In the novel Sula, Toni Morrison describes a neighborhood known locally as the Bottom, where the black community lived. It was "the hilly land, where planting was backbreaking, where the soil slid down and washed away the seeds, and where the wind lingered all through the winter." We know such Bottoms. We have seen neighborhoods forsaken in the levees' breach, public housing blocks gaptoothed with boarded windows, and floodplain shantytowns for farmworkers. We know of homes on land scarred by contamination or dogged by natural adversity. But across the country are Bottoms of another, less familiar type. On the outskirts of small cities and incorporated suburbs across the country, hundreds of high-poverty neighborhoods of color lack rudimentary services like sewage systems, drainage, and streetlights. Integrated economically with city populations but excluded from participatory rights in city government, these unincorporated urban areas bear disproportionate numbers of landfills, municipal utility plants, and freeways that benefit urban populations but threaten local health and depress land values.

What to do with today's lost neighborhoods? It is the late dawn of the twenty-first century, when integration is stronger and civil rights laws are weaker, when local government budgets are dwarfed by demands. Suing local governments or lobbying them, two of the most important strategies of twentieth- century advocacy for social justice, have been weakened by judicial and political hostility to redistributive claims. Yet state and local government law retains malleability and promise. Laws governing the allocation of power among local agencies exert significant influence over unincorporated urban areas in particular and spatial polarization by race and class more generally.

In part a prescription for unincorporated urban areas specifically, in part an exploration of solutions for any problem of metropolitan inequality, Mapped Out of Local Democracy takes stock of today's tools. It argues for a new priority in metropolitan law and policy: state legislative reforms to empower and reshape county governments to represent regional interests and regional logic in intergovernmental negotiations. Strengthening counties to bargain with other local agencies over matters with redistributive consequences, like annexation, can bring an interlocal perspective to critical local decision making and create a promising corridor for addressing contemporary issues of urban inequality. By bringing counties—our most neglected, under-theorized layer of urban government—into sharper relief, this Article offers a new direction in state and local government law in order to seek progress on economic and racial polarization in America's cities.

This Article offers a general framework for applying the Fourth Amendment to the Internet. It assumes that courts will seek a technology-neutral translation of Fourth Amendment principles from physical space to cyberspace, and it considers what new distinctions in the online setting can reflect the function of Fourth Amendment protections designed for the physical world. It reaches two major conclusions. First, the traditional physical distinction between inside and outside should be replaced with the online distinction between content and non-content information. Second, courts should require a search warrant that is particularized to individuals rather than Internet accounts to collect the contents of protected Internet communications. These two principles point the way to a technology-neutral translation of the Fourth Amendment from physical space to cyberspace.

A puzzle is raised by cases of false confessions: How could an innocent person convincingly confess to a crime? Postconviction DNA testing has now exonerated over 250 convicts, more than forty of whom falsely confessed to rapes and murders. As a result, there is a new awareness that innocent people falsely confess, often due to psychological pressure placed upon them during police interrogations. Scholars increasingly examine the psychological techniques that can cause people to falsely confess and document instances of known false confessions. This Article takes a different approach, by examining the substance of false confessions, including what was said during interrogations and how the confession statements were then litigated at trial and postconviction. Doing so sheds light on the phenomenon of confession contamination. Not only can innocent people falsely confess, but all except two of the exonerees studied were induced to deliver false confessions with surprisingly rich, detailed, and accurate information. We now know that those details could not have likely originated with these innocent people, but rather must have been disclosed to them, most likely during the interrogation process. However, our constitutional criminal procedure does not regulate the postadmission interrogation process, nor do courts evaluate the reliability of confessions. This Article outlines a series of reforms that focus on the insidious problem of contamination, particularly videotaping interrogations in their entirety, but also reframing police procedures, trial practice, and judicial review. Unless criminal procedure is reoriented towards the reliability of the substance of confessions, contamination of facts may continue to go undetected, resulting in miscarriages of justice.

As with phrenology and the polygraph, society is again confronted with a device that the media claims is capable of reading our minds. Functional magnetic resonance imaging ("fMRI"), along with other types of functional brain imaging technologies, is currently being introduced at various stages of a criminal trial as evidence of a defendant's past mental state. This Article demonstrates that functional brain images should not currently be admitted as evidence into courts for this purpose. Using the analytical framework provided by Federal Rule of Evidence 403 as a threshold to a Daubert/Frye analysis, we demonstrate that, when fMRI methodology is properly understood, brain images are only minimally probative of a defendant's past mental states and are almost certainly more unfairly prejudicial than probative on balance. Careful and detailed explanation of the underlying science separates this Article from others, which have tended to paint fMRI with a gloss of credibility and certainty for all courtroom-relevant applications. Instead, we argue that this technology may present a particularly strong form of unfair prejudice in addition to its potential to mislead jurors and waste the court's resources. Finally, since fMRI methodology may one day improve such that its probative value is no longer eclipsed by its extreme potential for unfair prejudice, we offer a nonexhaustive checklist that judges and counsel can use to authenticate functional brain images and assess the weight these images are to be accorded by fact finders.