"Many criminal legal system fees and fines practices can be characterized as “stategraft”--a concept developed by Professor Bernadette Atuahene to describe situations in which state agents transfer property from individuals to the state in violation of the law or basic human rights. The stategraft frame, with its focus on illegality, fits with much of the litigation and advocacy against unconstitutional fees-and-fines practices that have occurred over the last decade. Exposing illegal practices such as the operation of debtors’ prisons laid the groundwork for a more fundamental critique of the use of the criminal legal system as a revenue generator for the state. The Essay cautions, however, against relying too heavily on illegality to describe what is wrong with fees-and-fines regimes in light of the limited legal protections against state practices that saddle those who encounter law enforcement with debt. Relying on an illegality critique may make it harder to attack entrenched practices that courts are inclined to bless as legal and obscure more fundamental dynamics of predation and regressive revenue redistribution."

"By funneling onslaught litigation into bankruptcy, corporate defendants use chapter 11 to deny people the ability to participate in the justice process and to hurriedly shut down the truth telling and concomitant public airing that can come from that process. This Article shows how the reorganization process has been twisted to resolve onslaught litigation such that now its use is largely inappropriate."

"International human rights law prohibits slavery and the slave trade, but states are rarely held accountable. International human rights law advocacy neglects slavery and the slave trade in part because abolition marginalized the human rights of enslaved persons while consolidating empire. Today, the United States has doubled down on these imperial interventionist strategies, rebranding human trafficking as “modern slavery” and focusing enforcement on policing international borders and prosecuting perpetrators. Thus, human rights advocates should press international legal institutions to go beyond combatting human trafficking crimes and to focus additionally on state accountability for wrongs done to the human beings still exploited, enslaved, and slave traded today."

"Startup lawyers have a new name: exit engineers. Startup lawyers create value for clients by anticipating issues that could arise in a future exit transaction (an acquisition or an IPO) and helping their clients address those issues proactively, thereby “engineering” the transaction costs of that exit. In doing so, startup lawyers make deals happen that might otherwise fail, enabling more efficient use of the parties’ resources. In turn, this facilitates reinvestment into the broader technology ecosystem; profitable liquidity events enable VCs to fund more enterprises and innovation. Successful exit transactions lead to more, new successful ventures."

"Building on the work of abolitionist scholars and organizers, this Article centers the role of Violence Interrupters as an important alternative to policing and punitive prosecution. It is the first to explore legal change that might minimize the legal barriers to violence interruption, including statutory reform, mens rea reform, expansion of the Second Amendment, and recognition of an innocent possession defense."

"Sidewalks are critical public resources. Unique among public spaces, sidewalks are home to an incredibly wide array of users and uses, all of which contact and conflict with one another in numerous ways. Sometimes these encounters enhance the users’ experiences and produce happy collaborations; often, they detract from those experiences and risk producing a chaos that degrades the space for everyone. Management and coordination are sorely needed."

"Condominium safety is an issue of importance to millions of Americans. The Champlain Towers tragedy is a painful reminder that dangers not apparent to the untrained eye may impair the structural integrity of high-rise buildings, and that condominium board, if let to their own devices, may blind themselves to the attendant risks."

"NHTSA should use its investigative powers to monitor new technology as it comes to market. If a new automation system has a positive net impact on safety, NHTSA should let the experiment continue. If it creates unreasonable risks, NHTSA should tell the developer to go back to the lab and design safer software. Developers should learn that the easiest way to avoid regulation is to prioritize safety in development. In that way, NHTSA can finally realize its mission to channel the creative energies and vast technology of the automobile industry into a vigorous and competitive effort to improve the safety of vehicles."

"Innovation is a form of civic religion in the United States. Popular and political culture alike treat innovation as an unalloyed good. And the law is deeply committed to fostering innovation, spending billions of dollars a year to make sure society has enough of it. But this sunny vision of innovation as purely beneficial is mistaken. Some innovations, like the polio and Covid-19 vaccines, are unquestionably good for society. But many innovations are, on balance, neutral, and many more are simply bad for society (e.g., cigarette additives, worker surveillance, firearm bump stocks). This Article argues that a fuller conception of innovation’s costs and benefits counsels a radical reorientation of innovation law and policy."