Professor Bala's Article Receives Praise in Jotwell

Professor Nila Bala’s forthcoming Boston College Law Review article  “Parent-Child Privilege as Resistance” received a highly positive and expansive review in Jotwell from Rutgers Law School Professor Anibal Rosario-Lebrón.

The article, as Bala explains in its abstract, “provides a novel contribution in exploring parent-child communications within the health and reproductive decision-making contexts, arguing privilege is essential to protect minors in accessing care post-Dobbs.”

Bala’s approach “challenges the implicit assumptions about the validity of the adversarial system and the substantive laws,” Rosario-Lebrón wrote in Jotwell on Nov. 20. “In other words, her privileging resistance framework forces us to deal with the reality that the legal system will have unjust laws and that its design is unfair. Thus, we must build into the law resistance mechanisms that need not be justified under the validity of the legal system, but instead in its inherent injustice.”

Rosario-Lebrón concludes: “I gladly accept her invitation to rethink the legal system always from the perspective of a locus of power in which privileging resistance is indispensable if we wish to construct a just society.”

Nila Bala joined the faculty at UC Davis School of Law in 2023. Her research focuses on children’s rights and the criminal justice system, as well as emerging technologies. Her recent scholarship has appeared or is forthcoming in the Michigan Law Review, Boston College Law Review, the Federal Sentencing Reporter, Duke Law and Technology Review, and the New York University Review for Law & Social Change, among other journals. Her essays for broader audiences have appeared in the New York Times, The Washington Post, USA Today, Slate, Newsweek and elsewhere.