The Yale Law Journal


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Against Ventriloquizing Children: How Students’ Rights Disguise Adult Culture Wars

This Essay argues against the pursuit of students’ rights, which function mainly as a smokescreen behind which adults have advanced their own partisan agendas in our culture wars. Independent rights for students are both theoretically untenable and politically damaging to our liberal democracy.

 

28 Oct 2024
Education Law

Forum

“Safety, in a Republican Sense”:
Trump v. United States, Democracy, and an Antisubordination Theory of the Criminal Law

Democratic governance requires holding the powerful to account. This Essay therefore proposes a broad antisubordination theory of the criminal law which grapples directly with disparities in power, rather than obscuring them under the guise of formal equality. Neither formal equality nor its alternative, prison abolitionism, can adequately protect democracy.

 

25 Oct 2024
Criminal LawDemocratic Legitimacy

Forum

The Effects of 401(k) Vesting Schedules—in Numbers

In 2022, over 1.87 million Americans ceased employment before satisfying their employer’s 401(k) plan vesting schedule, causing them to forfeit nonvested employer contributions. This Essay uses data to demonstrate the effects of using vesting schedules and highlights companies who had the most affected workers or amassed significant forfeitures in 2022.

27 Sep 2024
401(k) PlansRetirement Plans

Tribute

The Education Justice

author. Robert R. Slaughter Professor of Law, Yale Law School; Law Clerk for Justice Sandra Day O’Connor, 2006-07.


In June 2007—as my year with Justice O’Connor began drawing to a close—she stopped by my office for a friendly chat late one afternoon. Rather than physically knocking, she playfully intoned the

01 Jul 2024

Introduction

Introduction to the Special Issue on State and Local Governance

Many are well-acquainted with Justice Brandeis’s metaphor that states serve as laboratories of democracy. While dicta in the 1932 decision, New State Ice Co. v. Liebmann,1 Brandeis’s words have taken hold in legal scholarship and subsequent jurisprudence for nearly a century since. However, what is often left out

30 Jun 2024

Tribute

Lessons from My Mentor, Justice Sandra Day O’Connor

author. Circuit Judge, United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit; Law Clerk for Justice Sandra Day O’Connor, 2001-02. I thank my law clerks Rianna Hidalgo and Becca Hansen for their helpful edits to drafts of this tribute.


I had the great fortune to clerk for Justice O’Connor in

30 Jun 2024


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