Oct 2, 2026 Eric J. MillerCriminal Law
Alice Ristroph is one of our foremost philosophers of police violence. She has provided important clarity about the physical nature of “force” and its effect on human bodies, and painstakingly traced the ways in which Supreme Court doctrine has concealed or legitimized the impact of the police on, disproportionately, the bodies of Black people. It thus behooves us to pay attention when she warns that, not just the police or the Supreme Court, but now the federal government as a whole is on the precipice of a legitimacy crisis with policing and the police power at its heart.
In teasing out the police power, Ristroph asks us to consider (again) the interrelation of state, sovereignty, violence, legitimacy, and policing that have formed the core of her writings for at least the past decade-and-a-half. What she adds in her wonderful new article, The Judicial Police Power, is an inquiry into the concept of power itself. Continue reading "Leviathan Twisted: The Supreme Court’s Legitimation of Police Violence"
Oct 1, 2026 Dara E. PurvisFamily Law
Aníbal Rosario Lebrón,
Opting Out of Subordination: Minors’ Right to Control Their Bodies and Futures, 47
Cardozo L. Rev. __ (2026), available at
SSRN (Apr. 17, 2026).
Over the last five years, repeated waves of attacks on transgender children have presented a dichotomy for legal advocates hoping to help transgender and nonbinary kids: how to handle parental rights. On the one hand, conservative legislators and judges have used parents’ rights to justify measures such as statutes requiring teachers to out a student to their parents if the student requests that teachers use a different name or pronouns than those that appear on their formal paperwork. Last year’s Mahmoud v. Taylor held that the religious rights of parents reach into the public school curriculum so extensively that a school presenting any curriculum sufficiently in conflict with parents’ beliefs – in the case, approximately one book per school year with an LGBTQ main character or theme – must provide parents a warning and an opportunity to opt their child out of being exposed to those curricular materials. On the other hand, parents’ rights could be a promising avenue when parents support their transgender children, since the Supreme Court’s 2025 holding relating to gender-affirming care bans did not address potential claims brought on behalf of the parents of children seeking such care. To be sure, the parents whose rights have been vindicated before the courts and who have successfully lobbied in favor of protective legislation have all been antitrans. Consequently, pursuing a parents’ rights claim risks further retrenching conservative notions of which parents are entitled to have their rights protected.
Professor Aníbal Rosario Lebrón’s article Opting Out of Subordination: Minors’ Right to Control Their Bodies and Futures, complicates this dichotomy in a tremendously helpful way. It is too simplistic to summarize the question as whether parents win or lose in a disagreement with the state. Sometimes the central conflict is between parents and state, such as if a state mandates a childhood vaccine that the parents wish to opt out of. But sometimes different arrangements of parent, state, and the child in question create different fights. What if parents say that a public school’s curriculum conflicts with their religious beliefs, but the child argues they don’t share their parents’ faith and asks to stay in class? Or if a parent wants their child to undergo medical treatment for a life-threatening condition, but the child wishes to decline the treatment? All of the potential conflicts between parents, child, and the state are not, Professor Rosario Lebrón establishes, created equal. A thumb on the scale in favor of one member of that triad [by whom/what?] is too blunt a solution for a broad range of issues arising in this context. Continue reading "Complicating Children’s Rights"
