April 17, 2026: New York City
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​2:00PM-5:00PM

​Lauren M. Ouziel (Temple): Creative Prosecution

The criminal law, we are told, is capacious, giving prosecutors seemingly limitless authority to pursue wrongdoing. That narrative is only partly true. This Article tells the other part—of the criminal law’s limits and prosecutors’ 
creative attempts to surmount them. I call these efforts creative prosecution: using creative theories of liability to target socially undesirable conduct that does not fall obviously within legislative prohibitions or prior judicial interpretations of them. Creative prosecution operates across different criminal law categories and jurisdictions. It functions as a distinct charging practice and method of criminal lawmaking, pushing law’s boundaries and the 
limits of prosecutors’ discretionary authority. In so doing, creative prosecution imposes unique – and significant –harms, not only to the defendants facing it, but more broadly to the rule of law, political accountability and public perceptions of the system’s legitimacy. Yet the phenomenon persists despite these harms, and despite the professional risks to prosecutors who wager on it. Key to taming creative prosecution’s excesses, then, is understanding its enduring appeal. Across criminal law categories and jurisdictions, creative prosecutions tend to share a common origin story: they arise in response to a social harm for which regulatory alternatives have proven elusive. Creative prosecution is, in this sense, a form of governance through crime. Understanding creative prosecution as a governance problem offers a governance-based framework for courts to adjudicate creativity andprosecutors to trim its sails.

S. Lisa Washington (Wisconsin): THE FAMILY REGULATION FRAME

The family regulation system separates thousands of families every year, searches millions of homes, obtains parents’ and children’s health information, and monitors family life in and outside of the home. Once a niche area of scholarly focus, the enormous power of the family regulation system to surveil and regulate intimate family life is getting more attention by both family and criminal law scholars. Two moves in legal scholarship are crucial for this shift: comparisons of the family regulation system to the criminal legal system and an increasingly capacious understanding of the carceral state. This line of scholarship illustrates that the logics of punishment and surveillance do not stop at the prison wall or exist merely in formal criminal legal institutions. They are, instead, entangled in a broad array of social and legal systems. 
Even within a more capacious understanding of the carceral state, the criminal 
legal system remains the central point of reference or starting place of analysis. As a result, scholarship has not fully appreciated that contemporary social control has increasingly taken on the features of family regulation, its centrality in a web of information production, and the distinct harms it inflicts. This Article destabilizes this dynamic by introducing what I call the family regulation frame. The family regulation frame provides a perspective shift by focusing on the modes and mechanisms of the family regulation system.
The family regulation frame offers three key insights. On a conceptual level, it 
reveals that the carceral state is increasingly taking on the characteristics of the 
family regulation system, rather than the family regulation system merely becoming more carceral. On the level of surveillance and information production, integrating the family regulation system more fully into our understanding of state regulation reveals the family regulation system as a central site of information collection, documentation, and distribution. And on the level of impact, it emphasizes relational harms, revealing that when familial relationships are at stake, they can trump other forms of state deprivation, including penal sanctions, which are sometimes framed as the most harmful form of liberty deprivation. Ultimately, the family regulation system belongs at the center of critical contemporary debates, including reproductive rights and criminal justice reform.