Law Review Articles
From the abstract: “This Essay draws on empirical research to compose a sketch of the criminal legal systems of several sparsely populated counties in central and eastern Washington State. The study reveals how, at times, the dearth of attorneys available to do the work of prosecuting and defending criminal cases is subjecting system-involved individuals to…
From the Abstract: In Maine, there is no such thing as a child too young to be prosecuted. Maine’s Juvenile Code grants the juvenile court jurisdiction over a child of any age, even one who would have been considered too young to prosecute in the fifteenth century. As of 2024, just over half of states…
From the introduction: “This Article proceeds in three parts. Part I describes how federal courts have interpreted potential sources of substantive immigration detention law and why some have produced, through their decisions, lawlessness for immigrants facing poor conditions of confinement. I focus on three areas: substantive due process, statutory immigration law interpretation, and the enforcement…
Abstract: In the wake of Miller v. Alabama and its progeny, there has been a wider acceptance that juvenile’s need more protections in our judicial system. This is a result of a growing body of research stating that young people’s brains do not fully develop until the age of twenty-five. States across the country are…
From the abstract: “This Article frames the experience of traffic stops for noncitizens as a form of “slow deportation.” It describes how the use of traffic stops to police noncitizens extends the system of racialized social control to immigrant communities with the effect of surveilling both race and status. It surveys scholarship across disciplines, racial…
From the conclusion: “In terms of Medicaid coverage, court opinions from the past decade have agreed that gender-affirming care (“GAC”) is medically necessary, efficacious, and appropriate when patients meet the relevant criteria. When those treatments are mandatory under the Act or otherwise covered for other diagnoses, exclusion of GAC violates the availability and comparability requirements.…
From the abstract: “South Dakota, like many other states, allows young children to be introduced to the criminal justice system at a very young age. Although South Dakota originally focused on managing children’s misbehavior, the law has evolved in a way that punishes kids for being kids. Despite recent reforms to handle juvenile delinquency in…
From the introduction: “The report begins by examining the racial impact of the Persistent Offender Accountability Act (POAA) through data. The racially disparate application of the Three Strikes Law has been documented since shortly after the law’s passage and has held constant for more than two decades. This report presents the most recent data related…
From the abstract: “Since their inception in the late 1980s, zero-tolerance policies have been a cornerstone of American school discipline. Passed by legislators with the intent of protecting school children, these policies have disparately upended the education of marginalized students. School discipline of vulnerable students often paves the way to juvenile incarceration, which in turn…
This article calls for the categorical exclusion of young children from juvenile court jurisdiction as a pathway toward the abolition of the juvenile legal system in its current form. This article highlights the landscape of age-based jurisdictional boundaries across the country: 24 states have no minimum age of arrest and prosecution, while 18 states have…
From the introduction: “Although racial discrimination in the Deep South is not the outright focus of this Note—many other scholars have tackled this subject—it remains an underlying ugly truth that is woven into the conversation throughout. Rather than illuminate an already expansive area of jurisprudence, the Author has sought to address racial disparities in sentencing…
From the introduction: “In In re Personal Restraint of Asaria Miller, at the urging of merits counsel from the University of Washington’s Race and Justice Clinic, supported by amicus counsel from Seattle University School of Law’s Civil Rights Clinic, the Washington State Court of Appeals took an important step in accounting for the ways that…
This article makes the argument against the imposition of life without parole for young people who commit felony murder using an adolescent development framework. The author analyzes existing case law to outline that, just as the U.S. Supreme Court found the death penalty inappropriate for felony murder and relied on adolescent brain development research in…
This article calls for the use of the Thirteenth Amendment to abolish federal and state gang statutes. Highlighting the lineage of modern-day gang statutes from Black Codes to vagrancy laws from the Jim Crow era to gang injunctions, this article establishes how current gang statutes remain as “badges and incidents” of slavery. This article walks…
This Article is one of the first to explore the racialized impact of the two most controversial and ubiquitous forms of what we call “imputed liability murder.” An analysis of ten years of murder prosecutions in the state of Minnesota reveals that imputed liability murder is anything but a fringe subtype of homicide: an astounding…
