UC Irvine Law Review

Women in the military have not had access to abortion care since 1978, when Congress introduced an amendment to a Department of Defense (DoD) appropriations bill, later codified under 10 U.S.C. § 1093, that prohibited the use of DoD funds for abortions. While women have endured this second-class health care for over four decades, the Supreme Court’s decision in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization has created new problems for servicewomen and the military writ large. Now military women must travel off-base and, in some instances, out-of-state or out-of-country, to seek an abortion. While women in and out of uniform share this burden, servicewomen must comply with military constraints that exacerbate their situation, including following orders that require them to be stationed in states that criminalize abortion, reporting their pregnancy up their chain of command, following leave protocols that require their commander’s approval when traveling for abortion care, and managing unpredictable assignments, including deployments, while seeking reproductive care. These unique circumstances create an unwelcoming and terrifying environment for military women at a time when the military is desperately trying to diversify the armed forces.

The DoD responded to the Dobbs decision by instituting an abortion travel policy, now rescinded, that allowed service members to be reimbursed for abortion-related travel, such as lodging, mileage, and per diem. While such policies are laudable, they are subject to change, and they do not diminish the legal and professional challenges that service members face after Dobbs. This Article analyzes the legal authorities that shape reproductive health policies in the military. It argues that the swirling political winds that influence abortion policies undermine the stability that military health care is meant to provide. Despite the hardships that service members face after Dobbs, renewed challenges to 10 U.S.C. § 1093 are likely to fail. However, Congress’s statutory ban should not prohibit the DoD from exploring alternative means of providing support to service members. The Article argues for increased confidentiality for pregnant servicewomen and argues that the Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) should be utilized to provide abortion services to servicewomen. The DoD must encourage formal and informal support networks and must leverage private organizations as gap-fillers where military health care falls short. The Article concludes that the military’s crippled reproductive health services are unacceptable in the age of Dobbs and that their detrimental impact on service members and national security is a national crisis. Unless reproductive services are expanded, the abortion issue will continue to impact national security and will hamstring the military’s efforts to modernize.

In 2025, regulating tech giants like Google and Amazon has emerged as a key issue on the U.S. government’s agenda, with antitrust law returning to the forefront. Meanwhile, across the Atlantic, Europe has introduced a new law, the Digital Markets Act (DMA), which regulates large online platforms, identified as “gatekeepers”. The DMA requires gatekeepers to adhere to specific obligations and prohibitions, typically subject to antitrust case-by-case scrutiny, to ensure fairness and contestability in digital markets. The European historical intellectual framework underpins the core features of the DMA, including its legal framework, approach, scope, and purpose. Since 2021, several antitrust bills have proposed a U.S. version of the DMA, aiming to reform antitrust law by adopting a similar legal framework, approach, scope, and purpose. However, this raises critical questions: Does the U.S. antitrust historical intellectual framework support the adoption of the DMA? Would a DMA type approach be successful in the United States? The conclusion from this comparative historical analysis of the DMA’s foundations is no. In making this claim, this Article lays out a roadmap for understanding the deep roots of the DMA in European history and tradition and why the U.S. approach to competition diverges in its foundations.

This Article makes three important contributions: First, it provides a historical comparative analysis between the intellectual frameworks of the United States and European Union (EU) by mapping out the roots of two very different antitrust traditions. Second, the Article unveils the ordoliberal ideology underlying the DMA, which fundamentally differs from the neoclassical way of thinking about and enforcing competition in the United States. Third, it gleans insights that American antitrust could learn from contrasting European approaches to regulating competition consistent with its core values.

The Article concludes by arguing that implementing a law like the DMA for U.S. antitrust law would be like forcing a square peg into a round hole. However, Europe does serve as a useful laboratory for the United States from which to draw important lessons. As Europe has adapted consistent with its framework, so too must the United States.

Imagine you had to choose between your health and your freedom. Many Americans do. Choices to work, marry, retire, move, cohabitate—all are influenced by health care finance laws. Access to health insurance is not guaranteed, and eligibility comes with social costs. For the publicly insured, recipients forgo work, marriage, and security in old age to meet strict income and asset tests. People with disabilities, their medical needs pigeon-holed into public programs, are denied equal opportunity in this way. Employer-sponsored insurance presents its own costs, limiting the range of jobs people take, when they can retire, and whether to marry and divorce. Medicaid expansion and premium tax credits mitigate these harms by degrees but are diminished under the current presidential administration.

Research is conclusive that social conditions shape our health. The inverse is also true, that the health care system shapes social conditions. This undermines goals of a health care system to make people healthier, insulate them financially, and enable them to live meaningful lives. It breeds social inequality.

This Article names and defines this problem, with an effort to center it in the health reform work of scholars, lawmakers, and judges. The Article offers minor and major policy reforms to address the problem. It contributes to scholarly discourse and policymaking on health and welfare reform at state and federal levels.

Gameplay is the core of video games, a two-hundred-billion-dollar business larger than the film and music industries combined. For years, commentators and public interest groups have claimed that video gameplay patents are stifling innovation—concerns that have garnered little attention from scholars or courts. That may soon change. Recent literature speculates that gameplay patents are rare and that challenges in acquiring them have forced companies to prioritize “copy-resistant” game elements such as high-definition graphics and sprawling open worlds. But advances in artificial intelligence are making such elements increasingly easy to recreate, prompting a renewed interest in gameplay innovation and a growing urgency to assess the merits of gameplay patents. This Article provides the empirical and analytical foundation for understanding the existence and merits of video gameplay patents. It trains a naive Bayes classifier to provide novel insight into gameplay patenting trends, uses case studies to identify distinguishing features of desirable video gameplay patents, and shows how recent Federal Circuit decisions impose stricter patentability requirements for video gameplay than the gameplay of physical games. In sharp contrast to the prevailing view among commentators, this Article argues that certain video gameplay patents can benefit the industry. It further argues that adopting the analysis from physical gameplay cases would create a new class of beneficial video game patents, providing critical protections to an industry under threat.

Immigration law is typically conceived as a body of law governing when noncitizens may enter the United States from abroad. But as revealed by recent controversies over migrants bused from Texas to cities like New York and Chicago, immigration law is not only concerned with who may cross the country’s borders, but also where people go within those borders. Immigration law, broadly understood, is not limited to questions of admission and deportation. It also shapes the geographic dispersal of refugees and immigrant workers throughout the United States. 

This Article contends that a complete account of immigration law requires understanding the ways in which it regulates the internal migration of noncitizens. This account involves grappling with immigration law both within the federal statutory scheme, and across numerous state and local regulations of undocumented immigrants. Recognizing this internal dimension of immigration law today also reveals a much longer history, stretching back to the country’s earliest controls over entry from abroad. Exploring this history reveals a wealth of alternative conceptions of how state and federal agencies might approach questions of internal migration. In particular, this Article provides an original analysis of a Progressive-era experiment with a federal immigrant labor “distribution” agency: the Division of Information, created within the Bureau of Immigration in 1907.

Recovering this largely forgotten history suggests how federal immigration law might be reformed to address challenges of internal migration more directly. Cooperative initiatives between federal and state agencies can increase federal capacity to respond to humanitarian emergencies. Such cooperation may also serve to align federal immigration law more closely with local economic, industrial, and labor policy needs. In contrast, failure to recognize and respond to immigration law’s internal dimension risks inviting a repetition of the “migrant crisis” of the Biden years.

The United States faces a climate crisis, an affordable housing crisis, and, linking them both, an insurance crisis. At the intersection of these concurrent predicaments lie a set of little-known but surprisingly impactful policies: state Insurer of Last Resort (ILR) programs. ILRs are state policies that provide property insurance when private insurance is unavailable, such as when private insurers determine that climate hazards are too risky to underwrite.

This Article argues that long-overlooked ILR programs are quickly becoming lynchpins for addressing some of today’s most pressing concerns around climate, housing, and insurance. Accordingly, ILRs bear urgent attention and reevaluation. In short, ILR progr ams are likely the most important policies that you’ve never heard of.

Building on this observation, the Article makes three main contributions. First, it identifies the power of ILR programs as intersectional policy responses to the concurrent insurance, climate, and housing crises.

Second, it surveys existing ILR policies, finding that they are relics of sixty-year-old decisions, and that states have seemingly overlooked the opportunities ILRs provide for tailored responses to insurance, climate, and housing concerns.

Third, it analyzes insurance data and state climate policy trends to show that many legacy ILR programs appear out of step with insurance withdrawal threats and state climate policy preferences. This suggests that states should consider revising their ILR programs in the near future.

Affirmative action is an active effort through policies aiming to provide opportunities for populations who have been historically underrepresented by allowing them to gain access to education, employment, and business contracting by using race as a factor. In California, the passage of Proposition 209 during the 1996 California ballot initiative created the end to affirmative action programs within the state. With the end of affirmative action programs in California, this Note explores the impact Proposition 209 left for underrepresented racial groups within higher education, specifically in the University of California (U.C.) system. Moreover, this Note addresses misconceptions created by opponents of affirmative action, such as the “mismatch theory” and harm towards the Asian American population. In 2023, the United States Supreme Court held in Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard that race-based affirmative action programs would be unconstitutional. With the national end of affirmative action programs, this Note also explores some alternative solutions, such as universities considering socioeconomic status instead of race.

This Note explores Abolitionist Community Economic Development (ACED) as a potential model for radical reform aimed at addressing entrenched racial and economic injustices in Black communities. This Note argues that traditional Community Economic Development (CED) projects often fall short of addressing the root causes of social and economic injustice in Black communities, as they tend to rely on external investment, risk triggering gentrification, and lack focus on redistributing power and rectifying historical injustices. In contrast, ACED emphasizes community ownership, long-term resilience, and direct control over resources, providing a more sustainable and empowering approach to tackling systemic inequalities. Using the framework established by Mabre Stahly-Butts and Amna Akbar in Reforms for Radicals? An Abolitionist Framework, this Note examines ACED initiatives like Cooperation Jackson and The Guild to assess their alignment with criteria for genuine radical change. This analysis demonstrates the potential of ACED to empower Black communities and proposes policy implications for scaling such models.