Category Archives: Equality
Mar 26, 2026 Ezra YoungEquality
In her Supreme Court chambers, the late Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg prominently displayed a passage of Hebrew scripture: “Tzedek, Tzedek, tirdof.” In English, the passage reads: “Justice, justice you shalt pursue.”
Some Americans are ardently religious. And some, like Justice Ginsburg, believe they are religiously obliged to do right in both public and private life. Figuring out how far individuals may extend their religious exercise into the public sphere is difficult and increasingly fraught. As Justice Ginsburg elevated more than a decade ago in her dissent to Burwell v. Hobby Lobby Stores, Inc., a legal rule that allows a religious person to affect the rights of someone who does not share their views is constitutionally suspect. Put another way, the big metaphysical questions some of us happily answer through faith alone are not always conducive to secular logics, let alone law. Continue reading "Religious Equality Run Amuck"
Feb 25, 2026 Chao-Ju ChenEquality
Rachel Bayefsky,
Tradition and Feminism in Constitutional Rights Adjudication, __
Va. L. Rev. __ (forthcoming), available at
SSRN (May 27, 2025).
In the post-Dobbs world, concerns over the Courts’ growing use of “history and tradition” as an interpretative tool and as a constitutional test, particular its invocation in ways that reinforce inequality, have reached an unprecedented high, and with good reason. One of the latest examples is the Supreme Court’s adoption of historical practice as a central interpretative mode in its 2025 birthright citizenship case, Trump v. CASA, which imposes limits on lower-courts’ ability to enter preliminary injunctions and opens up the possibility of discriminatory legal measures being blocked for some but enforced against others, including those in marginalized communities who lack resources to legally challenge them.
Joining a growing body of legal scholars addressing “history and tradition’s equality problem,” Rachel Bayefsky has now made a timely feminist intervention that brings conceptual clarity, methodological rigor, hope for change, and a persuasive appeal to both liberals and conservatives to move beyond the adversarial relationship between tradition and equality. In a world of intensified polarizations, Bayefsky’s constructive and philosophically nuanced engagement with traditionalists is especially commendable. Her proposed theory of dialectical traditionalism reconciles the tensions between traditionalism and feminism by providing a framework for adjudicators to engage with traditionalist reasoning without replicating and justifying the unequal past, regardless of whether they identify as “traditionalists.” A recent study examining the role of history and tradition in state court abortion decisions supports Bayefsky’s hope, as some of these courts have adopted a critical approach to history and tradition in protecting reproductive rights. Continue reading "Tradition versus Equality: A feminist intervention"
Jan 29, 2026 Marc SpindelmanEquality
Dean Spade’s latest book, Love in a F*ucked Up World: How to Build Relationships, Hook Up, and Raise Hell Together (2025), is a self-help volume with a distinctive mission. The book’s self-improvement stylings arrive amidst the highly intentional teachings of an established social movement activist, organizer, and institution-builder writing here primarily for a younger generation on or open to the political left. The book leverages hardscrabble wisdom wrought from Spade’s years on the political front lines as deepened by serious psychological study and reflection. The result is a book offering readers a space for meaningful self-witness. Love encourages readers to discover via self-reflection that many of the forces they oppose “out there” in the social world also operate within themselves. The book’s self-help resources then guide readers toward the transformative self-healing that may follow—producing selves capable of new intimacies, relationships, and social movement work that may yet set them, and the rest of us, free.
Love’s self-help advice unfolds across digestibly structured chapters. These carve-ups give readers opportunities to process the book’s instruction and self-exam prompts, making the experience almost dialogic. The book braids self-help advice with political argument and complements both with first-person narrative and fictionalized vignettes that supply readers with additional layered contact points for approaching its ideas, questions, questionnaires, assessment tools, and worksheets. Continue reading "Spade’s Love"
Dec 19, 2025 Ann E. TweedyEquality
In this current era of the weaponization of law against transgender people, I found the beauty and heartbreak of K. Iver’s Short Film Starring My Beloved’s Red Bronco fortifying. Iver is a trans, non-binary poet, but the poems in the book largely focus on their teen-age years when they identified as female and were in love with a young trans man who ultimately committed suicide.
These extremely difficult times we are now living in seem to call for poetry—even among law professors—because of its emotional immediacy, particularly its ability to transcend entrenched positions and arguments and to allow us to commune with others through the experiences poets describe. In this era of book bans and state-sponsored censorship, poetry and literature in general are perhaps less likely to have the wide reach they otherwise would, so, despite Iver’s book’s transformative potential, it may be unlikely that it will be read by many who are unsure about transgender rights or who reject them outright. However, as a trans ally and poet, I found the book deeply affecting, and I would highly recommend it to anyone. Continue reading "Iver’s Poetry as an Antidote to Law’s Weaponization Against Trans Folk"
Dec 12, 2025 I. India ThusiEquality
Andrea Freeman’s Ruin Their Crops is a bracing book— one that refuses to let law stay above the fray. The book’s title, drawn from President Washington’s command to “ruin their crops on the ground,” is more than historical reference; it’s a theory of power, waste, and control that pulses through this work with moral clarity. By centering food policy — a topic too often siloed as agricultural or technocratic — Freeman exposes how law actively structures hunger, malnutrition, and even food destruction in marginalized communities. This book is a powerful reminder that access to food, a fundamental socioeconomic right, is not peripheral to law, but one of its central battlegrounds. As Freeman stated in a recent interview, “It is the ground we stand on that sustains us. And it is this truism that frequently creates the illusion of alimentary choice while obscuring the structural racism embedded in U.S. American food politics.”
At a time when legal scholarship celebrates doctrinal complexity while distancing itself from lived experience, Ruin Their Crops does the opposite. Freeman pulls law down from abstraction and grounds it, quite literally, in the soil. She maps a legal genealogy of waste — from federally funded crop destruction to racialized school lunch programs — showing how food becomes a weapon, and hunger, a byproduct of governance. The book does what great legal scholarship should: it makes us see familiar structures differently, then implicates us in their ongoing design. Continue reading "Ruination as Policy: The Legal Architecture of Food Waste"
Nov 14, 2025 Rakhi RupareliaEquality
Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) programs have always sat uneasily with me. While the aspirations of such initiatives are ostensibly noble, their development and execution often present as token efforts to address social inequalities while leaving racial hierarchies intact. Indeed, many institutions express their commitment to such projects to appease political interests and avoid liability rather than to effect meaningful change.
Like many others invested in racial justice, I find it particularly vexing when DEI is used interchangeably with anti-racism, or more recently Critical Race Theory (CRT), as though brief training in cultural competency or individual bias, or a statement welcoming applicants from diverse communities at the end of a job posting are the magic wands that will eradicate systemic inequalities. DEI initiatives can be valuable when implemented properly, but they must complement systemic remedies, not replace them, for progress to be possible.
In her excellent article, law professor Tanya Hernández homes in on the proliferation of DEI programs as a response to the racism that has become increasingly difficult to deny following the unjustified police killings of George Floyd and other Black men and women. As the Black Lives Matter movement surged, organizations and corporations loudly professed their commitment to DEI and doing (or at least appearing to do) the right thing in a climate where so much was evidently wrong. Although their quality and efficacy vary, these programs still attract the ire of those who claim they promote unfairness and discrimination against white people, whom they characterize as the true victims of racism in an overly sensitive era. Sociologist Tressie McMillan Cottom aptly describes this unfounded perception as “race fantasy.” Continue reading "Resuscitating DEI: Using CRT to Breathe Life Back into Diversity, Equity and Inclusion"
Oct 15, 2025 Erez AloniEquality
Legal scholarship has long grappled with how to name and remedy discrimination that doesn’t fit neatly into existing legal and conceptual frameworks. We have robust vocabularies for overt bigotry, implicit biases, and increasingly nuanced understandings of microaggressions—those subtle slights that accumulate from interpersonal to structural harm. But what about the moments when someone refuses to use another’s pronouns—not with hostility, but with a shrug? When they double down, explaining they’re “not wired that way,” or that recognizing someone’s genderqueer identity is simply “asking too much”? What happens when misrecognition isn’t hidden, but rather is framed as ordinary, reasonable—even inevitable?
In their revelatory article, Blasé: Deviant Lawyers and the Denial of Discrimination, Swethaa Ballakrishnen names this under-theorized dynamic through interviews with sixty law students and early-career legal professionals from marginalized groups. Ballakrishnen calls it blasé discrimination: a form of bias that arises when emerging or less institutionally legible identities—such as nonbinary gender—are dismissed not as wrong, but as irrelevant. This is not discrimination that hides, but discrimination that shrugs. The harm lies in the casualness of erasure—where certain forms of difference are brushed aside as too trivial or inconvenient to matter. Ballakrishnen traces how identity categories in flux become especially vulnerable to denial. Continue reading "Ordinary Denials: The Shrug of Identity-Based Harm"
Sep 16, 2025 Natsu Taylor SaitoEquality
Enslaved Africans occasionally poisoned those who abused them. As legal scholars, how do we process this? You may have jumped, as I did, to drafting a mental list of legal justifications that could apply in a poisoning case. Or you may have assumed, as I did, that such legal defenses would be the focus of Angi Porter’s analysis in her new article “POISON! An Africana Legal Studies Investigation into Enslaved Africans and their Deadly Roots.” In fact, however, Porter, an assistant professor at American University’s Washington College of Law, does something wildly, brilliantly, courageously different.
POISON! moves outside of the framework of the enslavers and their legal system to assess the use of poisons by enslaved Africans from the perspective of indigenous African governance. With this shift, Porter confirms that the emergence of Africana Legal Studies brings us a new methodology, not just an expansion of the subject matter at hand. Utilizing her meticulous research on poisonings, the knowledge held by African healers, and what she terms the governing Protocol of West African Akan speakers, Porter helps us see that these enslaved Africans may best be understood not as individuals forced to act in self-defense but, instead, the enforcers of a collective Protocol that governed and protected their communities. Continue reading "Roots of Freedom"
Aug 4, 2025 Andrea FreemanEquality
Professor and scholar-activist Bernadette Atuahene’s meticulous research and riveting writing in Plundered reflect decades of living in communities resisting predatory governance. Over ten years after Professor Atuahene’s powerful first book, We Want What’s Ours: Learning from South Africa’s Land Restitution Program, she turns a spotlight on a Detroit community under siege from its own county. In her heartbreaking exposé of illegal property tax assessments and foreclosures, Professor Atuahene paints a vivid picture of people fighting for the right to keep the homes that rightfully belong to them.
Focused on two families – one Black and one Italian – Plundered: How Racist Policies Undermine Black Homeownership in America shows how government decisions circumscribe the ability to build wealth through generations. The narrative is rife with details that each deserve a book in themselves. Ms. Mae, who Plundered introduces in its opening pages, put up with years of abuse before finally shooting her husband. “He came home and tried to jump on me. I was sitting there watching tv, and he pulled his shotgun to shoot me, and so I got it, and I shot him.” To pay her defense lawyer, Ms. Mae took out a lien on her home. She finally got rid of the lien ten years later but her luck was short-lived. Soon after relieving herself of the debt, she damaged her shoulder while lifting a resident at the nursing home where she worked. Surgery could not fully restore proper use of her shoulder. Then, holes in the roof of her house caused leaks in the kitchen ceilings which made the basement ceiling fall in, unleashing a flood. While trying to drain her flooded basement, Ms. Mae fell, permanently injuring her spine and bringing her working life to an abrupt halt. The flood also destroyed her hot water tank, forcing her to boil water for everything. Instead of coming to her aid, the system repeatedly failed Ms. Mae and families like hers and then turned around and blamed them for their troubles. Continue reading "Predatory Governance in Wayne County and Beyond"
Jul 3, 2025 Eliot TraczEquality
It’s rare that an article comes along with the potential to reshape how an entire area of law is litigated. This is particularly true for articles addressing discrimination against the LGBTQ community. Katie Eyer authored such a piece, which influenced the outcome in Bostock v. Clayton County. Now, Zee Scout, in her article Trans Erasure, Intersex Manipulation: The First Amendment and Other Reflections from Women in Struggle v. Bain, has written just such a work, which promises to impact how anti-trans legislation is litigated.
Scout’s article addresses the onslaught of state legislation targeting what she refers to as transgender, gender nonconforming, intersex, and queer (TGNCI) people. While the Equal Protection Clause has long been the tool of choice to advance TGNCI rights, federal courts have begun rolling back progress. This rollback, according to Scout, is premised on the “real differences” doctrine, which argues that men and women have distinct biological characteristics which in turn permit certain types of distinctions in regulation. (P. 121.) As a result, states have been able to pass legislation as based on binary differences of reproductive anatomy (which of course erases intersex people entirely). Continue reading "Viewpoint Discrimination, Compelled Speech, and Trans Identity"
