Cornell Law Review

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Mandating Nature’s Course

Laws that substantially restrict abortion, gender-affirming care, and aid in dying do not merely forbid particular acts; they effectively mandate burdensome bodily obligations. Yet many proponents of such restrictions purport to support a right to bodily autonomy in other contexts, for example by opposing public health vaccination and masking mandates. They distinguish the former restrictions…

On “Death Houses” and “Kill Boxes”: The Death Penalty and Animal Slaughter

This Essay is somewhat unusual for a Symposium of this nature honoring the scholarship (and of course the memory) of my former colleague and friend Sherry Colb. I will not engage directly with an article or book Sherry did write, but rather with one that she didn’t. Sherry (and her husband and frequent coauthor Michael…

What If Animals Are Moral Agents?

In an essay titled Should Animals Be Able to Sue People?, Professor Sherry Colb considers Justice v. Vercher, a lawsuit brought by Justice, a horse seeking damages for injuries resulting from his previous owner’s gross negligence. Gwendolyn Vercher had already been convicted of animal cruelty and paid the statutorily required restitution, but that restitution was limited to…

Feminism, Theocracy, and Righteous Anger: Sherry Colb Unbound

From May through August of 2022, Professor Sherry Colb wrote an impressive series of essays in furious response to what soon became Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, a nearly final draft of which had been leaked before its official publication date. In All Hail Justice Coathanger, Gunning for Involuntary Pregnancy, and finally Alito and the Free Exercise of…

In Defense of Katz: In Memory of Professor Sherry Colb

Professor Colb addressed issues of privacy and the Fourth Amendment in many of her articles. A key aspect of her scholarship focused on the appropriate test for determining what is a search under the Fourth Amendment. Her article—A World Without Privacy: Why Property Does Not Define the Limits of the Right Against Unreasonable Searches and…

Sherry Colb: Feminist Theorist and Social Change Agent

Social movements change hearts and minds by shifting how people understand what is true about the world around them. They start by making differences visible, centering lives and experiences previously pushed to cultural margins. Such differences are often at once biological and social, inherent and constructed. Feminist scholars and activists, for example, have grounded ethical…

Race and a Revised Doctrine of Double Effect: A Reservation About Professor Colb’s Revision

Even as her life ebbed, Professor Sherry Colb was remarkably committed to scholarship. Among the works she produced in her last year was A New and Improved Doctrine of Double Effect: Not Just for Trolleys, posthumously published in the Connecticut Law Review. It was creative, enormously ambitious, wide-ranging, and entertaining—but, I think, at least in one crucial…

A Pro-Feminist Life: Sherry Colb and Abortion Rights

In a classic work of feminist theory, The Mermaid and the Minotaur, Dorothy Dinnerstein described her project this way: “[T]o fight what seems about to destroy everything earthly that you love—to fight it not passively . . . , with denial; and not unrealistically, with blind force; but intelligently, armed with your central resource, which is…

Dead Infants and Taking the Fifth

This Essay offers tribute to Professor Colb’s teachings and insights expressed in her writings on the Court’s Miranda and Self-Incrimination Clause rulings. Since the start of the twenty-first century, Professor Colb wrote many blogs on the Court’s Miranda doctrine. Miranda v. Arizona famously held that persons under arrest must be warned of their right to…

New and Newer Ways of Thinking About the Fourth Amendment

Sherry Colb was one of the most innovative Fourth Amendment thinkers of her generation. Every criminal procedure buff has something to say about search and seizure law, but Sherry was one of the few scholars who added to the canon. In particular, her two articles in Columbia Law Review, Innocence, Privacy, and Targeting in Fourth…

Desperate Times and Desperate Measures: When Is Rescuing Animals “Necessary?”

Sherry Colb and I didn’t always agree about everything. One of the things I valued most about her friendship was that, partly because of that, she was the perfect person to talk to in order to hone ideas. But, of course, it also mattered immensely that she was always respectful and generous and, of course,…

Sherry Colb, Massiah, and Miranda

I dislike subtitles but if I were to use one for this Article, it would be “Facing Miranda’s Consequences.” It is one kind of judicial act to decide that suspects should know that they do not have to answer police questions posed during custodial interrogation; this led the Supreme Court to require Miranda warnings. It…

Using State Constitutions and International Human Rights Law to Compel Law Enforcement to Test Rape Kits

There are 25,000 untested rape kits sitting in storage, around the United States, that are purposely not being tested by law enforcement, even though they contain DNA evidence that can easily help solve rapes. Law enforcement is deliberately not testing evidence that can solve violent sex crimes committed almost exclusively against girls and women. The…