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Forced Prison Labor: Punishment For A Crime?, Wafa Junaid

Northwestern University Law Review

The Thirteenth Amendment’s prohibition of involuntary servitude carves out an exception to its protections that allows the use of forced labor as “punishment for a crime” when an individual is “duly convicted.” Courts have interpreted this language as placing a categorical bar on Thirteenth Amendment claims alleged by individuals who are incarcerated. Yet, a consistent understanding of the term “punishment” that draws from the term’s use in the Eighth Amendment’s Cruel and Unusual Punishment Clause supports a narrower interpretation of the Thirteenth Amendment’s punishment exception. This Note argues that individuals cannot be denied Thirteenth Amendment protections unless they are explicitly …

Equal Protection Under The Carceral State, Aya Gruber

Northwestern University Law Review

McCleskey v. Kemp, the case that upheld the death penalty despite undeniable evidence of its racially disparate impact, is indelibly marked by Justice William Brennan’s phrase, “a fear of too much justice.” The popular interpretation of this phrase is that the Supreme Court harbored what I call a “disparity-claim fear,” dreading a future docket of racial discrimination claims and erecting an impossibly high bar for proving an equal protection violation. A related interpretation is that the majority had a “color-consciousness fear” of remedying discrimination through race-remedial policies. In contrast to these conventional views, I argue that the primary anxiety …

Reforming School Discipline, Derek W. Black

Northwestern University Law Review

Public schools suspend millions of students each year, but less than ten percent of suspensions are for serious misbehavior. School leaders argue that these suspensions ensure an orderly educational environment for those students who remain. Social science demonstrates the opposite. The practice of regularly suspending students negatively affects misbehaving students as well as innocent bystanders. All things being equal, schools that manage student behavior through means other than suspension produce the highest achieving students. In this respect, the quality of education a school provides is closely connected to its discipline policies.

Reformers have largely overlooked the connection between discipline and …