For Teachers

The 2024 Supplement is here. Most of this Supplement repeats the 2022 version, but items added this year are in italic below. The Supplement includes the following:

• Chapter 2: Discussion of the COVID-19 pandemic in jails and prisons, and the federal court’s skeptical stance towards resulting conditions of confinement claims. And more discussion (including some added 2024) of the developing split in authority regarding the impact of the Supreme Court’s Kingsley v. Hendrickson decision on pretrial detention conditions cases.
• Chapter 3: A short addition relating to some courts’ rejection of solitary confinement claims. Some material is new to this version of the Supplement.
• Chapter 5: Added notes material on the Prison Rape Elimination Act and its uses in litigation.
• Chapter 6: A short addition on First Amendment claims relating to visitation in prison. Other additions cover the developing case law in the Roberts Court and lower courts on RLUIPA, including Ramirez v. Collier, 595 U.S. 411 (2022) (granting death-row prisoner’s challenge to Texas’s refusal to allow his pastor to pray aloud and touch him as he is executed), and two examples of court of appeals decisions, one going each way. And a few sentences about Tanzin v. Tanvir, 592 U.S. 43 (2020) (allowing damages against government officials sued in their individual capacity under RFRA).
• Chapter 11: An added note on heightened scrutiny for sex discrimination. 
• Chapter 12: We add some additional discussion of transgender prisoners and social transition needs.
• Chapter 14: About two pages address the developing (though still unsettled) boundary between habeas and injunctive litigation, which has been pushed by COVID-related litigation. A new table summarizes the PLRA’s impact on the prevalence of court orders. We also add a paragraph about the PLRA’s constraints on prospective relief, from Georgia Advocacy Office v. Jackson, 4 F.4th 1200 (11th Cir. 2021), and a couple of paragraphs about the PLRA’s preliminary injunctive time limits, which were not discussed in the original casebook.
• Chapter 15: Several paragraphs describe the Supreme Court’s continuing hostility to Bivens remedies. Two new pages deal with qualified immunity and the level of generality appropriate for analysis of prior precedent; they briefly excerpt several court of appeals decisions and the Supreme Court’s decision in Taylor v. Riojas, 592 U.S. 7 (2020).
• Chapter 16: We add three pages about administrative exhaustion, including in Ramirez v. Collier, 595 U.S. 411 (2022), and Valentine v. Collier, 978 F.3d 153 1 (5th Cir. 2020), 141 S.Ct. 57 (2020) (Sotomayor, J., dissenting from denial of vacatur application). 
• Chapter 19: We add an excerpt addressing voting by people in jails.
• Chapter 20: This is new chapter (shortened considerably from its version in the 2021 Supplement), now titled “State Court and Executive Responses to COVID-19 Behind Bars.” It includes an Illinois Executive Order and a Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court opinion.

Although it is entirely superseded by the 2022 Supplement, the 2022 Supplement remains here. 

A Teachers’ Manual by Margo Schlanger is available from West Academic, the casebook’s publisher. It includes introductory material (Selecting Coverage; To Tour or Not to Tour; Integrating a Practicum Component) as well as chapter-by-chapter notes. 

To download, click here. (You’ll need a West login, but that’s available to regular or adjunct profs, on request.)  

If you teach these materials, we would love to add your perspective to what’s on offer here at the casebook website—your syllabus, additional reading, questions for students, etc. The items we’ve received are listed/linked at the bottom of this page. To share materials or suggestions, you can use the “suggestions” button at the top of this page. Or email us. In addition, there is a listserv for law school and affiliated faculty who teach about prisons and the law; please feel free to email to be added.