Digital Commons Network^™

Until The Cages Are Empty: Transgender Criminal Defense As A Necessary Tactic Of Prison-Industrial Complex Abolition, Lark Mulligan

UC Law Journal of Race and Economic Justice

This article is a practical guide in the fight to abolish the prison-industrial complex as well as institutionalized transphobia and cissexism. Focusing specifically on the practice area of criminal defense, this article proposes a model that must be replicated across jurisdictions wherever transgender people are criminalized. By instituting an interdisciplinary team approach that is non-hierarchical, strengths-based, trauma-informed, community focused, holistic, harm-reductionist, and abolitionist, practitioners will find their role in this movement as one of consensus building, knowledge sharing, community empowerment, institutional navigation, and access distribution. As discrimination and violence against trans people continues to rise, practitioners must learn to not …

The Feminist Challenge To Global Justice: How International Law Reproduces And Resists Patriarchy, Shashwati Wagle

UC Law SF Journal on Gender and Justice

This article seeks to introduce feminist approaches to international law. It examines how traditional state-centric security concepts in international law reflect masculine ideals of military strength and sovereignty, contrasted with human security approaches addressing intimate violence and displacement. The piece details international law’s recognition of sexualized violence in armed conflict as a war crime and analyzes international institutions, noting their advancements in gender protections alongside failures to fully incorporate intersectionality. Overall, feminist engagement positions international law as a transformative process challenging gendered power structures.

California’S Attempt To Confront Implicit Bias In Jury Selection: A Critique Of Ab 3070, Sarah Bodisco

UC Law SF Journal on Gender and Justice

No abstract provided.

What The Court Tells Reporters: A Discourse Analysis Of Press Interviews With The Justices Since 2000, Brown James

UC Law SF Communications and Entertainment Journal

The Supreme Court of the United States is among the most influential institutions in American life, yet it is also well known to be one of the most secluded and inaccessible. By and large, the justices only pass their thoughts and decision-making processes to the public via their official written opinions, and seldom grant interviews to reporters. General press coverage of the Court has been given considerable scholarly attention, but the limited interviews the justices grant to the press receive comparatively little attention. This article examines those interviews by analyzing 82 press interviews with active and retired justices from 2000 …

The Politics Of Rcra Criminal Enforcement, Joshua Ozymy, Melissa Jarrell Ozymy

UC Law Environmental Journal

Violations of federal environmental laws governing hazardous and solid wastes are typically remedied via civil methods, except in the case of crimes involving significant harm and culpable conduct, which can merit criminal prosecution. With historically varied commitments to environmental enforcement, we would generally expect substantive increases in prosecutions and penalties for these crimes under Democratic, as opposed to Republican presidents, but very little is known about the criminal enforcement of hazardous and solid waste crimes generally or how they vary under different partisan regimes. Through content analysis of 2,728 criminal prosecutions resulting from U.S. EPA criminal investigations, 1983-2021, we select …

The Supreme Court’S New Map Of Federalism, Stephen M. Griffin

UC Law Constitutional Quarterly

No abstract provided.

A Human Rights Approach To International Criminal Liability: From The Promises Of The 1990s Criminal Tribunals To Selective Impunity, Ilias Bantekas

UC Law SF International Law Review

Since the adoption of the UDHR in 1948, it has become clear that state responsibility for human rights violations ought to be complemented by perpetrators’ individual responsibility under criminal and civil law. The concept of individual responsibility suggests that criminal liability is the “natural” corollary of conduct considered to be a violation of human rights. Even if such criminal liability does not, for whatever reason, arise under national law, this is certainly the outcome under international law. The extent to which this concept is applicable to all violations of human rights involves an examination of the legal basis of human …

Yes Under Duress: The Paradox Of The Fawn Trauma Response In Consent Law, Madeline Paoli

UC Law SF Journal on Gender and Justice

This article examines the evolving landscape of sexual consent law through the lens of trauma-informed legal analysis, focusing on the underrecognized trauma response known as fawning. Existing consent frameworks fail to capture the complex behaviors of many survivors who outwardly feign consent as a survival mechanism. To assess how fawning evidence might fit into consent statutes, I categorize U.S. state law into four subtypes of consent: affirmative, hybrid, forcible compulsion, and statutory silence. Each sub-type fails to adequately account for trauma-informed behaviors. By examining each of these subtypes and its corresponding case law, I identify statutory and doctrinal gaps that …

Child Welfare Upholds Black Family Separation While Denying Essential Constitutional Protections, Samantha Nichol

UC Law Journal of Race and Economic Justice

This note examines the refusal to expand constitutional protections to include proceedings concerning child welfare. A system that largely mirrors and works in tandem with the criminal system, which enjoys robust constitutional safeguards. Important to the analysis of the rejection of these protections is an acknowledgement that child welfare, or welfare more broadly, is a system that upholds racial power structures and a tradition of family separation. Just as the overincarceration of Black people has been acknowledged by legal scholars to be a particular badge and incident of slavery, the child welfare system should also be critiqued as a system …

The New Cja Form 24: Protecting Indigent Criminal Appellants’ Rights, Gabriel J. Chin, Hannah Bogen

UC Law Journal of Race and Economic Justice

This essay describes how the Judicial Conference of the United States elected to reform the provision of transcripts to indigent persons appealing criminal convictions in federal court. A conviction cannot be appealed without a transcript, but, by definition, indigent persons cannot afford to purchase them. A series of Supreme Court decisions held that indigent persons had to be provided transcripts without charge. However, the practical implementation of that right was blocked. In the federal system, appointed counsel had to request production of transcripts using Criminal Justice Act Form 24. That form required special permission for the court reporter to produce …

Disarming Data: An Empirical Take On The Loaded Debate About Felon-In-Possession Of A Firearm, Jonathan Abel

UC Law Journal

This Article answers a crucial empirical question at the heart of the scholarly and judicial debates about the laws governing felon-in-possession of a firearm: How often do defendants charged with this offense have violent felony convictions? Using a comprehensive dataset of over 27,000 defendants charged in California from 2021 through 2024, the study provides a novel, large-scale analysis of how prosecutors deploy this most-common gun charge. The findings substantiate longstanding concerns that felon-in-possession is overbroad in its application to nonviolent felons—only 8.5% of defendants had a “violent felony” conviction as defined by California law, rising to just 28.8% under a …

Geofence Surveillance And The Possibility Of Radicalization, Bardia Moghtaderi Zadeh

UC Law Constitutional Quarterly

No abstract provided.

Prevention Beyond Deterrence, Benjamin A. Barsky

Faculty Scholarship

This Article reconceptualizes preventive justice—the public safety paradigm that seeks to prevent harm before it occurs. Scholars have long documented how cities have advanced this paradigm through largely punitive measures, notably variants of broken windows policing, which posit that aggressive misdemeanor enforcement deters more serious crime. Yet in the aftermath of the 2020 George Floyd protests, and as underscored recently in City of Grants Pass v. Johnson, these measures have faced a legitimacy crisis—prompting calls for nonpunitive responses to nonviolent incidents.

This Article establishes a preventive justice approach that advances health and safety without emphasizing crime deterrence. It draws on …

Retrenchment, Segregation, And Public Education: A Five-Year Analysis Of State Exclusionary School Discipline Legislation, Thalia Gonzalez, Will Martel

Faculty Scholarship

Notwithstanding the decision in Brown v. Board of Education formally ending educational segregation and more than two decades of state reform, the legislative landscape protecting minoritized children from the structural violence of exclusionary school discipline has dramatically shifted in less than five years. From the passage of state “Teacher’s Bills of Rights” to mandatory expulsions, rescissions of prior protections, and new categories of removal, a retrenchment of anti-inclusion legislation—and its corollary, educational carcerality— has occurred. While studies of other forms of legislative retrenchment in K–12 public schools, such as anti-Critical Race Theory and Don’t Say Gay laws, literacy bans, and …

June 30, 2023: Resurrections And Bad Omens Of A Nadir Court, Zamir Ben-Dan

UC Law Constitutional Quarterly

June 29, 2023 was monumental for racial justice advocates and scholars; the U.S. Supreme Court issued a major decision that eviscerated affirmative action while declaring itself a vanguard of racial equality. The Court’s race-related juridical activities on the following day, June 30th, received far less attention. On June 30, 2023, the Court denied certiorari in five cases directly implicating race. Those denials of certiorari generated five opinions, two concurring in the denial and three dissenting from denial. These five opinions should have created as much buzz as the Court’s affirmative action decision the day prior; examined together, they tell a …

Spotlight Research Brief: Exclusionary School Discipline And Student Health And Wellbeing, Center For Racial And Economic Justice

Center for Racial and Economic Justice

No abstract provided.

Dobbs, State Policies, And Minors’ Interests In An Open Future, Lois A. Weithorn

UC Law SF Journal on Gender and Justice

The United States Supreme Court discarded five decades of established federal constitutional doctrine with its decision in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization. Following Dobbs, legislators in some states rushed to restrict the decisions of pregnant persons. Litigation, executive actions, and voter initiatives, including attempts to amend state constitutions, quickly followed. At the time of this writing, access to abortion is severely restricted in large swaths of the country. Increasing numbers of pregnant persons have sought out-of-state services through telehealth or cross-border travel. Some states have created new forms of criminal or civil liability in an effort to prevent its …

In Place Of Prison, Grace Y. Li

UC Law Journal

A new, previously unstudied institution is addressing felonies, including violent felonies of the highest levels, without imposing incarceration as the sanction. Attempts to abolish prisons, or at least reduce racialized mass incarceration, must consider how to respond to serious and violent crimes. This Article offers an analysis of a real-world, ongoing experiment in doing so.

The Manhattan Felony Alternative-to-Incarceration Court (“ATI Court”) is the first and, thus far, the only court in the country that systematically offers defendants of any demographic and any charge the opportunity to be diverted from the traditional criminal legal system and to avoid prison. Defendants …

Educational Policy Committee Meeting – Open Session Book 05/22/2025, Uc Law Sf

2025 Board of Directors Agenda and Materials

No abstract provided.

The Racial Justice Act: A Real Solution Or A Just Step In The Right Direction?, Addison Lyons

UC Law Journal of Race and Economic Justice

The American criminal legal system is built upon racism and inequality. Some effort has been made to critique and correct the impact of those legacies. Although many steps have been taken, racism is far from erased from the legal apparatus. It demands contemporary solutions to contemporary legal dynamics. One of the attempts is the California Racial Justice Act of 2020 (RJA). The RJA has sought to remedy these challenges with a more robust understanding of how racism operates within the criminal legal system. Although the RJA appears to reflect a more nuanced understanding of how race operates, I argue that …

Hashtags, Handcuffs, And Hush Money: Inequitable Application Of The Fourth Amendment In Electronic Surveillance, Karina Devi Etminani

UC Law Journal of Race and Economic Justice

A wealthy executive buries misconduct behind corporate nondisclosure agreements (NDAs) and encrypted devices. Nearby, police wield geofence warrants to sweep the digital footprints of peaceful protesters demanding racial justice. Both scenarios hinge on the same Fourth Amendment but reveal a coin with two faces. For powerful abusers, privacy protections can conceal assault, intimidation, and corruption. For Black activists, rapidly emerging surveillance tools—including biometric scanners, phone “pings,” and social media mining—intensify a long legacy of racially targeted policing. As Jeannie Suk Gersen notes, two recent social movements– #MeToo and Black Lives Matter–reveal that “too much deference to privacy serves male entitlement, …

Generative Privacy Doctrine: The Case For A New Legal Privacy Framework For Gen^Ai, Karina Devi Etminani

UC Law Constitutional Quarterly

From quills to queries, from secrets once scrawled in private to personal prompts on glowing screens, debates over privacy rights endure. Generative Artificial Intelligence (GenAI) further confounds by conflating confession with code, and intimate thoughts with algorithms. Although technologists have predicted AI’s ascent before, and have critically assessed privacy rights for decades, the unprecedented engagement with GenAI following OpenAI’s public launch of ChatGPT marks a distinct moment— one where a generation of rights holders actively builds and converses with emerging platforms while the law strains to keep pace.

Existing privacy doctrines are ill-prepared for GenAI’s dynamic data processing and its …

Hate Groups And The Charitable Tax Exemption, Miriam Galston

UC Law Constitutional Quarterly

No abstract provided.

Board Of Directors Quarterly Meeting - Open Session Book 03/13/2025, Uc Law Sf

2025 Board of Directors Agenda and Materials

No abstract provided.

State Restorative Justice Legislation 2020 – 2025: Confidentiality, Admissibility & Privilege, Center For Racial And Economic Justice

Center for Racial and Economic Justice

No abstract provided.

Faq: Educational Fines And Fees In K – 12 Public Schools, Center For Racial And Economic Justice

Center for Racial and Economic Justice

No abstract provided.

Standing And Prosecutorial Discretion: Why The Doctrine Of Standing Precludes Challenges To Categorical Non-Enforcement, Michael Diamandakis

UC Law Constitutional Quarterly

No abstract provided.

A Legal Herstory Of Wwii ‘Comfort Women’— Chapters: Past, Present, And Beyond, Linny Kit Tong Ng

UC Law SF Journal on Gender and Justice

No abstract provided.

Targeted And Ticketed: Student Ticketing And The Perpetuation Of The School-To- Prison Pipeline, Jasmine Richardson-Rushin, Angelica Jimenez, Gwendolyn Walker, Hannah Benton Eidsath

UC Law Journal of Race and Economic Justice

The National Center for Youth Law (NCYL) is a non-profit organization working to end the harms of the juvenile, municipal and criminal legal systems, including by decriminalizing normal adolescent behavior, ending financial consequences, and improving children’s access to adequate developmentally appropriate treatment. Our work prioritizes eradicating the school-to-prison pipeline, and abolishing harmful fines, fees and economic sanctions through the Debt Free Justice Campaign (DFJ).

In school districts across the nation, students receive fees and fines as consequences for school-based behavior. Students are policed and ticketed for age-appropriate behaviors and disciplinary matters such as littering, truancy, and underage drinking and smoking. …

Legislatively Erased: The Failure Of Privacy Legislation To Protect People Connected To The Criminal Legal System, Kate Weisburd, Chaz Arnett

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.