Mar 30, 2026 Maya ManianHealth Law
For more than forty years, HIV/AIDS has been understood as a paradigmatic public health crisis. The HIV/AIDS crisis generated extraordinary social movement activism and resulted in significant public health reforms. Yet, the dominant narratives of AIDS too often marginalize women’s experiences and obscure how deeply feminist advocacy reshaped not only the law but also the science of AIDS. In Risk and Resistance, Aziza Ahmed offers a powerful corrective to the historical narrative surrounding AIDS while also provoking broader questions about the nature of scientific knowledge itself.
Risk and Resistance is history, theory, and warning. The book is at once a rich archive of feminism and AIDS, a sharp challenge to the myth of science as a purely objective, neutral domain, and a conceptual lens for understanding contemporary public health crises in the MAHA era. Through a meticulously researched genealogy of feminist AIDS activism from the early 1980s through the 2010s, Ahmed shows how feminist social movements reshaped scientific consensus, transformed public health law, and altered the material distribution of life-saving resources. Continue reading "Public Health Law, Social Movements, and the Feminist Remaking of AIDS"
Mar 27, 2026 Sarah LorrFamily Law
What makes a good mother? This question, once answered simply by staying alive, has become more complicated over time. For example, the recent Heritage Foundation Report, Saving America by Saving the Family: A Foundation for the Next 250 Years, seems to suggest that a good mother is defined, at least in part, by her marital status. Some might locate good mothering in the willingness and ability to deeply research childcare-related choices and provide labor-intensive care, while others caution against this sort of “intensive parenting.” And how should a mother feel? Is it healthy to feel conflicted about motherhood? Is it normal?
In a cultural context that prizes the selfless mother above all, Professor Elizabeth Kukura’s engaging and insightful article, Normalizing Maternal Ambivalence, argues that scrutinizing and punishing maternal ambivalence is the result of restrictive gender stereotypes about the self-sacrificing and overwhelmingly joyful mother. Maternal ambivalence, which is “both common and normal,” can be defined as having mixed feelings about mothering and the role of motherhood. Psychologists consider such complex, uncertain feelings about motherhood typical; the multiplicity of modern motherhood memoirs and their market success offer evidence that ambivalent feelings about motherhood are both common and relatable to many. Despite the ubiquity of maternal ambivalence, Professor Kukura shows us that it can be a basis to punish mothers in the criminal legal system and separate families in the family regulation system. Continue reading "How Should a Mother Feel?"
Mar 26, 2026 Ezra YoungEquality
In her Supreme Court chambers, the late Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg prominently displayed a passage of Hebrew scripture: “Tzedek, Tzedek, tirdof.” In English, the passage reads: “Justice, justice you shalt pursue.”
Some Americans are ardently religious. And some, like Justice Ginsburg, believe they are religiously obliged to do right in both public and private life. Figuring out how far individuals may extend their religious exercise into the public sphere is difficult and increasingly fraught. As Justice Ginsburg elevated more than a decade ago in her dissent to Burwell v. Hobby Lobby Stores, Inc., a legal rule that allows a religious person to affect the rights of someone who does not share their views is constitutionally suspect. Put another way, the big metaphysical questions some of us happily answer through faith alone are not always conducive to secular logics, let alone law. Continue reading "Religious Equality Run Amuck"
Mar 25, 2026 Ji Seon SongCriminal Law
Over 3.6 million people are on some form of community supervision of either probation or parole. This is almost double the number of people incarcerated in juvenile facilities, jails, and prisons. The alternative to incarceration has now become its own beast, leading to the new coinage of mass supervision or mass probation. The problems with mass supervision and mass probation are many, as scholars have noted. Supervision in the community net-widens. It replicates and perpetuates racial inequality. Community supervision does not lead to a life free from the criminal legal system. Instead, people who are sentenced to probation and parole often cycle back into incarceration. Probation and parole expand the carceral footprint and do so in ways that infringe on the privacy, liberty, and dignity of lives, while also expanding law enforcement capabilities.
These criticisms implicitly include the actions of the agents of community supervision—probation and parole agents. But is there more to probation and parole than just supervision? As routine, embedded institutional actors who operate at the nexus of law enforcement, rehabilitator, counselor, and adjudicator, what other kinds of harms do they produce? This is where Renagh O’Leary’s work comes in. In the “new penology” described by Jonathan Simon and Malcolm Feeley, with its emphasis on risk management and control of those deemed dangerous, the agents of community supervision are important arbiters of risk management and assessors of dangerousness. In two articles, Supervising Sentencing and Ideological Testing, O’Leary delves deeper into the processes of community supervision agents, looking beyond their purely supervisory functions. Each article is noteworthy for its individual contributions, but reading them together reveals additional insights and implications. O’Leary’s work uncovers probation and parole agents as important ideological actors contributing to the “ideology of criminal procedure.” These principles of criminal procedure frame the cultures and interactions between the criminal justice actors and the public, constituting “a set of ideas and assumptions that undergird the operation of the criminal process and legitimize the status quo.” Continue reading "The Ideology of Community Supervision"
Mar 24, 2026 Howard M. WassermanCourts Law
Elizabeth Earle Beske,
Article III’s Constraints on the Legislative Power, __
Wm. & Mary L. Rev. __ (forthcoming 2026), available at
SSRN (Sept. 17, 2025).
Good scholarship connects distinct areas and issues, highlighting consistencies and inconsistencies (some might say hypocrisies) across areas. Elizabeth Beske’s Article III’s Constraints on the Legislative Power connects a well-covered area—35 years of SCOTUS narrowing Article III standing, from Lujan through TransUnion—to historic and modern controversies over congressional power and judicial aggrandizement at legislative expense.
Beske places standing in the broader discussion of the imperial Supreme Court and Supreme Court supremacy. Rather than limiting the power of courts to hear and decide cases—the oft-repeated rationale for justiciability doctrines—the Court wields Article III to limit the legislative power. Spokeo v. Robins and TransUnion v. Ramirez narrowed Congress’ power to authorize litigation between private parties for statutory harms and statutory damages, absent a showing of a traditional judicially recognized common law injury. Continue reading "Standing and the Legislative Power"
Mar 23, 2026 Anna GelpernCorporate Law
What does a garbled snippet of English commercial boilerplate mean when pasted into a Chinese-law contract between a Chinese policy bank and a parastatal in a low-income country? What work does a seemingly nonsensical promise to keep secured and unsecured debt equal (“pari passu”!) do in the relationship between that bank and, say, the government of Benin? How would an arbitration court in Beijing, apparently vested with authority to enforce these contracts, decide whether the parties complied? As a non-sinologist communing with such contracts, I find these questions endlessly puzzling yet mostly ignored in the legal and policy debates over Chinese overseas investment.
China in Compliance, the special issue of Regulation & Governance edited by Matthew Erie, is a welcome reprieve from the China Good/China Bad back-and-forth that sucks the oxygen out of debates about Chinese overseas investment. Better yet, the issue offers unexpected insights into legal ethics and corporate compliance. The editor’s introduction, Compliance in China, and the first article, Legal Brokers of Chinese Investment in Cambodia: Compliance Between Contract and Culture, co-authored by Erie, Molly Bodurtha, and Sokphea Young, are good places to start for a sense of Erie’s Chinese Law and Development project. Together, the papers contribute to what he calls an ‘ethnographic record of global China.” Continue reading "Thesis, Antithesis, Dissonance: Compliance in China"
Mar 20, 2026 Martha ErtmanContracts
Dorothy Brown’s new book Getting to Reparations: How Building a Different America Requires a Reckoning with our Past shows that “the legacy of slavery . . . is found in every nook and cranny of American life.” (P. 164.) So it’s hardly surprising to find actual contracts and extreme incursions on freedom of contract in the ongoing “trifecta” of “economic exploitation, mass incarceration, and racial violence” that white America has imposed on African Americans. Brown’s focus is post-13th Amendment, arguing that slavery essentially “shape-shifted” through harms including forced labor (i.e., sharecropping and convict leasing), mob violence to punish blacks who built businesses, and, more recently, today’s subprime mortgages.
Brown succeeds in building a case for reparations that everyone – including contracts scholars – could and should embrace. Continue reading "Racial Harms, Contracts, & Reparations"
Mar 19, 2026 Jaya Ramji-NogalesLexImmigration
What do we learn by reading the international law of migration from the perspective of migrants from the Global South? Deftly weaving together various strands from legal and social science literature to produce a brilliant new theoretical tapestry, Usha Natarajan’s book chapter, Third World Approaches to International Law (TWAIL) and Migration, offers a relational and contextual take on that question. She suggests three new ways of understanding international law in this sphere: as a harmful relationship between control and protection; as a constructor of categories that limit contestation; and as a phenomenon destructively co-constitutive of migration. This critique lays the groundwork for her proposal to build an international law of migration that is “more expansive, evidence-based and ethically consistent . . . as advocated for by TWAIL scholars.”
TWAIL is a movement of international legal academics that coalesces around a shared critique of the Global North’s domination of knowledge production in the field. TWAILers offer a diverse set of viewpoints and methodologies, yet share a commitment to foregrounding the perspectives of the people of the Third World in international law through policy-making, practice, and scholarship. Prof. Natarajan offers the reader both a useful overview of existing TWAIL literature on international migration law and an important new framing of that work, elucidating the synergies that emerge when the range of TWAIL insights are put in conversation with each other. Continue reading "Beyond the Sovereign Prerogative: TWAILing Global Migration"
Mar 18, 2026 Blake EmersonConstitutional Law
Nathaniel Donahue,
Officers at Common Law, 135
Yale L. J. __ (forthcoming, 2026), available at
SSRN.
The unitary executive is on the march. Since the Founding, there has been ongoing—and sometimes fierce—debate concerning the nature and scope of the President’s powers to control, direct, and fire executive and administrative officials. Proponents of the unitary executive argue for a high, if not complete, degree of presidential control. Proponents of executive pluralism argue that Congress has discretion to insulate various officers, employees, and agencies from presidential direction. Over the past 15 years, the Roberts Court has adopted an increasingly deep commitment to the unitary view.
The second Trump administration has taken advantage of this development to fire executive branch officials and to assert power to transform the bureaucracy and even dismantle administrative agencies. In Trump v. Wilcox, the Court stayed district court injunctions on Trump’s removal of members of the independent National Labor Relations Board and the Merit Systems Protection Board, despite statutory restrictions on their removal. In balancing the equities, the Court concluded that “the Government faces greater risk of harm from an order allowing a removed offer to continue exercising her statutory duty than a wrongfully terminated officer faces from being unable to perform her statutory duty.” The rights and duties of the President to control other officers now apparently outweigh those officers’ rights and duties to carry out the law. The Court thus seems to be preparing, in Trump v. Slaughter, to overrule Humphrey’s Executor and expand the President’s power to fire the heads of independent agencies. Continue reading "Official Responsibility Against the Unitary Executive"
Mar 17, 2026 Daniel WaltersAdministrative Law
When the newly minted Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) captured headlines in the early part of the new Trump administration for, in Elon Musk’s words, feeding federal programs into the wood chipper, outrage erupted. And it is not hard to see why. Here was a “special government employee” heading a shadowy new office that was apparently burning the midnight oil to make consequential, unilateral decisions about appropriated federal dollars. Concerns began to emerge that Musk was unconstitutionally appointed, but the concerns ultimately did not go anywhere before DOGE apparently disappeared. Part of the reason for that tepid legal response can be chalked up to the Trump administration’s ace in the hole. DOGE didn’t have any actual authority to feed programs into the wood chipper; it needed some other entity with actual authority to rubber-stamp its work. And rubber-stamping of this sort is pervasive.
In a new article, Adam Samaha gives us a helpful framework for thinking about not only DOGE, but also countless other arrangements in modern government where one actor apparently approves, without any serious independent thought or judgment, the work of another actor. Although many of the examples Samaha uses to illustrate rubber-stamping dynamics come to us from administrative law, rubber stamps can be found almost anywhere institutional decisions are made. Continue reading "Rubber Stamps Running Riot"
