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Volume 76, Issue 6


Article

General Law and the Fourteenth Amendment

by  William Baude, Jud Campbell & Stephen E. Sachs

The Fourteenth Amendment’s Section One is central to our constitutional law. Yet its underlying principles remain surprisingly obscure. Its drafting history seems filled with contradictions, and there is no scholarly consensus on what rights it protects, or even on what kind of law defines those rights. This Article presents a new lens through which to…

Article

Disabling Families

by  Sarah H. Lorr

The family regulation system is increasingly notorious for harming the very families that it ostensibly aims to protect. Under the guise of advancing child welfare, Black, Brown, Native, and poor families are disproportionately surveilled, judged, and separated. Discrimination and ingrained prejudices against disabled parents render their families especially vulnerable to separation and termination. Once enmeshed…

Note

Younger and the Youth: The Younger Abstention Doctrine in the Child-Welfare Context

by  Peter R. O’Neill

In 2021, over three million children interacted with the child welfare system and over six hundred thousand were in foster care. These child welfare systems, striving as they may to help children and families in crisis, are themselves in crisis. Seeking relief from these dysfunctional state systems, children and advocacy groups have turned to the…

Note

Elephants in Mouseholes: The Major Questions Doctrine in the Lower Courts

by  Ling Ritter

In recent years, the Supreme Court has repeatedly deployed a new doctrine with potentially seismic implications for the future of the federal administrative state. The “major questions doctrine,” formally embraced by a majority of the Court for the first time in West Virginia v. EPA, requires administrative agencies to demonstrate “clear congressional authorization” when they…