We are excited to publish Volume 25.2. The full journal is available at CUNY Academic Works. Please see below for individual articles:
Courtney G. Lee
Ruhan Nagra, Jeanne Bergman, & Jasmine Graham
Cruel and Usual: Contaminated Water in New York State Prisons
Shannon Haupt & Phil Miller
Michael Maskin, Shannon Haupt, Jennifer Grossman, Panagioti Tsolkas, Phil Miller, & Ramon Henriquez
Peggy Cooper Davis, Aderson Francois, and Colin Starger
Content warning: this article quotes a decision that includes the n-word1.
Dixie is a song with a complicated history. Versions of it were sung by both Confederate and Union troops during the Civil War. Historian Karen Cox carefully documented the song’s lingering popularity and its mixed social and racial signaling in Dreaming of Dixie. Over the years – and for reasons that are not entirely clear – “just whistling Dixie,” a slang expression based on the song, came to stand for bravado without follow-through. A seemingly overblown statement might cause listeners to wonder whether the speaker was speaking truth or “just whistling Dixie.” A threat might cause listeners to wonder whether the speaker was actually dangerous or “just whistling Dixie.”
By Cynthia Soohoo
Justice Alito’s decision overturning Roe v. Wade and Planned Parenthood v. Casey marks a watershed shift in the way that the country treats people who are pregnant versus an “unborn life.” By stripping constitutional protection from the decision to have an abortion, Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization equates pregnant people’s right to control their bodies and the state’s interest in protecting prenatal life.
Yesterday, the Supreme Court of the United States’ ruling on Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization dismantled the constitutional foundation giving pregnant people the right to choose whether or not to give birth. The decision allows states to ban abortion and criminalize anyone who assists a pregnant person in getting an abortion. 26 states have laws and amendments in place that ban or have a near-total ban on abortion following this decision.
The City University of New York Law Review is committed to addressing the consequences of structural oppression, and to challenging these structures themselves. As such, we denounce the Supreme Court’s holding undoing 50 years of legal precedent that millions have relied on to plan their futures and families. The decision will have far-reaching and devastating legal and practical ramifications on those who can give birth, particularly the poor, people of color, and trans people. Justice Thomas’ concurrence called for the Supreme Court to “reconsider” its past rulings on contraception access, same-sex marriage, and consensual sex in same-sex relations, which implicates consequential constitutional privacy rights. This decision’s reasoning was not grounded in notions of liberty or equality but in a white supremacist, sexist historical period where women, Black people and other people of color, the poor, and queer people had inferior, or no rights at all.
Interested in getting published in CUNY Law Review? We are currently accepting submissions for student-written articles to be published in our Winter 2023 issue (26.1). CUNY Law Review seeks to uplift student authors and welcomes submissions from all law students for the Notes and Comments section. Students are encouraged to see Notes and Comments as a platform to publish their work, along with the Footnote Forum and the CUNY Law Review Blog!
Submissions should be emailed to salimah.khoja@live.law.cuny.edu and sulafa.grijalva@live.law.cuny.edu no later than June 1st. For general questions, please email cunylr@mail.law.cuny.edu.
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On March 4, 2022, CUNY Law Review hosted our 25th Anniversary Celebration with an event spotlighting our article, Restorative Justice in Cases of Sexual Harm, by Dr. Alexa Sardina and Dr. Alissa Ackerman. The events as co-moderated by Rev. Dr. Yvette Wilson-Barnes, Associate Dean of Student Affairs and former CUNY Law Review Editorial Board member, and Brittney Frey, CUNY Law Review Executive Articles Editor. Below are the Opening Remarks given by Dean Wilson-Barnes and a video of the event.
Continue readingBy Emma Mendelson1
The pandemic left many poor and working-class people in precarious financial positions. The federal government attempted to alleviate some of these financial burdens through Economic Impact Payments (“EIP”) providing people with three stimulus checks in 2020 and 2021. As paltry and unrealistic as these payments were (a maximum of $1,200, $600, and $1,400 for households of one, $2,400 for a married couple, and up to $500 additional for each qualifying child) in supporting the financial loss felt by many, it was at least an act meant to mitigate some of that burden. However, this caused some unforeseen damage to recipients of Supplemental Security Insurance (“SSI”).
Continue readingBy Elizabeth Stillman,1 Associate Professor of Academic Support, Suffolk University Law School
Success in law school, like in any form of higher education, requires that students feel a sense of belonging. Belonging “refers to students’ perceived social support on campus, a feeling or sensation of connectedness, and the experience of mattering or feeling cared about, accepted, respected, valued by, and important to the campus community or others on campus such as faculty, staff, and peers.”
Continue readingBy Summer Blaze Aubrey, Esq. LL.M.1 (Cherokee/Blackfeet) & Patricia Handlin, Esq.2
Enbridge, Inc. is a Canadian company that moves oil from the Western Canadian oil tar sands through a pipeline from Alberta, Canada across Minnesota to Superior, Wisconsin on the shores of Lake Superior. Line 3 is new construction that will connect Alberta to Lake Superior along a different route. The pipeline’s route snakes through the wild rice fields of Minnesota, called manoomin or psίᶇ, a sacred food of the Anishinaabe, the Ojibwe and Minnesota Chippewa Tribes, and Dakota Tribes, respectively, and is at the center of their cultural identity, spiritual traditions, and physical and economic well-being. The route crosses the headwaters of the Mississippi River as well as hundreds of other rivers, bodies of water, and wetlands in Minnesota and ends on the shores of Lake Superior just across the Minnesota-Wisconsin border.
Continue reading
We are excited to announce the publication of the 25th Anniversary Volume of CUNY Law Review, Volume 25.1! The full journal is available at CUNY Academic Works. Please see below for individual articles:
Articles
Restorative Justice in Cases of Sexual Harm
Alexa Sardina and Alissa R. Ackerman
Supreme Confusion About Causality at the Supreme Court
Issa Kohler-Hausmann and Robin Dembroff
Notes
Challenging Weapons Deals Between the United States and Israel: Limitations and Prospects
Ryan J. McNamara
Comments
Casting Out from the Inside: Abolishing Felony Disenfranchisement in New York
Elizabeth Neuland
Public Interest Practitioner Section
Elderly, Detained, and Justice-Involved: The Most Incarcerated Generation
Rachael Bedard, Joshua Vaughn, and Angela Silletti Murolo
Footnote Forum
The Impeachment Trials of Donald John Trump: How Senate Jurors Strengthened the Case Against Federal Felon-Juror Exclusion
James M. Binnall
Footnote Forum Podcast
Challenging Reform: A Formerly Incarcerated Student Roundtable Discussion
Colby Williams, Phil Miller, and Jordan Sudol
Listen to the audio recording here