UC Irvine Law Review

Once considered a mere novelty, ground robots and aerial drones are quickly becoming a mainstream policing tool. Autonomous police robots, equipped with a panoply of cameras and sensors, have been sent into parks, schools, and train stations. Agencies across the country are piloting “Drone as First Responder” programs, which automatically dispatch drones in response to 911 calls. Police have used robots to disorient, immobilize, and use force against suspects.

Police robots may provide public safety benefits, but they may also carry real risks. The widespread adoption of highly mobile robots equipped with cameras, sensors, and analytics will only hasten the proliferation of police surveillance, with attendant risks to individual privacy. Algorithmic bias and disparities in where policing technologies are deployed may fuel racial inequities. The advent of force-equipped robots raises profound ethical questions that require a systematic rethinking around use-of-force rules.

In the face of the harms of police robots, the existing patchwork of laws and constitutional rules governing policing is proving inadequate. As police rush to adopt these new tools, sound policymaking is needed—and urgently. To that end, this Article aims to provide a comprehensive roadmap for the regulation of robotics in law enforcement.

In the aftermath of the 2022 U.S. Supreme Court ruling in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization removing federal constitutional protection for abortion, twenty states currently significantly restrict access to abortion. These state laws all include exceptions for the life of the pregnant person; most also exempt significant impairments to the pregnant patient’s health. Despite these exceptions, repeated accounts in the press and in court cases have shown pregnant patients in significant medical need being denied abortion care, resulting in serious injuries and, in some cases, death. The reasons for this denial of care, though, are disputed. Physicians have contended that the language of medical exceptions is so unclear that they are difficult to apply. Meanwhile, legislators who favor strict restrictions have blamed attending doctors for failing to apply what they say are clear exceptions, either because of negligence or because physicians are seeking to discredit restrictive regulations.

This Article explores the controversy over application of medical exceptions through analyzing the results of a new empirical study involving in-depth, qualitative interviews with maternal fetal medicine physicians providing patient-facing care post Dobbs. Physicians’ responses in these interviews, we demonstrate, pinpoint recurring gaps between the ways that physicians make abortion decisions in standard medical practice and the language of medical exceptions. These create uncertainty regarding whether, among other issues, the level of risk to life or health experienced by the patient rises to the threshold required by state law, and whether and when the patient’s medical risk meets the exception’s requirements regarding timing of the abortion. The disjuncture between medical practice and the statutory language physicians are expected to apply, we show, creates indecision regarding whether medical exceptions will shield doctors from liability and severe penalties in most cases involving medical risk.

We then argue that physicians’ uncertainties in applying medical exceptions implicate the constitutional “void-for-vagueness” doctrine. Under that doctrine, laws that do not allow those persons subject to them to determine whether their conduct is legal cannot be enforced. We contend that physicians’ inability to determine whether and when existing medical exceptions apply in the cases presented to them requires that courts strike down abortion restrictions. Finally, although we believe that pregnancy is too complicated to allow abortion to be regulated in a manner that adequately protects the lives and health of pregnant patients in all cases, we offer an example of a “least-vague” medical exception that would provide better guidance to physicians about when abortions for medical reasons are lawful. Such an exception, we believe, would clear the void-for-vagueness bar.

This Article integrates multigenerational illegality into the canon by employing conceptual analysis and personal narrative. Multigenerational illegality explains how mixed-status Indigenous, Black, Latinx/e, and Asian and Pacific Islander families are branded as “illegal” and systemically denied pathways to status or citizenship, thereby becoming marginalized across generations. In this way, this Article demonstrates the legal injuries and sacrificios of mixed-status families of color caused by the system of immigration law and enforcement.

Corporate directors and officers substantially influence how well—or poorly—a corporation addresses human rights risks. But their involvement is often hidden or misunderstood, despite the reality that many corporate human rights abuses occur because of explicit choices made by their leadership that, on many occasions, inevitably lead to human rights violations. The failure to understand their role in past corporate human rights violations leads to ineffective strategies to prevent future ones as leading international, regional, and domestic laws and norms on business and human rights inadequately address the corporate governance gaps that facilitate human rights violations.

This Article identifies the critical role that corporate boards and officers play in human rights violations committed by their corporations. It introduces a four-part typology that categorizes the different executive choices at the root of many of the most infamous corporate human rights violations today and in the recent past. These abuses arose from decisions made by the corporate directors and officers: Some neglected their oversight responsibilities; others approved deals with entities known to violate human rights; and still others created and endorsed business models that depend on exploiting human rights. By understanding these choices and their consequences, senior management and their legal counsel can better understand the root causes of corporate human rights abuses and identify blind spots in their governance practices.

This Article also explains that corporate law and governance play a crucial role in addressing human rights violations. Courts, victims, and advocates cannot rely exclusively on human rights law to prevent corporate human rights violations. Instead, the root of the problem may be within corporate law and the governance decisions of the board of directors and officers. This Article explains that corporate directors and officers should prioritize human rights within their corporations for three important reasons that are derived from corporate law: legal liability for breaching fiduciary duties (Delaware driver); shareholder activism (shareholder driver); and converging expectations on good governance driven by foreign legislators, multinational corporations, international organizations, and multilateral executive coordination (global drivers). Each of these contributions can improve both the prevention of corporate human rights abuses and accountability for it should it occur.

It is a myth that equal protection doctrine protects women and people of color. It is a
myth, first, in the sense that it is a fiction. Although the Supreme Court claims to enforce the
equality rights of all, it is unwilling to combat the contemporary inequality of women and
people of color. It is also a myth in a second sense: it is a political myth or legitimating story.
The Court relies on the fiction that it protects women and people of color to justify a broad
new vision of equality for religious conservatives that, perversely, is not available to women
and people of color. More perverse, the Court invokes this new vision of equality to invalidate
federal, state, and local laws that do real work to promote race and gender equality.

Understanding the reality of equal protection doctrine clarifies debates about the
Supreme Court’s power. The Court’s present power over constitutional equality enforcement
depends, in large part, on the claim that the Justices have a superior capacity and willingness
to protect minority rights. While the myth of equal protection bolsters this defense of the
Supreme Court’s power, the reality of equal protection contradicts it. It shows that the Court
does not protect minority rights evenhandedly but instead subordinates the rights of minority
groups it disfavors to the rights of minority groups it favors. This selective protection and
subversion of minority rights cannot justify the Court’s continued displacement of democratic
will. On the contrary, it reveals a democratic legitimacy problem with this power that
invites reform.

New kinds of private money are thriving, with increasing circulation, growing acceptance, and rapid technological innovation. But this new money suffers from an old problem: bank runs. Bank runs can destabilize even well-regulated and healthy banks, and their contagion can catalyze and amplify a system-wide financial crisis. Since the 1930s, policymakers have sought to protect our financial system from bank runs through public deposit insurance and other emergency response mechanisms. Those historically effective policy tools, however, are critically unavailable or ineffective in the context of these new types of money. As a result, these new types of money remain critically vulnerable to bank runs, and the potential for financial contagion from their failure poses catastrophic risks to society.

In light of traditional legal tools’ inadequacy, this Article proposes an unconventional solution to the financial contagion risks these new kinds of money impose on society writ large: taxation. A corrective or Pigouvian tax—unlike traditional banking regulation or traditional response mechanisms—can effectively reduce the risk of financial contagion by forcing private money issuers to internalize the social costs of contagion in their private decision-making. In this Article, we make the case for such a tax, discuss its main design features, and explain how tax instruments can partly replicate the success of public deposit insurance. Further, we explain why tax instruments can be superior to traditional tools at addressing the risk of financial contagion from new money, challenging banking-law-centered policymaking. In doing so, we show that more than a second-best solution, Coin Taxes exemplify a set of efficient and adaptable alternative tools that policymakers could use to regulate new, innovative, or regulation-avoidant banking—from stablecoins to shadow banking.

This Article traces historical patterns in systemic responses to protest movements along racial lines. It contrasts the militarized response to protests advocating for racial justice with the leniency shown towards predominantly White-led demonstrations, arguing that the different systemic responses to the Black Lives Matter movement and the January 6th insurrection illustrate the enduring impact of racialized policing and systemic racism in the modern context. It further advocates for non-reformist approaches that challenge systemic inequalities rather than perpetuate them. The Article concludes by urging continued collective resistance and the pursuit of justice in the face of entrenched power structures and systemic racism.