to all persons regardless of race. This Article challenges this assumption and reveals how evidence law structurally disadvantages people of color. A critical race analysis of stand-your-ground defenses, cross-racial eyewitness misidentifications, and minority flight from racially…

By Lumen N. Mulligan & Glen Staszewski. Full text here. We claim that the proper method of interpreting the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure (Rules)—civil rules interpretive theory—should be recognized as a distinct field of scholarly inquiry and judicial practice. Fundamentally, the Rules are not statutes. Yet the theories of statutory interpretation that are typically imported…

The 2016 Stein Lecture. Transcript here. This piece was transcribed from a conversation between Justice Sonia Sotomayor and Professor Robert A. Stein held at the University of Minnesota Law School on October 17, 2016. Justice Sotomayor shares how her early life experiences, such as being diagnosed with type 1 diabetes, shaped her worldview. She discusses…

By Gerald S. Kerska. Full text here. How should public universities strike a balance between First Amendment values and their mission to establish a diverse and inclusive environment? Recent events from the University of Minnesota bring this question into focus.