Civil Rights

Civil Rights Articles

The Forgotten History of Prison Law: Judicial Oversight of Detention Facilities in the Nation’s Early Years

Vol. 138 No. 7 Prison law is characterized by judicial deference to penal administrators. Despite the well-documented horrors that occur behind prison walls, federal and state courts often decline to intervene, asserting, among other things, that prisoners’ rights are limited and that the judicial branch lacks the power and expertise to get involved in the inner workings of detention facilities. Moreover, jurists often assume that the nation’s first courts largely stayed out of prisons and jails, and contemporary judicial deference is therefore historically rooted.
Abortion Law Book Review

How to Get Free in a Time of Retrenchment

Vol. 138 No. 7 Queering Reproductive Justice and Liberating Abortion are not books of theory. I want to make this clear from the start because the work of “queering” a topic can sometimes be followed by paragraphs filled with words like deontological, epistemic, and discursive (not that there’s anything wrong with those words).
Evidence Articles

Excited Delirium, Policing, and the Law of Evidence

Vol. 138 No. 6 Police use of force continues to be a significant problem in American law and society. Recent discussions have focused on doctrinal issues such as what type of force is considered “reasonable” under the Fourth Amendment and the propriety of qualified immunity as a defense that can shield law enforcement from civil litigation. However, there has been little commentary on how these and other legal questions might be informed by medicine — specifically, victim diagnoses that might effectively absolve officers from criminal prosecution or civil liability.
Civil Rights Recent Case

Banyee v. Garland

Eighth Circuit Holds that Prolonged Mandatory Immigration Detention Poses No Due Process Issues While Removal Proceedings Are Ongoing

Vol. 138 No. 6
Constitutional Law Articles

Determining Rights

Vol. 138 No. 4 This Article explores Founding-era views about the grounding of constitutional rights and how those rights obtained determinate legal content. Today, we typically view constitutional rights as textually grounded, gaining their force through ratification, and we treat the task of determining their content as a question of law — that is, a question for judges to decide using legal criteria.