Apr 10, 2026 Jedidiah KronckeLegal History
María Montoya’s A Workplace of Their Own examines labor conflict in Colorado’s mining industry from the late 19th to the early 20th century, a period marked by acute violence that has long attracted study by a range of historians. Yet Montoya’s attention to new local, national, and even transnational elements of these conflicts recontextualizes existing accounts while reminding us of the all-too-often forgotten violence at the heart of American labor history.
Montoya frames her engagement around two dyads: the 1914 Ludlow Massacre and the 1927 Columbine Mine Massacre; and the visions of labor relations advanced by the two inheritors of Colorado’s then-largest mining companies, John D. Rockefeller, Jr. and Josephine Roche. The book excavates these massacres not as discrete episodes but as outgrowths of broader contests over the agency of labor in the workplace and the relative influence of local and national coalitions seeking to manage labor conflict. This reorientation is then powerfully illustrated by Rockefeller and Roche’s competing, if not openly hostile, attempts to rehabilitate their families’ reputations by using Colorado as a testing ground for models of industrial peace that later influenced national debates and legislation. Continue reading "The Forgotten Violence and Perpetual Tensions of American Labor History"
Apr 9, 2026 Andrea BoyackProperty
“The waters are rising, but so am I. I am not going under, but over.”
~ Catherine Booth, founder of the Salvation Army
In his recent article, Struggle Against the Water: Connecting Fair Housing Law and Climate Justice, Professor Jade Craig explains the outsize impact that flooding has had and will continue to have on Black communities in the United States. Rising sea levels and intense weather-related hazards destroy property and displace people. Over the past several years, more people have been displaced by natural disasters than by war. Climate changes fuel increasingly dire global and local refugee crises. The “struggle against the water” is real. Research demonstrates that so-called “100-year” floods now occur much more frequently – once a decade or even annually. Flood devastation poses a mortal threat to people living in floodplains. And a majority of the 30 million Americans who live in flood-prone areas today are both poor and Black. Continue reading "Fairer Housing in the Face of Frequent Floods"
Apr 8, 2026 Maartje van der WoudeCriminal Law
There is a tendency in socio-legal and criminological scholarship to approach border policing through its most visible moments: the violent encounter, the discretionary stop, the dramatic deportation, the spectacular failure or abuse. Irene Vega’s Bordering on Indifference: Immigration Agents Negotiating Race and Morality invites us to look elsewhere. Not away from power or harm, but toward the quieter, routinized, and morally ambiguous labor through which immigration enforcement is sustained day after day. It is here, Vega shows, that the U.S. immigration system derives much of its resilience, and much of its cruelty.
Based on extensive ethnographic interviews with Border Patrol agents and ICE deportation officers, the book offers a deeply textured account of how frontline immigration agents come to understand their work, their authority, and themselves. Vega is not interested in asking whether agents are “good” or “bad.” Instead, she asks a more unsettling question: how do agents learn to live with, justify, and normalize a system that produces suffering on such a vast scale? Continue reading "Bordering on Indifference: The Moral Work of Immigration Enforcement"
Apr 7, 2026 Kristina NiedringhausLexLibrarianship and Legal Technology
Depending on who you ask, AI will either free us from the drudgery of our everyday lives, take our jobs, or wipe out humanity. It’s nearly impossible to glance at legal news without reading something about AI. There is, however, a lot more theorizing than actual data-driven research on how AI is working for (or against) the legal profession. However, Professor Lee Peoples reports on the results of his important study evaluating and comparing the performance of various specialized and non-specialized large language models (LLMs) in legal reasoning. Spoiler alert: it varies, and not necessarily how you might assume.
Before getting to the results, let’s examine how Prof. Peoples designed the study. Many first-year law students are taught to think like a lawyer using the IRAC method. As a refresher, this is a system using distinct steps to spot the Issue, identify the Rule, Apply the rule to the facts, and draw a Conclusion about the legal outcome. Prof. Peoples selected seven fact situations from a legal research and writing exercise book and anonymized to test beginning rule analysis, skilled rule analysis, beginning analogical reasoning, skilled analogical reasoning, beginning statutory analysis, intermediate statutory analysis, and skilled statutory analysis. Very importantly, Prof. Peoples told the LLMs not to train on the prompts used in the testing. Continue reading "Can your AI Think Like a Lawyer?"
Apr 6, 2026 Leah LitmanLegal Profession
Maybell Romero,
Gossip, 115
Geo. L. J. __ (forthcoming, 2026), available at
SSRN (Feb. 1, 2026).
There’s no one like Professor Maybell Romero in the legal academy (I say this, a la Violet Chachki, as a compliment, not a read).
In a searing article from several years ago, Ruined, Romero used her own experiences with rape and sexual assault to critique how the law and legal profession describe survivors as “ruined,” “broken,” or “destroyed.” Then, in Shamed, Romero expanded the lens: She used personal narrative and auto-ethnographic methods and applied them to individuals and institutions within the legal academy. That piece explored how survivors are shamed, in addition to being described as ruined—sometimes by members of the legal academy, as Romero recounts when describing (some of) the reaction to Ruined. Continue reading "Lady Whistledown…and the Legal Academy?"
Apr 3, 2026 Sean CoyleJurisprudence
The Nature of Law is an insightful and engaging book that challenges almost every touchstone of modern jurisprudence. Proceeding from the thesis that laws must be understood after all as commands rather than rules, the book defends the thesis that law itself must be understood by reference to the common good. The view that the law consists of commands does not take us back to the Austinian jurisprudence that preceded H. L. A. Hart’s (the author maintains that John Austin’s theory is indeed radically defective), but challenges the modern consensus that Hart’s conception of law as a system of rules is really the advance it is supposed to be.
The book’s central sections deal with the question of whether there is an obligation to obey the law, not (as Joseph Raz maintains) merely because the law consists of reasons for action that apply to the subject anyway (P. 199), but because the law secures the common good in ways that cannot be successfully contemplated or advanced by multitudes of individuals, even if those individuals steadily wish to act for the common good. This thesis is linked to that of command, for the author argues that commands generate genuine obligations, and do not simply, as Hart suggested, oblige (Pp. 93-96, 204). In fact, it is Hart who runs into trouble, for his argument is based on the idea that rules are to be theorised as practices, but these can be shown to lack a normative element. Continue reading "Modern Analytical Jurisprudence"
Apr 2, 2026 Laura Pedraza-FariñaIntellectual Property Law
Inventors and their inventions are the building blocks of patent law: There simply is no patent law without inventors who seek to patent their inventions. One might think that a concept as foundational as inventorship would be both well-settled and extensively argued in legal opinions. But that is not the case. In fact, understanding who counts as an inventor and what constitutes an invention has surprisingly flown below the radar both in patent law scholarship and judicial opinions. In her article, The Inventorship Fallacy, Amy Motomura helps us with a deeply-researched and carefully-parsed analysis of the myriad and often contradictory ways in which courts have defined the “inventor” and the “invention.”
Motomura’s article makes a number of important contributions to the literature. First, it sheds light on the inventorship doctrine’s hidden role in policing the boundaries of related patent filings (what she calls the “indirect” role of inventorship). It then provides a taxonomy for how to think about who counts as an inventor, disaggregating the concept into three strands: manner, timing and substance. Ultimately, her inquiry into how courts define the “substance” of inventorship—that is, what a participant must contribute to become a true inventor—leads her to a second key descriptive contribution: defining who counts as an inventor requires defining what counts as an invention for inventorship purposes. This task, in turn, has no clear doctrinal answer. Rather, the Federal Circuit has implicitly articulated three mutually exclusive understandings of the invention as reflected in (1) the full scope of the claims; (2) only the novel and nonobvious elements of the claims; or (3) only the “not-well-known” or “not publicly accessible” elements of the claims. Continue reading "Dynamic Inventorship"
Apr 1, 2026 Michael YuTrusts & Estates
In Tax Sheltering Death Care, Professor Victoria J. Haneman proposes the creation of tax-advantaged 529 End-of-Life (EOL) Plans to incentivize individuals to plan for death care expenses (for funeral, burial, or cremation) in a thoughtful way. Her proposed 529 EOL Plan (which operates like the existing 529 Plan for educational expenses) is “politically strategic in its subtlety” according to Professor Haneman because it “provides both a structure through which savings is incentivized for all and a targeted deathcare benefit is also delivered to our most vulnerable.” (P. 630.)
Before discussing Professor Haneman’s proposed 529 EOL Plan, a brief explanation of existing 529 plans for educational expenses is in order. Professor Haneman notes that her proposal is similar to one type of existing 529 plans (a state-administered tax-deferred investment account for educational expenses) but not to a different type of plan (a prepaid tuition program for in-state post-secondary schools. (Pp. 647-48.) Existing 529 plans allow for an account: (1) to receive contributions, (2) to treat account income as income tax-exempt, and (3) to have account withdrawals be treated as income-tax exempt if the withdrawals are made for a “qualified” educational expense. (P. 648.) Although contributions to existing 529 plans are not deductible for federal income tax purposes, around thirty states allow some type of deduction against state taxes. (P. 648.) Continue reading "A Proposal for a 529 End-of-Life Plan for Death Care Expenses"
Mar 31, 2026 Sam F. HalabiInternational & Comparative Law
For many of us, Derrick Bell’s Race, Racism, and American Law was a fundamental, devastating revelation about the role of law in constructing, reinforcing, and emboldening social institutions and structures that perpetuate and strengthen racism and de facto apartheid. Bell’s sphere was primarily the domestic United States—although of course it was not possible to completely separate the local from the global in 1973 and certainly is not today. Scholars influenced by Bell applied his lessons to other areas of legal research, including, but not limited to, international law. At its origin and continuing today, international law was anchored in racialized paradigms placing at their apex the “civilized” i.e. white and colonial sovereign powers, partially civilized countries like “Siam” and the Ottoman Empire, and “savage” or “barbarian” states comprised of what Frantz Fanon was later to famously describe as “the wretched of the earth.”
International law represents, therefore, an even more focused study of Bell’s precepts, and I welcome this new volume dedicated to this essential nexus of law and justice, Race, Racism, and International Law edited by Devon Carbado, Kimberle Williams Crenshaw, Justin Desautels-Stein, and Chantal Thomas. Featuring chapters from E. Tendayi Achiume and Aslı Bâli, Aziza Ahmed, Adelle Blackett, Christopher Gevers, Wadie Said, and Matiangai Sirleaf, in addition to the editors, the volume provides scholars of international law and racial justice one of the most important resources to date on how the history, agents, processes, and discourse of international law not only entrenched racial oppression as part of imperial global extraction and exploitation, but now sustain and feed this oppression within international legal rules and institutions. As wielders of these forces, the International Criminal Court is just as culpable as the World Trade Organization. Continue reading "Race, Racism, and International Law—Taking Derrick Bell’s Insights to the Next Level"
Mar 30, 2026 Maya ManianHealth Law
For more than forty years, HIV/AIDS has been understood as a paradigmatic public health crisis. The HIV/AIDS crisis generated extraordinary social movement activism and resulted in significant public health reforms. Yet, the dominant narratives of AIDS too often marginalize women’s experiences and obscure how deeply feminist advocacy reshaped not only the law but also the science of AIDS. In Risk and Resistance, Aziza Ahmed offers a powerful corrective to the historical narrative surrounding AIDS while also provoking broader questions about the nature of scientific knowledge itself.
Risk and Resistance is history, theory, and warning. The book is at once a rich archive of feminism and AIDS, a sharp challenge to the myth of science as a purely objective, neutral domain, and a conceptual lens for understanding contemporary public health crises in the MAHA era. Through a meticulously researched genealogy of feminist AIDS activism from the early 1980s through the 2010s, Ahmed shows how feminist social movements reshaped scientific consensus, transformed public health law, and altered the material distribution of life-saving resources. Continue reading "Public Health Law, Social Movements, and the Feminist Remaking of AIDS"
