The statute governing obstruction of an official proceeding—one of the charges brought against January 6 defendants and then-President Trump—faces a moment of reckoning. This Essay by Stanford J.D. candidate Jennifer L. Portis identifies a novel interpretation: § 1512(c)(2) reaches only direct obstruction, not those individuals who obstruct the official proceeding through another person's conduct.
In this Essay, Aliya Sternstein of Georgetown University Law Center argues that an international body must set a standard, five-year window, after an emergency vaccine is administered and when the recipient can seek compensation for an injury. Sternstein further argues that emergency vaccine developers should receive immunity against liabilities except for willful misconduct.
In this Essay, Prof. John J. Martin of the University of Virginia School of Law argues for a Congressional Incapacity Amendment to the Constitution, modeled on the Twenty-Fifth Amendment's provisions for Presidential incapacity.
In this Essay, Prof. Jacob D. Charles of Pepperdine University Caruso School of Law considers the use of history and tradition in firearm regulation following the Supreme Court's Bruen decision. He argues that courts should use an "Abstraction Approach" in considering historical analogues to modern regulations.
In this Essay, Judge Timothy B. Dyk of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit considers appellate courts' use of information from outside the factual record, i.e. "non-adjudicative facts," when making decisions. Although this practice is commonplace and often harmless, the Essay notes the greater potential for incorrect conclusions when relying on facts outside the record. It urges judges to use non-adjudicative facts with caution, and carefully verify them to avoid serious error.
Class actions are plagued by poor communication between class counsel and the masses of unnamed class members. In this Essay, Professors Alissa del Riego and Joseph Avery propose that these barriers be overcome by using the new technical capabilities of artificial intelligence, and by adding an express duty to communicate to the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure.
In this Essay, part of Stanford Law Review's 2023 Access to Justice Symposium, Juliet M. Brodie and Larisa G. Bowman argue that most low-income tenants facing eviction do not need a lawyer—they need money to pay rent. They suggest investing in rental assistance programs and non-attorney advocates to save legal resources for cases with factual or legal disputes.
In this Essay, part of Stanford Law Review's 2023 Access to Justice Symposium, Lauren Sudeall argues that many aspects of the civil legal system systematically disfavor poor litigants. She suggests removing certain types of cases from the legal system altogether, following the logic of decriminalization in the civil sphere.
In this Essay, Bruce A. Green describes how a 1917 misdemeanor case charted the course of civil justice in America for over a century and urges state judiciaries to change course. Instead of impeding nonlawyers from helping unrepresented people with their legal problems, as courts have done for more than a century, he argues that courts should use their regulatory authority to let certified paralegals, social workers, and other nonlawyers train to do legal work that they can capably do.
Part of Stanford Law Review's symposium on access to justice, Karin Martin argues that monetary sanctions are an important contributing factor to the problem of access to justice. The sanctions simultaneously generate unmade legal needs and deprive people of just solutions.
As part of Stanford Law Review's 2023 Symposium on Access to Justice, this Essay explains how medical-legal partnerships--community-based programs that embed lawyers within healthcare teams--offer a promising model to address our country's justice gap. By using trusted institutions to connect people to the resources they need and embracing a bottom-up "patients-to-policy" approach, medical legal partnerships demonstrate how interdisciplinary collaborations can effect transformative change and advance substantive justice.
Part of Stanford Law Review's 2023 Symposium on Access to Justice, this Essay explores how lawyerless state civil courts operate in unique ways, countering conventional understandings of how law is developed in a court system. The Essay highlights how patterns of law development within state trial courts can either counter or reinforce inequality, and how important it is for scholars and policymakers to first understand how these courts, which are integral to our system, work.
In The Fight to Save the Town, Michelle Wilde Anderson captures how the idea of narrative is inextricable from the intertwined problems of economic collapse, poverty, divestment, and racism. By shining a light on small victories in the places in the country where progress is not expected like Lawrence, Massachusetts, the book tells people in similar places that progress is possible.
In The Fight to Save the Town, Michelle Wilde Anderson chronicles the fights to save four places that are usually put on the undeserving, unworthy side of the line. This Book Symposium aims to elaborate on the stories the book tells, with authors Helaine Olen, Julia Mendoza, Sheila Foster, Jess Andors, and Dan Rivera each reflecting on different towns and individuals featured.
Michelle Wilde Anderson’s The Fight to Save the Town offers a compelling portrait of residents of Stockton, California, Lawrence, Massachusetts, Detroit, Michigan, and rural Josephine County, Oregon in their fights against the decline of their hometowns. She focuses her attention on the hardy souls who attempt to push back against ongoing neglect and the people who fight to keep libraries open and teens away from drugs. But we must remember that individual victories—when, that is, they occur—can’t fully compensate for decades of neglect, and that the fight to save a town is often harder than it sounds.
In The Fight to Save the Town, Michelle Wilde Anderson addresses how local governments and nonprofits can create collective ecosystems of care despite decades of “austerity, spatial inequality, and citywide poverty.” These ecosystems of care are essential not only to building an abolitionist world without police and prisons, but to creating a world with life-affirming social infrastructures that address all systems of inequity.
In The Fight to Save the Town, Michelle Wilde Anderson captures how the rise and fall of Detroit maps onto so many other important cultural, political, social, and economic moments of the twentieth century. As Anderson rightly notes, many of the ways in which the city’s history is commonly told represent a “white gaze on Detroit.” What this narrative often leaves out is the critical role of the Black middle and professional class in stabilizing or holding up the city during the period often associated with the city’s decline.
Now that the Supreme Court has overturned Roe v. Wade and Planned Parenthood v. Casey, the movement for abortion rights and access finds itself in uncharted territory, and the stakes could not be higher. For abortion rights defenders, this new, post-Roe playing field means adapting their strategy and mindset to confront a new environment without a tether to federal constitutional protection. This Essay, published in the immediate aftermath of Dobbs, offers some initial thoughts about what the changed legal landscape means for abortion rights legal advocacy. It offers several suggestions, all of which require a paradigm shift in movement strategy to one that is in some ways modeled after the now-successful movement to overturn Roe.
Has qualified immunity finally found its roots? Scott Keller’s Qualified and Absolute Immunity at Common Law shows the breadth and complexity of nineteenth century case law dealing with official immunities. But its most important claim, for today’s purposes, is the claim to find a historical basis for a doctrine of qualified immunity: an immunity from suit given to all government officials (including, but not only, the police) whenever they are sued for violating the Constitution. According to Keller, “the common law definitively accorded at least qualified immunity to all executive officers’ discretionary duties” in 1871, when Congress passed the civil rights statute now codified as 42 U.S.C. §1983. This would be very important if it were true. But it is not.
Election law now operates in a sea of pervasive distrust. This essay argues that election law and practices must adapt to the context of this pervasive distrust. Policies and practices that might be fine under normal circumstances, but are likely to feed distrust today, should be re-thought. This short essay identifies seven initial measures that policymakers, election administrators, and even voters can take to help fend off distrust about the election process.
