School of Law

This essay examines the case of Chelsea Manning in the larger context of both U.S. imperial war and the ways in which gender and sexuality are deployed in service of colonialism, racism, and militarism. Situating the Manning case alongside two contemporaneous events, the attempted prosecution of Julian Assange on rape charges and Hillary Clinton's much-lauded " gay rights are human rights " speech, we argue that Manning's trans identity has challenged both right and left commentators to absorb her into projects of pinkwashing and homonationalism. We conclude with a consideration about what anti-war, anti-imperial, anti-carceral LGBT politics and organizing around this case might look like.

This article looks at the recent proliferation of statistics about LGBT populations and examines how these statistics are used by legal advocates.  It puts that use in the context of critiques of LGBT equality strategies and the eugenics origins of statistical methods to ask what is at stake when portraying LGBT people as "rights-deserving."

In the current political moment in the United States, defined by climate crisis, increased border enforcement, attacks on public benefits, expansive carceral control, rising housing costs, and growing white right-wing populism, leftist social movement activists and organizations face two particular challenges that, though not new, are urgent. The first is how to address the actual changing conditions that are increasing precarity and shortening lives. The second is how to mobilize people for resistance. In the face of these conditions, movements might strengthen, mobilizing tens of millions of new people to directly fight back against cops, US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), welfare authorities, landlords, budget cuts, polluters, the defense industry, prison profiteers, and right-wing organizations. Or, movement organizations could fail to provide any real relief for those whose lives are most endangered and leave newly scared and angry people to the most passive and ineffective forms of expressing their opinions. This article argues that, in the face of these conditions, expanding use of mutual aid strategies will be the most effective way to support vulnerable populations to survive, mobilize significant resistance, and build the infrastructure we need for the coming disasters. Based on my observations participating in policy reform work, public education efforts, and mutual aid projects in movements for queer and trans liberation and prison and border abolition and my study of related and overlapping efforts, I argue that mutual aid is an often devalued iteration of radical collective care that provides a transformative alternative to the demobilizing frameworks for understanding social change and expressing dissent that dominate the popular imagination. I examine the benefits of mutual aid, its challenges, and how those are being addressed by contemporary organizations mobilizing through mutual aid.

Legal academia, and by extension law professors, has an ambivalent, nearly schizophrenic, attitude towards the casebook. On one hand, law professors have an abiding appreciation for the centrality of the casebook within the law school curriculum. Although it is fashionable to claim that law school pedagogy has long since transcended the casebook method bequeathed to us by Christopher Columbus Langdell-embracing clinical training, 2 simulated lawyering exercises, 3 and computer assisted exercises 4-the truth is that, for the overwhelming majority of law school classes, the casebook still occupies the pedagogical center of the course. In fact, when law professors who teach the same subject meet, the first question they invariably ask is, "What casebook do you use?" And with good reason. The nature of the casebook chosen is a handy shorthand way to locate new acquaintances both in terms of the spectrum of substantive ideological attitudes towards the subject matter and as to general

During the 1960s and 1970s, the Supreme Court issued a number of decisions guaranteeing certain procedural rights to juveniles. This article assesses the impact of these decisions on the actual practices of the delinquency jurisdiction of the juvenile court. Studies show that, by and large, the procedural mandates have not been met. A key example is the fact that a significant percentage of juveniles still do not receive effective legal representation. This article also explores the potential disadvantages to juveniles of no constitutional right to a jury trial in juvenile court, waivers into the adult criminal court system, and diversion programs. Because of the juvenile court's resistance to reform, a number of juvenile justice scholars are advocating the abolition of its jurisdiction over delinquency cases. The article concludes with various viewpoints on this current controversy.

The rules of evidence govern the admissibility of evidence in trials and determine the scope of meaning to be accorded to that evidence. This paper examines two American evidence rules and suggests that both rules incorporate 'masculine' norms of language usage. The evidence rule defining adoptive admissions provides that, when a person is confronted with an accusation of wrongdoing and fails to assertively deny it, the allegation is deemed to be admitted through silence. This rule presumes that one's natural reaction upon an accusation would invariably be an explicit denial, such that silence can be fairly taken as a confession. Thus, this rule privileges assertive and confrontational modes of speech-all coded as 'masculine'-and ignores the ways in which power asymmetries impact responses to accusation. Likewise, the evidence rule construing apology as an admission of fault denigrates expressions of emotional solidarity-coded as 'feminine'-in favor of a presumption that penalizes those who say 'sorry' by presuming it means 'I'm sorry I did something wrong' rather than 'I'm sorry that something bad has happened to you.' Evidence rules such as these both channel and constrain the legal interpretation of language in ways that sustain gendered hierarchies of legal power.

The juvenile court has been a part of the American institutional landscape for nearly a century.' Born of the redemptive ideology of Progressivism, the juvenile justice system promised to divert youthful offenders from the rigors of the criminal justice system, both at adjudication and for disposition, and its advocates claimed that in doing so, the juvenile justice system would be able to rehabilitate young lawbreakers and derail their incipient criminal careers. As it reaches its hundredth birthday, however, the juvenile court has come under serious attack. Even its staunchest supporters acknowledge that, as it currently functions, the juvenile justice system is deeply flawed. 2 The unhappy truth is that we as a society do not particularly value young people," and inequities in the current juvenile justice system