Source Collect: California Law Review's Podcast

Algorithms shape our modern world, determining everything from which ads we might see on Instagram to who is afforded access to credit. But what decisions go into the development of these algorithms? Professor Fanna Gamal, Assistant Professor of Law at UCLA School of Law, noticed that developers often exclude race and racial proxy variables as an input when creating machine learning algorithms. Prof. Gamal's latest article in the California Law Review, "The Algorithmic Racial Proxy," discusses the difficulty of defining what a racial proxy is, and the implications of allowing those who develop machine learning algorithms to decide. today's episode, Prof. Gamal joins Source Collect to discuss her article. This episode was recorded in April 2026. Host, Script, and Production: Davis Rich (Volume 115 Podcast Editor) Soundtrack: Composed and performed by Carter Jansen (Volume 110 Technology Editor) Introductory Quote: Judge Thelton E. Henderson

Americans have long persevered in the face of the national welfare system’s inadequacies. But when a new challenge in the form of climate change emerges, how can the United States adapt its welfare programs to assist Americans? Author: Andrew Hammond, Professor of Law, Indiana University Maurer School of Law Host: Georgiana Soo (Volume 112 Podcast Editor) Technology Editors: Georgiana Soo (Volume 112 Podcast Editor, Al Malecha (Volume 112 Senior Technology Editor, Kiana Harkema (Volume 112 Technology Editor) Soundtrack: Composed and performed by Carter Jansen (Volume 110 Technology Editor) Note Abstract: In the United States, law condemns poor people to their fates in states. Where Americans live continues to dictate whether they can access cash, food, and medical assistance. What’s more, immigrants, territorial residents, and tribal members encounter deteriorated corners of the American welfare state. Nonetheless, despite repeated retrenchment efforts, this patchwork of programs has proven remarkably resilient. Yet, the ability of the United States to meet its people’s most basic needs now faces an unprecedented challenge: climate change. As extreme weather events like wildfires and hurricanes become more frequent and more intense, these climate-fueled disasters will displace and impoverish more people. How can the United States adapt its welfare programs to assist Americans in the face of this threat? This Article maps that uncharted territory. It contextualizes the climate crisis in our scholarly understanding of the U.S. welfare state. It then canvasses the myriad disaster provisions in each major welfare program. Equipped with an understanding of the status quo, the Article proceeds to evaluate how federal law has fared amid the recent spate of fires and floods. The Article attends to the role of Congress, weakened as it is by increased polarization and diminished capacity, and how the resulting delays and distortions in emergency relief have hampered the governmental response. The Article then brings state government into focus, and in doing so, demonstrates how assistance often excludes the most vulnerable Americans. The Article also extracts lessons from the pandemic response and applies them to climate adaptation of public benefits. The Article concludes with an agenda for how to adapt welfare programs to meet the climate crisis. That agenda starts and ends with the federal government, but it includes policies states, territories, and Tribes could implement if Congress and federal agencies do nothing or not enough. The Article repurposes what we know about how the U.S. welfare state functions now to inform what government should do next.

“What does it mean to be a lawyer committed to justice when the law seemingly facilitates injustice? And how do you teach students to reckon with this question?” Author: Etienne C. Toussaint, Assistant Professor of Law, University of South Carolina School of Law Host: Kevin Kallet (Volume 112 Associate Editor) Technology Editors: Hiep Nguyen (Volume 111 Senior Technology Editor), Taylor Graham (Volume 111 Podcast Editor), Benji Martinez (Volume 111 Technology Editor) Soundtrack: Composed and performed by Carter Jansen (Volume 110 Technology Editor) Article Abstract: When President Donald Trump launched an assault on diversity training, critical race theory, and The 1619 Project in September 2020 as “divisive, un-American propaganda,” many law students were presumably confused. After all, law school has historically been doctrinally neutral, racially homogenous, and socially hierarchical. In most core law school courses, colorblindness and objectivity trump critical legal discourse on issues of race, gender, or sexuality. Yet, such disorientation reflects a longstanding debate over the fundamental purpose of law school. As U.S. law schools develop anti-racist curricula and expand their experiential learning programs to produce so-called practice-ready lawyers for the crises exposed by the COVID-19 pandemic, scholars continue to question whether and how, if at all, the purpose of law school converges with societal efforts to reckon with America’s legacy of White supremacy. This Article argues that the anti-racist, democratic, and movement lawyering principles advocated by progressive legal scholars should not be viewed merely as aspirational ideals for social justice law courses. Rather, querying whether legal systems and political institutions further racism, economic oppression, or social injustice must be viewed as endemic to the fundamental purpose of legal education. In so doing, this Article makes three important contributions to the literature on legal education and philosophical legal ethics. First, it clarifies how two ideologies—functionalism and neoliberalism—have threatened to drift law school’s historic public purpose away from the democratic norms of public citizenship, inflicting law students, law faculty, and the legal academy with an existential identity crisis. Second, it explores historical mechanisms of institutional change within law schools that reveal diverse notions of law school’s purpose as historically contingent. Such perspectives are shaped by the behaviors, cultural attitudes, and ideological beliefs of law faculty operating within particular social, political, and economic contexts. Third, and finally, it demonstrates the urgency of moving beyond liberal legalism in legal education by integrating critical legal theories and movement law principles throughout the entire law school curriculum.

When employers commit wage violations against their low-wage employees, recovery of those funds through a lawsuit or the administrative process is difficult and time consuming. No matter the outcome of the litigation, the result is a transfer of wealth from the victims of wage theft to the perpetrators. But what if there was a to ensure employees were paid up front for their lost wages? Author: Elizabeth Ford, Visiting Professor, Seattle University School of Law Host: Taylor Graham Technology Editors: Hiep Nguyen (Volume 111 Senior Technology Editor), Taylor Graham (Volume 111 Technology Editor), Benji Martinez (Volume 111 Technology Editor) Soundtrack: Composed and performed by Carter Jansen (Volume 110 Technology Editor) Article Abstract: Wage theft is rampant in the United States. It occurs so frequently because employers have much more power than workers. Worse, our main tool for preventing and remedying wage theft—charging government agencies with enforcing the law—has largely failed to mitigate this power differential. Enforcement agencies, overburdened by the magnitude of the wage theft crisis, often settle cases for nothing more than wages owed. The agency, acting as broker for the payment of the wages owed, voluntarily foregoes both interest and statutory penalties. This is a bad deal for workers, but not just because they do not get the benefit of the interest or penalties. Instead of making workers who have experienced wage theft whole, the enforcement agencies systematically broker no-interest loans from low-wage workers to their employers. The system, as it functions now, essentially transfers wealth from low wage workers to their employers. This is not the result of malicious intent: when forced to choose between recovering wages-only or waiting another six months for a still-uncertain recovery, workers themselves will choose the former. This Article proposes an elegant solution that will shift this paradigm: Wage Recovery Funds (WRFs). A WRF is a pool of funds housed at a government agency or community organization. Employees who are victims of wage theft could approach the WRF; if the WRF accepts the case, it would make the worker whole upfront—before the employer has paid—and then take assignment of the worker’s claim. The WRF would then pursue wages, interest, and penalties through administrative enforcement proceedings. Money recovered from employers would then be returned to the fund to support the next case. Beyond aggregating interest and penalties for support of future workers, a Wage Recovery Fund would change the risk paradigm, placing the risk of delayed recovery on an entity that can more easily afford it, and eliminating the workers’ immediate need for lost wages as a source of employer leverage in settlement.

All first-year law students take contracts, where they learn about offer and acceptance and what makes a legally enforceable agreement. But what can contract theory tell us about police violence against black people in the United States? Author: Marissa Jackson Sow, Assistant Professor of Law, University of Richmond School of Law Host: Taylor Graham Technology Editors: Hiep Nguyen (Volume 111 Senior Technology Editor), Taylor Graham (Volume 111 Technology Editor), Benji Martinez (Volume 111 Technology Editor) Soundtrack: Composed and performed by Carter Jansen (Volume 110 Technology Editor) Article Abstract: There exists a substantial body of literature on racism and brutality in policing, police reform and abolition, the militarization of the police, and the relationship of the police to the State and its citizenry. Many theories abound with respect to the relationship between the police and Black people in the United States, and most of these theories rest upon the basic assumption—undergirded by constitutional, civil rights, and human rights law—that Black people in the United States are entitled to due process and equal protection when they are in contact with the police or other law enforcement officers. This Article uses critical contract theory and the theory of Whiteness as Contract to challenge that basic assumption and instead advance the claim that the mandate that police “protect and serve” does not apply to Black people, notwithstanding the provisions of constitutional and statutory law, because Black people are the objects of racial contracting rather than participants therein. The police are charged with protecting the racial contract and serving the contract’s signatories; accordingly, they enforce the contract’s terms, requiring them to specifically target Black people for surveillance, harassment, deprivation, and even death, lest the contract be subject to breach or other interference.

Professor Khiara Bridges explores environmental injustice and disability-based abortion bans in the “dysgenic state,” where communities of color are exposed to environmental toxins that impair fetal health while being forced to give birth to health-impaired fetuses. Author: Khiara Bridges is a Professor of Law at the University of California, Berkeley, School of Law Host: Taylor Graham Technology Editors: Hiep Nguyen (Volume 111 Senior Technology Editor), Taylor Graham (Volume 111 Technology Editor), Benji Martinez (Volume 111 Technology Editor) Soundtrack: Composed and performed by Carter Jansen (Volume 110 Technology Editor) Article Abstract: Disability-selective abortion bans are laws that prohibit individuals from terminating a pregnancy because the fetus has been diagnosed with a health impairment. Many environmental toxins—to which low-income people and people of color disproportionately are exposed—are known to cause impairments in fetuses. When the fact of environmental injustice is read together with disability-selective abortion bans, we see that in one moment, the state fails to protect its citizens from toxins that impair fetal health, while in another moment, that same government compels its citizens to give birth to health-impaired fetuses. This Article identifies these two moments as the dysgenic state. Whereas the eugenic state of the early twentieth century sought to remove impairments from the population, the dysgenic state of the early twenty-first century seems committed to producing an impaired citizenry. This Article makes two important interventions into the existing literature. First, the Article intervenes simply to identify the dysgenic state—to call out the processes that harm the health of fetuses and then compel pregnant people to carry these pregnancies to term. Second, the Article intervenes to analyze the racial stakes of the dysgenic state. What is the significance of the empirically documented fact that people of color are disproportionately exposed to environmental toxins? What does it mean that because people of color also disproportionately bear the burdens of poverty, they are the least able to avoid the constraints of abortion regulations like disability-selective abortion bans? What does it mean, then, that the state produces impairments not in its citizenry generally, but in its nonwhite citizenry specifically? This is the puzzle that this Article sets out to describe and then analyze.

In “Opportunity Zones, 1031 Exchanges, and Universal Housing Vouchers,” Professor Brandon M. Weiss argues that eliminating the Opportunity Zone program and § 1031 exchanges could fund a significant expansion in the Housing Choice Voucher program. Author: Brandon M. Weiss is an Associate Professor of Law at American University Washington College of Law. Host: Carter Jansen Technology Editors: NoahLani Litwinsella (Volume 110 Senior Technology Editor), Carter Jansen (Volume 110 Technology Editor), Hiep Nguyen (Volume 111 Senior Technology Editor), Taylor Graham (Volume 111 Technology Editor), Benji Martinez (Volume 111 Technology Editor) Other Editors: Ximena Velazquez-Arenas (Volume 111 Senior Diversity Editor), Jacob Binder (Volume 111 Associate Editor), Michaela Park (Volume 111 Associate Editor), Kat King (Volume 111 Publishing Editor) Soundtrack: Composed and performed by Carter Jansen Article Abstract: The Tax Cuts and Jobs Act of 2017 contained former President Trump’s signature economic development initiative: the Opportunity Zone program. Allowing a deferral of capital gains tax for certain qualifying investments in low-income areas, the Opportunity Zone program aims to spur economic development by steering capital into economically distressed neighborhoods. The program is the latest iteration of an overly simplistic market-based approach to community development—an approach that transcends political party—based on a flawed yet enduring notion that mere proximity of capital will solve deeply entrenched issues of poverty and racial inequity. In reality, the legacy of Opportunity Zones is likely to be one of accelerated neighborhood gentrification left in the wake of wealthy taxpayer windfalls. Opportunity Zones are more akin to a classic tax shelter than an effective anti-poverty strategy. They share a fundamental DNA with a much older real estate-related tax break, § 1031 like-kind exchanges, which allow for the nonrecognition of gains for certain qualifying transactions that involve trading one piece of real estate for another. Section 1031 is one of the largest corporate tax expenditures in the U.S. tax code. Yet, as examined in this Article, the four primary theoretical bases upon which § 1031 rests—measurement, administrability, liquidity, and economic stimulus—have eroded over time and are ultimately unpersuasive. Redirecting the value of the Opportunity Zone program and § 1031 exchanges to the Housing Choice Voucher program could roughly double the number of housing vouchers available to extremely low-income households in the United States. I argue that this sort of intervention would have far greater impact in addressing the ills of poverty and racial inequality in the United States than the Opportunity Zone program. This argument is timely in light of President Biden’s recent support for reforming Opportunity Zones, limiting § 1031, and expanding the Housing Choice Voucher program.