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Victoria Litman, Law, Religion, and Psychedelics in the United States of America (Cambridge University Press, 2026)Clicking on the button will copy the full recommended citation.
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Robyn Powell, Holding Out for Love: Why Disabled People Can’t Say ‘I Do’, 61 Wake Forest L. Rev. 177 (2026)Clicking on the button will copy the full recommended citation.
Ten years after Obergefell v. Hodges, marriage remains out of reach for millions of disabled people. While explicit bans on interracial and same-sex marriage have fallen, disabled people navigate a sophisticated web of discrimination that operates across legal, economic, institutional, and cultural domains. Guardianship laws strip away decision-making authority, benefit programs impose devastating marriage penalties that force impossible choices between love and survival, institutional policies prevent relationship formation, and cultural narratives render disabled people invisible as potential partners. These interlocking barriers make marriage effectively unattainable for many.
This Article charts a path forward through constitutional litigation, benefit reform, guardianship transformation, and cultural change—recognizing that piecemeal fixes cannot dismantle a system built to exclude. True marriage equality demands more than legal recognition on paper—it requires dismantling the obstacles that keep constitutional rights theoretical for millions of Americans. The systematic denial of marriage choice reflects deeper societal failures to recognize disabled people’s full humanity, autonomy, and citizenship. Constitutional promises of liberty and equality must extend beyond formal recognition to encompass the material conditions necessary for their meaningful exercise, and the systematic exclusion of disabled people from marriage represents a profound failure of these constitutional commitments that demands immediate and comprehensive redress.
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Victoria Litman, The Law and Policy of Psychedelic Chaplaincy, in Psychedelic Medicine: Law and Policy (I. Glenn Cohen et al. eds., Cambridge University Press, 2026)Clicking on the button will copy the full recommended citation.
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Steven Lubet and Elizabeth Ippolito Boals, Expert Testimony: A Guide for Expert Witnesses and the Lawyers Who Examine Them (5th ed., NITA, 2026)Clicking on the button will copy the full recommended citation.
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Jaclyn Lopez, NEPA’s Midlife Crisis, Nev. L.J. (2026)Clicking on the button will copy the full recommended citation.
The National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA) is in the throes of a midlife crisis. In just the last three years, Congress amended NEPA for the first time since 1970, the Supreme Court issued its first major NEPA decision in two decades, and the Council on Environmental Quality (CEQ) rescinded its NEPA implementing regulations. Taken together, these developments do not explicitly repeal NEPA, but they reallocate its action-forcing power away from a centralized federal procedural baseline and toward a proximate-cause limited exercise in expanded agency discretion.
This Article is among the first to situate this trifecta within longer, intersecting arcs. First, it traces NEPA’s doctrinal growing pains since Public Citizen, showing how lower courts’ two-decade struggle parsing indirect effects and causal responsibility set the jurisprudential groundwork for Congress’s 2023 amendments and the Supreme Court’s 2025 decision in Seven County Infrastructure Coalition v. Eagle County. Second, it lays bare the ongoing struggle between an apparent judicial skepticism of administrative authority and judicial deference to so-called expert agencies.
The Article proceeds in three Parts. Part I begins with NEPA’s Carson-era origins and federal leadership ambitions that reflected a national reckoning with the impacts of rapid industrialization and its unchecked externalities but also forecasted the statute’s eventual undoing. Part II chronicles NEPA’s implementation through the CEQ, hard-look review, circuit splits, and agency implementation. Part III evaluates NEPA’s amendments, Seven County’s deference and causation reminders, and the regulatory blowback culminating in CEQ’s regulation rescission. The central argument is that NEPA no longer serves as a reliable, national environmental conscience; its revival depends on a renewed political commitment to accountability akin to the awareness that enabled NEPA’s passage more than a half-century ago.
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Robyn Powell, Disability and Reproductive Justice in Global Public Health, in Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Global Public Health (David V. McQueen ed., 2026)Clicking on the button will copy the full recommended citation.
Disability and reproductive justice (RJ) in global public health addresses how more than one billion people with disabilities worldwide experience systemic barriers to reproductive autonomy, healthcare access, and family formation. Disabled people face pervasive inequities across the reproductive lifecycle, including limited access to contraception and sexual health education, coercive sterilization, inaccessible perinatal care, discriminatory abortion restrictions, and disproportionate child welfare surveillance. These barriers are not inherent to disability itself but stem from ableist assumptions embedded within healthcare systems, legal frameworks, and social institutions that devalue disabled people’s sexuality, bodily autonomy, and parenting capacity. Such reproductive oppression is compounded by intersecting systems of racism, colonialism, sexism, economic marginalization, and other forms of structural inequality, particularly affecting disabled people who navigate multiple forms of marginalization.
Applying RJ and disability justice frameworks to global public health reveals that disabled people’s reproductive experiences must be understood within historical legacies of eugenics and population control that have explicitly targeted people for reproductive restriction across diverse national contexts. Achieving RJ for disabled people requires transforming public health systems to center disability in policy and practice, dismantling coercive legal regimes, ensuring healthcare accessibility and provider competency, addressing economic inequities that constrain reproductive choices, and establishing community-based support systems for disabled parents. Most fundamentally, it demands centering disabled people’s leadership and lived expertise in shaping reproductive health initiatives, recognizing that reproductive autonomy depends not only on legal rights but also on the material, social, and political conditions necessary to make and enact reproductive decisions with dignity and self-determination.
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Em Wright, Intersex Erasure, 50 Harv. J.L. & Gender (2026)Clicking on the button will copy the full recommended citation.
Contemporary American law is increasingly committed to a project of sex enforcement. Across statutes, executive orders, and litigation positions, governments define “biological sex” as binary, immutable, and determinable at birth. They then use that static, dimorphic model to regulate people’s access to rights, spaces, and services. This Article argues that this project has a devastating and largely unacknowledged collateral consequence: the rhetorical and practical erasure of intersex Americans. Intersex variations—naturally occurring differences in sex characteristics—demonstrate that sex is not a single binary trait but a multi-factor biological phenomenon that does not reliably sort human bodies into two mutually exclusive categories. Because intersex variation makes binary classification scientifically unstable and administratively unworkable, contemporary sex-binary regimes must treat intersex bodies as anomalies, exceptions, or errors rather than as ordinary human variation.
This Article traces the rhetorical shift that enables this project, showing how “biological sex” has been deployed to cast sex binarism as objective reality rather than ideological belief. It then provides an overview of the biology of sex differentiation, explaining how chromosomal, gonadal, hormonal, anatomical, and secondary sex characteristics vary independently across individuals, and demonstrating that intersex variations are neither rare nor anomalous. It shows that no single biological marker—and no combination of markers—can coherently sustain a binary definition of sex. The Article examines how states and the federal government nonetheless codify binary sex through statutory definitions, executive orders, and litigation rhetoric that render intersex people legally unintelligible. The Article maps the consequences of that illegibility across healthcare, identity documents, sex-segregated spaces, education, and athletics. In the healthcare context, this Article examines a core policy conflict: bans on gender-affirming care for minors frequently prohibit medications and procedures for transgender adolescents out of purported concerns about irreversibility and the capacity of transgender youth to consent while expressly permitting surgical and hormonal “normalization” interventions to “treat” or “correct” intersex infants and small children. Finally, the Article argues that these contradictions reveal the deeper function of contemporary anti-trans policy: not the protection of children or medical ethics, but the enforcement of binary sex as a governing legal order. It concludes by assessing the resulting doctrinal landscape and identifying potential strategies—grounded in consent doctrine, equal protection, and related constitutional theories—to challenge binary sex enforcement and to re-center intersex bodily autonomy in disputes over sex classification.
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Ian Moura et al., Evaluating disability bias in the Allegheny Family Screening Tool: implications for child welfare decisions, Journal of Public Child Welfare (2026)Clicking on the button will copy the full recommended citation.
Child welfare systems are increasingly adopting algorithmic decision-making (ADM) tools, but there has been limited work assessing the impact of such tools on people with disabilities. We address this gap by examining the Allegheny Family Screening Tool (AFST) for disability-related bias. We obtained variables and coefficients used in the AFST from the Allegheny County Department of Human Services. We used data from the American Community Survey, Medical Expenditure Panel Survey, and National Survey on Drug Use and Health to assess whether disabled parents and children would receive worse AFST scores compared to their non-disabled counterparts. Parents and children with disabilities were significantly more likely to be penalized by all elements of the AFST scoring we examined. These include socioeconomic indicators, healthcare utilization patterns, involvement with public benefits programs, and contact with the criminal legal system. Despite containing no explicit disability measures, the AFST effectively encodes disability status through proxy variables, potentially subjecting disabled parents and their children to disproportionate scrutiny and intervention. The AFST may reinforce rather than remedy historical biases against parents with disabilities, raising important questions about the role of algorithmic tools in public sector decision-making.
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Victoria Litman, The Retreat of Federal Power and the Rise of Post-Supremacy Federalism, 74 Clev. St. L. Rev. 651 (2026)Clicking on the button will copy the full recommended citation.
This Article introduces the theory of post-supremacy federalism to describe a structural condition in which federal law remains formally binding, but enforcement has durably receded or collapsed. Unlike frameworks grounded in intergovernmental friction or negotiated cooperation, this account begins from federal retreat—the cumulative erosion of enforcement capacity across judicial, administrative, legislative, and executive institutions. Post-supremacy federalism arises when three conditions are met: (1) federal law remains intact; (2) enforcement retreats; and (3) no formal devolution occurs. In this vacuum, states are not merely filling gaps. They are governing by default—under laws that still bind but no longer structure governance in a coherent or consistent way.
This Article maps the institutional dynamics behind this transformation, including judicial realignment, administrative collapse, legislative paralysis, and the rise of executive unilateralism. It then traces how this retreat manifests in four domains: drug policy, public education, environmental protection, and reproductive healthcare. In each, federal authority persists in theory, but meaningful enforcement has eroded—leaving states to construct and implement their own legal regimes without delegation, partnership, or protection. These domains are not newly decentralized. They are abandoned. Statutes like the Controlled Substances Act, Title IX, the Clean Air Act, and EMTALA remain binding, yet no longer coordinate or constrain state action. In their place, states exercise contingent authority—governing under conditions of legal precarity and enforcement asymmetry, exposed to federal snapback and forced to navigate an unstable landscape.
This Article does not propose reform. It offers a diagnosis. Post-supremacy federalism names the legal condition that emerges when federal authority recedes but does not relinquish control. Naming that condition is the first step toward understanding how governance now unfolds—and what may come next.
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Luci Duffy and Robyn Powell, “The System Is Stacked against Them”: Attorneys’ Perspectives on Intersectional Oppression, Disabled Parents, and the Child Welfare System, 50 Social Work Research 107 (2026)Clicking on the button will copy the full recommended citation.
Studies have documented pervasive ableism faced by disabled parents within the child welfare system. However, the experiences of disabled parents facing multiple forms of oppression in this context remain understudied. Recognizing the heterogeneity of disabled parents, this study investigated intersectional oppression from the perspective of attorneys who represent disabled parents in child welfare cases. Semistructured interviews were conducted with 23 attorneys in the United States who represent disabled parents in child welfare cases. Content analysis revealed three main themes related to the experiences and outcomes of disabled parents facing intersectional oppression: systemic mechanisms of oppression, intermediate impacts, and ultimate outcomes. Drivers of intersectional oppression included system structure and institutional barriers, power dynamics, and cross-system interactions. Intermediate impacts encompassed the child welfare system’s response and parent experiences, whereas ultimate outcomes included case outcomes and long-term family impact. Addressing intersectional oppression faced by disabled parents necessitates substantive and comprehensive system restructuring, including rules, statutes, practices, and services that currently punish and marginalize affected disabled parents. Paired with structural and policy reform, intersectional training must also be required for all professionals involved with the system to erode individual-level bias.