Volume 42, Issue 2 (Spring 2024)

Pandemic State-Building: Chinese Administrative Expansion Since 2012

Volume 42, Issue 2 (Spring 2024)

By Yutian An and Taisu Zhang*

Abstract. In 2020, with the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, China embarked on one of the largest expansions of administrative capacity in its modern history. Compared to its pre-COVID self, the current Chinese government can now track and manage individual activity with unprecedented precision and regularity. While some of these developments were emergency measures that were limited to the pandemic, many of them have become institutionally entrenched through generalized lawmaking and policymaking, permanently transforming the Chinese government’s relationship with its population. Most importantly, the Party-state delegated enormous administrative-law enforcement and information-collection powers to two levels of urban government—the “subdistrict,” and below it, the “neighborhood community”—that used to be institutionally marginalized.

The Mythology of the Three Liars and the Criminalization of Survival

volume 42, issue 2 (spring 2024)

By Elizabeth Langston Isaacs*

Abstract. There is nothing new about the legal system discounting the credibility of women, people of color, and people behind bars. Historically, the mythology of these three “liars” has given rise to evidentiary rules that equate female chastity with truthfulness, and Blackness (or its proxy—a criminal record) with dishonesty. Examples include the doctrine of prompt complaint and laws barring Black people from testifying against whites. In recent history, the law has steadily retreated from rules endorsing explicit bias. But disbelief based on race and gender bias persists even in unlikely places, such as progressive legislative reform.

A Contractual Approach To Social Media Governance

volume 42, issue 2 (spring 2024)

By Gilad Mills*

Abstract. The heated scholarly debate in recent years around social media governance has been dominated by a clear public law bias and has yielded a substantively incomplete analysis of the issues at hand. Captured by public law analogies that depict platforms as governors who perform legislative, administrative, and adjudicatory functions, scholars and policymakers have repeatedly turned to public law norms as the hook on which they hang proposed governance solutions. As a practical strategy, they either called to impose public law norms by way of regulatory intervention or, conversely, called on platforms to adopt them voluntarily. This approach to social media governance, however, has met with limited success, stymied by political deadlocks, constitutional constraints, and platforms’ commercial preferences.

When Public Land Leaves Public Hands: Values Embedded in Municipal Land Disposition Law

Volume 42, Issue 2 (Spring 2024)

By Ann Sarnak*

Abstract. In the wake of multiple economic crises, many local governments across the country have resorted to selling off their real property. At the same time, advocates and social movements are increasingly calling for municipalities to use publicly-owned land to advance spatial justice in cities—for instance, to develop affordable housing, parks, and other public resources. Brewing conflicts over local land suggest the need to better understand the law that underlies municipal land disposition. In this Note, I survey the tapestry of state and local laws that govern land disposition in fifteen large American cities, and catalogue the values embedded within these laws. I conclude by proposing a pair of new and potentially overriding “stewardship” values that should guide the disposition process, in an effort to countervail privatization and urban inequality in the country’s major metropolitan areas.

Challenging the Inconceivability Fallacy: Post-Dobbs Abortion Rhetoric, Transgender Visibility, and What the United States Can Learn from Latin America’s “Green Wave”

Volume 42, Issue 2 (Spring 2024)

By Jordan Thomas*

Abstract. After fifty years of pro-choice advocacy groups abroad looking to the United States as a beacon of hope and a guidebook for how to achieve similarly expansive abortion liberties, the United States abdicated its position as a global leader on abortion rights with its decision to overturn Roe v. Wade in 2022. In contrast, three of Latin America’s four most populous nations—Argentina, Mexico, and Colombia—have expanded abortion protections in the past three years. The victories in all three countries were linked to a grassroots abortion-rights movement known as the “Marea Verde” or “Green Wave” that has been advocating for change across Latin America.

Reducing Community Violence & Incarceration: Insights from a Health-Justice Partnership in Detroit

volume 42, issue 2 (spring 2024)

By Amanda Alexander, J.D., Ph.D. & Tolulope Sonuyi, M.D., M.Sc*

Abstract. Community violence is the leading cause of death for young adults in Detroit. Our community and others across the country desperately require solutions that center the needs of violence survivors and interrupt cycles of violence, reinjury, retaliation, incarceration, and premature death. Most cities have confronted the problem of community violence by deepening investments in punitive and carceral approaches, such as expanding police forces, surveillance infrastructure, jails, and prisons. Yet these investments have not stopped community violence, and often only exacerbate the problem and further destabilize communities.