The concerns over another terrorist attack, a sluggish economic recovery, high unemployment rates, and state and local budget deficits have propelled immigration policy to the forefront of political debate in the United States. America’s current approach to immigration is an abject failure, undermining the rule of law and our national security. This has prompted various [...]

Which law governs during armed conflict—human rights law or humanitarian law? This Article aims to answer that question. It draws on jurisprudence, state practice, and recent scholarship to describe three possible approaches to applying the two bodies of law: The Displacement Model, the Complementarity Model, and the Conflict Resolution Model. Of the three, the Conflict [...]

President Obama has repeatedly stated that he views a capacity for empathy as an essential attribute of a good judge. And conservatives have heaped mountains of scorn upon him for saying so—accusing him of expressing open contempt for the rule of law. This Article seeks to offer a sustained scholarly defense of judicial empathy. Empathy [...]

Appellate review is limited, almost by definition, to consideration of the factual record as established in the trial court. Adhering to this record review principle, appellate courts generally reject out of hand any effort to supplement the appellate record with evidence that was not considered by the court below. There are, however, exceptions to this [...]

At the birth of the juvenile court, reformers attempted to develop a system that melded child welfare concerns with crime control. Despite the founders’ original intentions, however, the juvenile court system has moved away from the therapeutic model to a punitive model.  The increasingly punitive nature of the system warrants a second look at the [...]

Recent developments in the interpretation of the Second Amendment left unanswered questions regarding the scope of the constitutional guarantee of armed self-defense. Most importantly, neither District of Columbia v. Heller nor McDonald v. City of Chicago set a firm standard for determining the constitutionality of gun-control laws. This determination is of critical importance because—perhaps more [...]