TEACHING

I aim to help students understand the law’s Janus-faced relationship with discrimination — at once disrupting inequality and deepening it. On the one hand, courses in constitutional law and anti-discrimination showcase the doctrinal tools available to challenge subordination. On the other, courses in criminal law reveal how legal institutions themselves generate and legitimate status-based hierarchies.

I am happy to share my course evaluations upon request.

Précis

Constitutional Law

  • Constitutional Law (for 1Ls)

    State Constitutional Law

    Equal Protection and Substantive Due Process

    Constitutional Remedies

  • Criminal Law (for 1Ls)

    White Collar and Corporate Crime

    Criminal Procedure – Adjudications

  • What grounds, if any, justify the state in criminalizing activities like gambling, recreational drug use, alcohol use, pornography, same-sex intimacy, or sex work? This seminar examines the contested boundary between private morality and public prohibition, guided by three questions: (1) What is the relationship between criminal law and morality? (2) Can the law properly reach conduct that is considered “self-destructive,” or only that which causes injury to others? And (3) to what extent has the criminalization of so-called vices functioned as a tool for maintaining status hierarchies based on race, sex, sexuality, and class?

    In search of answers, we will revisit a series of concrete controversies—drug and alcohol policy, gambling prohibitions, and laws criminalizing interracial intimacy, adultery, same-sex intimacy, and sex work. By scrutinizing the rationales for criminalizing “victimless” and consensual acts, seminarians will test whether these regulations are a permissible exercise of state authority, or whether they inevitably collapse into the enforcement of morality.

  • Consider three cases.

    • Suppose a financial advisor defrauds a victim because he knows law enforcement are less likely to take the victim’s complaint seriously because of their identity. Is that a hate crime or mere opportunism?

    • Suppose a member of the LGBTQ community targets a victim belonging to another group under the same umbrella. Is that intra-community animus the stuff of “hate crime,” or something else entirely?

    • Same facts as the last, only this time the offender and victim belong to the same group. Does shared identity disqualify the conduct from constituting a hate crime, and does it count as “hate” when the prejudice is internalized?

    Legislatures in many jurisdictions have enacted penalty enhancements for crimes motivated by animus against victims on the basis of race, religion, gender, sexual orientation, or other protected characteristics. And yet, as the above examples show, the justifications and details of such enhancements are far from clear.

    This seminar will investigate the vexing conceptual, moral, and legal puzzles surrounding so-called “hate crimes.” We will work through five clusters of questions.

    1. Normative: Are crimes animated by prejudice more morally culpable than others? If so, why? What is the relationship between motives, culpability, and deserved punishment?

    2. Conceptual: What are, or what should we be, referring to when we label something a “hate crime”? Just how much prejudice is required? Must the conduct be wholly motivated by bias, or merely tinged by it? What mental states, attitudes, objectives, or beliefs count as “hate”?

    3. Explanatory: Why do we need the label “hate crime”? What is the evil we seek to remedy? Is the wrong of hate crimes better explained by distinctive motives, or by the distinctive harms suffered by victims, communities, and society?

    4. Enforcement: can members of one minority community commit hate crimes against another? How should the law handle “cluster communities” (ie., LGBTQ folk), or internalized prejudice?

    5. Pragmatic: Even if we could give a clear account of hate crimes, is it legitimate and advisable to wield criminal law against prejudice?

  • This seminar examines how criminal law creates and sustains hierarchies of status, and the possibility for repair. We will examine a series of case studies in which the expressive and enforcement functions of criminalization have been mobilized to reinforce or redraw hierarchies of race, ethnicity, gender, sexuality, and class. Examples include a combination of contemporary case studies—for instance, the use of criminal abortion regulation to police women’s roles; the criminalization of transgender identity; the intertwining of immigration and criminal law (“crimmigration”)—and historical cases—“status crimes” such as vagrancy or loitering; the policing of poverty and homelessness;  the late twentieth-century “war on crime” and “war on drugs,” with their disproportionate impact on Black communities. Throughout, the seminar will press the question: If criminalization has served to sustain racial stratification, gender subordination, or economic marginalization (among others), then how should criminal law respond once its complicity is acknowledged?

Criminal Law

Anti-discrimination Law

  • Employment Discrimination

    Civil Rights

  • Anti-discrimination Law and Theory

    Law and Inequality

    Hate Speech

  • What is the law’s role in either eradicating, or perpetuating, injustice against sexual minorities (i.e, lesbians, gays, bisexual, and asexual persons) and gender minorities (i.e, non-cisgender persons)?

    Weaving together history, theory, and doctrine, the seminar interrogates how the law generates, maintains, and legitimizes, injustices faced by gender and sexual minorities.

    Over the semester, we will look at the ways, both past and present, that the law has constructed and erased various queer identities, and trace how social movements, political conflicts, and social rhetoric play a role in the process of forging legal doctrine and legal rights. Throughout the semester, we will review key legal and political battles supporting and opposing the equal citizenship of the queer community, including: antidiscrimination protections, same-sex marriage, parenting and child welfare, education, healthcare, and athletics.

    Reading materials include case law, case documents, original press accounts, legal scholarship, and sources from other academic disciplines. Although the voices and first-hand accounts of those with the highest stakes in these conversations will be centered, a range of opinions will be considered.

  • This course provides an introduction to American constitutional law for students who are trained in other legal traditions. It covers structural aspects of the Constitution including the roles of the legislative, executive, and judicial branches; and the relationship between federal, state, and tribal governments. It also covers some of the Constitution’s rights provisions.

  • This seminar surveys the complex entanglement of race, racism, and legal institutions across U.S. history. We will pursue three socio-legal projects. First, we will trace the legal history of race in America by examining cases that have shaped the lives of Native peoples, African Americans, Latinos, and Asian Americans, situating those decisions in their social and political contexts. Second, we will interrogate the reciprocal relation between law and society: how law not only reflects but also produces, legitimates, and sustains racial hierarchies. Third, we will map the role of race in contemporary controversies—focusing on affirmative action, criminal justice reform, and immigration policy.

    In spring 2025, the topical coverage will include:

    • Native Persons: the Doctrine of Discovery, the Cherokee Cases, Reservations and Removal

    • Legal Aspects of American Chattel Slavery

    • Reconstruction, Racial Constructions, and Reconstituted Slavery: Trials of Racial Determination, Black Codes, and Vagrancy Criminalization

    • Law and Anti-Chinese Racism: The Chinese Exclusion Act, the Movement to Eliminate Chinese Restaurants, and the Chinese Laundry Cases

    • Federal Policy and Native Families: Coerced Adoptions, Criminalization of Cultural Practices, and Assimilationist Boarding Schools  

    • Japanese American Internment

    • Sexualized Racism: The White-Slave Traffic Act of 1910, Anti-miscegenation, Intimate Discrimination, and Contemporary Romantic Racial “Preferences”

    • Latinx Identity and the Law: Puerto Rico and Racialized Citizenship, LatCrit Theory, Crimmigration and Media Narratives of “Illegality” and “Criminality”

    • Substance Use and the Color of Crime: From “Opium Dens”, “Reefer Madness," and “Crack Is Wack” to Treatment-based Solutions for the Modern Opioid Epidemic

Previously Taught