Vanderbilt Law Review

Overview

The Vanderbilt Law Review publishes six times a year (January, March, April, May, October, and November). We have two selection cycles (spring and fall) per year. Vanderbilt Law Review also has an online companion journal called Vanderbilt Law Review En Banc.

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Section Contents
Volume 78, Issue 4 | May 2025 | Michael Allan Wolf | Article

Goodbye, Zoning?

American zoning is under attack on multiple fronts. The concerns of zoning’s many critics range from social and racial justice, to private property rights, to the extreme shortage of affordable housing, to climate-change resilience and sustainability. A growing number of voices have called for, at a minimum, the elimination of single-family zones; some even champion the abolition of this ubiquitous method of American land use regulation. This Article is the first detailed look at what would happen if zoning’s critics got their way. The most efficient means for erasing zoning from American law would be for the U.S. Supreme Court to find it unconstitutional, so this Article features excerpts from three fictitious Supreme Court opinions that reflect the jurisprudence of today’s iteration of the Roberts Court.

Kaiponanea T. Matsumura

The Illusion of Stability in Family Law

Stability is universally accepted as a central value in family law. Within the context of adult relationships, stability determines which relationships the law will recognize and support. Within the context of parent-child relationships, stability determines who will be recognized as a parent, whose parental rights will be terminated by the state, and who, among fit parents, will receive custody. This Article challenges stability’s pride of place in family law, identifying three problems with the law’s use of stability.

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Kurt T. Lash and Stephanie Hall Barclay

A Crust of Bread: Religious Resistance and the Fourteenth Amendment

In Employment Division v. Smith, the U.S. Supreme Court denied heightened constitutional protection to religiously motivated exercise burdened by neutral and generally applicable laws. The history presented in this Article suggests that the Smith approach conflicts with the original understanding of the Fourteenth Amendment. Out of the crucible of religious abolitionist resistance to the Fugitive Slave Act emerged a substantive theory of constitutional religious freedom: American citizens should have the right to obey the Biblical command to care for the needy and provide the hungry a “crust of bread,” even if doing so was contrary to neutral and generally applicable state or federal law.

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Larry Schwartztol

Congress’s Power Over the Electoral Count

Does Congress have authority to pass legislation regulating the counting of electoral votes? This is a consequential question for the legal framework governing presidential elections. In 2022, Congress passed the Electoral Count Reform Act (“ECRA”), which overhauled the statutory regime governing the counting of electoral votes. The ECRA’s predecessor statute, which had been in place since 1887, had long been criticized as ambiguous and unnecessarily convoluted. Those deficiencies were widely seen as a contributing cause of the January 6, 2021, attacks on the Capitol, and a rare bipartisan majority in Congress passed the ECRA to address the earlier statute’s shortcomings.

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Submissions

Submissions for our journal are currently closed. The Vanderbilt Law Review will resume collecting submissions around early August 2025.

The Vanderbilt Law Review publishes six times a year (January, March, April, May, October, and November). We have two selection cycles (spring and fall) per year. During a selection cycle, we accept submissions on a rolling basis. We do not accept submissions solely authored by law school students.

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