This Article explores the treatment of race and racial justice in dominant liberal democratic legal discourse and theory concerned with inter-national borders. It advances two analytical claims. The first is that contemporary national borders of the international order—an order that remains structured by imperial inequity—are inherently racial. The default of liberal borders is racialized inclusion […]

 The typical American civil trial court is lawyerless. In response, access to justice reformers have embraced a key intervention: changing the judge’s traditional role. The prevailing vision for judicial role reform calls on trial judges to offer accommodation, information, and process simplification to people without legal representation. Until now, scholars have known little about judicial […]

 The role of race in law enforcement was before the United States Supreme Court in its 2021 Term. The case did not stem from the Black Lives Matter movement; rather, the case arose from a tribal police officer’s encounter with a white man. Joshua Cooley pulled over on the state highway that crosses the Crow Reservation. Officer […]

 A common refrain in current constitutional discourse is that lawmakers and judges are systematically disfavoring certain rights. This allegation has been made about the rights to free speech and free exercise of religion, but it is most prominent in debates about the right to keep and bear arms. Such “second-class” treatment, the argument goes, signals […]

Imagine that you are a small business owner who has just received word that the Department of Labor proposed a new rule increasing the current minimum wage at all businesses from $7.25 per hour to $20 per hour. Understandably concerned about what this means for your business, you read the proposed rule, look-ing for information […]

 The rule of lenity is special. A canon of statutory interpretation that calls for the strict construction of criminal statutes, lenity is ancient, “perhaps not much less old than construction itself.” It was first invoked by a United States federal court in 1794 and by the Supreme Court in 1820. It has been cited hundreds of times, throughout the history of […]