Telling War Stories: Innocence, Indictment, and (En)gendered Terror
The law is replete with dominant narratives endorsed by its letter and amplified by connected and conspiring levers of power. This Article centers the discursive power of law, and specifically, the War on Terror’s grand narrative of “masculine Arab and Muslim terrorism.” By gendering terror threat, this dominant wartime narrative marks Arab and Muslim men […]
Reconstructing the Reconstruction: Equality, Liberty, Method and Interpretation
The U.S. Supreme Court’s reliance on “history and tradition” in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization reinvigorated long-standing debates about the Court’s use of what it claims is originalism. The Court’s selective view of which history matters manifests throughout the Dobbs opinion, dismissing Antebellum, Reconstruction, and Jim Crow histories altogether and engaging in opportunistic and […]
Law’s Shifting Circles
This Article undermines two myths in American legal history: first, that the law’s circle of moral concern has steadily expanded; and second, that legal protections have always centered on human persons. As to the first, the law contains multiple, shifting circles of moral concern, expanding along some dimensions and contracting along others. As to the […]
Leveling the Playing Field: Marginalization, the Fallacy of Amateurism, and Student-Athlete Unionization
Student-athletes at public universities have reportedly earned at least $125 million off of their name, image, and likeness (NIL) since 2021. Many people have celebrated (or loathed) that student-athletes, at public and private universities alike, are finally being compensated as a result of their labor. This buzz, however, only serves as a red herring. Despite all of […]
The Grant-to-Off-Ramp Pipeline: A Study of the Supreme Court’s Use of Procedural Off-Ramps
In January 2024, the Supreme Court agreed to resolve a contentious and unprecedented dispute over then-candidate, and former President, Donald Trump’s eligibility to run for president. Section Three of the Fourteenth Amendment bars anyone who takes an oath to support the Constitution from holding a government office if they “engage[] in insurrection” or “give[] aid or […]
The Regrettable Rebirth of "Irreparable Harm to the Government"
A new trend in Supreme Court decisionmaking has picked up since the start of Donald Trump’s second term as President. The Administration has made extensive use of the Supreme Court’s “shadow docket,” making numerous applications for emergency stays of lower-court injunctions against executive orders and actions, and by and large, the Supreme Court has acquiesced […]