Critics of the Supreme Court’s equal protection jurisprudence despair that the Court conceives of discrimination as the mere classification of individuals on forbidden grounds, such as race and sex, rather than systemic patterns of subordination. On the Court’s anticlassification theory, affirmative action, which relies on overt racial or gender classifications, is generally forbidden. Such context-insensitive anticlassification rules could, in principle, extend to individuals who are members of groups often regarded with hostility and suspicion, such as transgender people. Indeed, this is how most trial courts have approached recent laws that classify individuals based on sex to exclude transgender people. However, appellate courts have refused to take anticlassification rules seriously. This Article argues that all sex classifications, like all race-based ones, ought to trigger heightened constitutional scrutiny. It draws support from the principles undergirding anticlassification rules announced by the Roberts Court, most recently in its university affirmative action decisions.
Article
Catalyzed by the #MeToo movement, states have adopted a spate of laws restricting secret settlements. In 2018, California led the charge with the Stand Together Against Non-Disclosure (STAND) Act, which targets secrecy in the resolution of sex discrimination, harassment, and abuse cases. Transparency advocates hail these reforms as a major win for victims. Critics, meanwhile, warn that the reforms will hurt those they intend to help.
Nested within this debate sit a raft of confident, conflicting—and eminently testable—claims about what exactly happens in the wake of reform. Will defendants still settle, even if secrecy isn’t on offer? Will case filings disappear? Debate over these questions has raged since the 1980s, and, over these decades, the debate has always centered on fervent predictions regarding each.
Our findings tell a clear and consequential story. Contrary to critics’ fears, the STAND Act did not yield a sharp increase or decrease in case filings. Nor did the Act appear to significantly prolong cases or amplify their intensity. The upshot: cases still settle even when secrecy isn’t on offer. Perhaps most importantly, it appears that positive effects did come to pass.
In the last few years, the Supreme Court has upended its doctrine of religious freedom under the First Amendment. Now, the government must treat religion equally with respect to providing public benefits. But it must also grant special exemptions from regulations that burden religion. We refer to this regime as structural preferentialism. This Article offers an external, political account of changes in Free Exercise and Establishment Clause jurisprudence by analyzing them as if they were the result of political conflicts between competing interest groups. Focusing on the role of religion in political polarization, rapid disaffiliation from denominations, and shifting strategies to fund religious schools, this political perspective has explanatory and predictive power that extends beyond conventional legal arguments about text, history, and precedent. Applying this approach, we predict that structural preferentialism will transform First Amendment doctrine and provide material grounds for its own entrenchment.
The Roberts Court has made protecting “the privacies of life” a catchphrase of Fourth Amendment law in the digital era. The time is thus ripe for revisiting the doctrinal and political roots of this newly influential quote from the Court’s 1886 decision Boyd v. United States. This Article makes a novel argument that Boyd and its elevation of protecting the “privacies of life” to an animating principle of the Fourth Amendment was instead a product of Reconstruction and its dismantlement. Fourth Amendment privacy was produced by and helped secure Reconciliation—the process through which White Americans North and South, Democrat and Republican came together to limit Reconstruction, preserve White supremacy, and pave the way for the violent disenfranchisement of newly freed Black men. The Article concludes by considering the divergent doctrinal implications of resituating Boyd and Fourth Amendment privacy in the politics of Reconciliation.
This Article examines over 500 nationwide-injunction cases and shows that a surprising participant is influencing the result: an outsider who has joined as an intervenor. Judicial discretion over intervention functionally gives courts control over how nationwide-injunction cases proceed, or whether they proceed at all. With few principles guiding that discretion, procedural rulings can appear to be influenced by the court’s own political leanings, undermining public confidence in the court’s decision on the merits. This Article represents the first scholarly examination of the significant role that intervention plays in nationwide-injunction suits. More broadly, this Article uses intervention to explore the function of procedural rules and the federal courts in a democratic system. Finally, this Article offers two reforms that would promote procedural values and cabin the role of the federal courts in ideological litigation.
Judicial reform aimed at rectifying historical inequalities understandably focus on increasing the number of women and people of color on the bench. This Article sheds light on another aspect of the representation problem, which will not necessarily be resolved through greater diversity in judicial appointments: the understudied and opaque practices of judicial administration. Through an empirical study of federal appellate decisions, we find systematic gender and racial imbalances across decision panels. These imbalances are most likely a product of disparities in decision reporting; some decisions, which we call judicial dark matter, go unreported, distorting the representation of judges in reported cases. Our findings suggest that assessing the distribution of legal power across gender and racial groups based on the numbers of judges from these groups may create an inflated sense of the influence of judges from underrepresented groups. We propose reforms to protect against the demographic biases that we uncover.
Associational standing is a widely used doctrine that has never been subject to serious academic scrutiny. This Article calls for the abandonment, or at least serious modification, of associational standing. Even without associational standing, groups may still sue to enforce their own rights. And they could continue to help vindicate their members’ rights by providing legal representation for member plaintiffs in individual or class action suits (filed anonymously, if necessary), covering members’ litigation costs, and providing expert witnesses and other guidance. In short, associational standing is a largely unnecessary deviation from both Article III’s injury-in-fact requirement and the fundamental principles underlying our justice system. Eliminating associational standing would not limit public law and other important collective litigation, but rather ensure that such cases proceed through the proper channels (i.e., Rule 23) while preventing a range of unnecessary procedural, preclusive, remedial, and other complications.
Much of the scholarship on immigration enforcement and environmental justice assumes that agencies negatively impact vulnerable and marginalized people as a result of individualized bias or arbitrariness. This Article argues that, beyond idiosyncrasies or flaws in administrators themselves, the poor impact of administration on minorities emanates from institutional systems. In doing so, this Article introduces a framework of institutional oppression into the study of administration. This Article’s prescription is for institutional redesign. First, from the top down, Congress could utilize appropriations and pointed procedural interventions to influence how agencies exercise discretion. Second, from the bottom up, the President or agencies themselves could instigate efforts to use more accurate information and more meaningful process. Third, a focus on reviving a government of small, discrete agencies could constrain administrative discretion in ways that encourage agencies to rebalance their priorities.
A basic principle of virtually every regulation to improve grid reliability and reduce power sector emissions is that market participants change their behavior when regulations make it more expensive to engage in socially harmful activities. But this assumption does not apply to large parts of the electricity industry, where investor-owned utilities are often able to pass the costs of climate and reliability rules on to captive ratepayers. The underlying problem, I argue, is that the U.S. legal system outsources investment and market design decisions to private firms that will be financially harmed if state and federal regulators pursue deep decarbonization or take ambitious steps to improve grid reliability. Structural changes such as full corporate unbundling, market liberalization, and aggressive governance reforms are needed to make climate and reliability policies more effective and easier to administer.
There are two conventional methods for resolving separation of powers disputes: formalism and functionalism. Although both approaches have been around for decades, neither has proven capable of resolving the difficult separation of powers disputes that actually arise today. This Article proposes a method built to resolve precisely such cases: interest balancing. Accepting that both branches might have power to act over a matter, interest balancing asks whether one branch’s exercise of power has infringed upon the other’s and, if so, whether such infringement is justified by a sufficiently strong interest. Despite the long history of interest balancing in individual rights cases, scholars have failed to appreciate its utility in resolving separation of powers disputes. This Article identifies interest balancing as a coherent method of separation of powers analysis that is both conceptually and practically well suited to address the separation of powers disputes that actually arise today.