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Full-Text Articles in Law

Regulating Black-Box Medicine, W. Nicholson Price Ii Dec 2017

Regulating Black-Box Medicine, W. Nicholson Price Ii

Michigan Law Review

Data drive modern medicine. And our tools to analyze those data are growing ever more powerful. As health data are collected in greater and greater amounts, sophisticated algorithms based on those data can drive medical innovation, improve the process of care, and increase efficiency. Those algorithms, however, vary widely in quality. Some are accurate and powerful, while others may be riddled with errors or based on faulty science. When an opaque algorithm recommends an insulin dose to a diabetic patient, how do we know that dose is correct? Patients, providers, and insurers face substantial difficulties in identifying high-quality algorithms; they …


Rationing Criminal Justice, Richard A. Bierschbach, Stephanos Bibas Nov 2017

Rationing Criminal Justice, Richard A. Bierschbach, Stephanos Bibas

Michigan Law Review

Of the many diagnoses of American criminal justice’s ills, few focus on externalities. Yet American criminal justice systematically overpunishes in large part because few mechanisms exist to force consideration of the full social costs of criminal justice interventions. Actors often lack good information or incentives to minimize the harms they impose. Part of the problem is structural: criminal justice is fragmented vertically among governments, horizontally among agencies, and individually among self-interested actors. Part is a matter of focus: doctrinally and pragmatically, actors overwhelmingly view each case as an isolated, short-term transaction to the exclusion of broader, long-term, and aggregate effects. …


Expressive Law And The Americans With Disabilities Act, Alex C. Geisinger, Michael Ashley Stein Apr 2016

Expressive Law And The Americans With Disabilities Act, Alex C. Geisinger, Michael Ashley Stein

Michigan Law Review

The question of why people follow the law has long been a subject of scholarly consideration. Prevailing accounts of how law changes behavior coalesce around two major themes: legitimacy and deterrence. Advocates of legitimacy argue that law is obeyed when it is created through a legitimate process and its substance comports with community mores. Others emphasize deterrence, particularly those who subscribe to law-and-economics theories. These scholars argue that law makes certain socially undesirable behaviors more costly, and thus individuals are less likely to undertake them.


A Functional Theory Of Congressional Standing, Jonathan Remy Nash Jan 2015

A Functional Theory Of Congressional Standing, Jonathan Remy Nash

Michigan Law Review

The Supreme Court has offered scarce and inconsistent guidance on congressional standing—that is, when houses of Congress or members of Congress have Article III standing. The Court’s most recent foray into congressional standing has prompted lower courts to infuse analysis with separation-ofpowers concerns in order to erect a high standard for congressional standing. It has also invited the Department of Justice to argue that Congress lacks standing to enforce subpoenas against executive branch actors. Injury to congressional litigants should be defined by reference to Congress’s constitutional functions. Those functions include gathering relevant information, casting votes, and (even when no vote …


Tmi? Why The Optimal Architecture Of Disclosure Remains Tbd, Ryan Bubb Jan 2015

Tmi? Why The Optimal Architecture Of Disclosure Remains Tbd, Ryan Bubb

Michigan Law Review

We are inundated with disclosures in our daily lives. In one of the more evocative passages in their stimulating new book, More Than You Wanted to Know, Omri Ben-Shahar and Carl E. Schneider imagine a day in the life of someone who actually reads all those disclosures (pp. 95–100). During a commercial on the morning news, the protagonist hits pause on the TiVo to catch the fine print that would otherwise fly by. Breakfast is a slog, requiring close reading of the toaster’s ominous label and the disheartening nutrition facts on the butter and jam. More of the same awaits …


Rethinking The Timing Of Capital Clemency , Adam M. Gershowitz Oct 2014

Rethinking The Timing Of Capital Clemency , Adam M. Gershowitz

Michigan Law Review

This Article reviews every capital clemency over the last four decades. It demonstrates that in the majority of cases, the reason for commutation was known at the conclusion of direct appeals—years or even decades before the habeas process ended. Yet when governors or pardon boards actually commuted the death sentences, they typically waited until the eve of execution, with only days or hours to spare. Leaving clemency until the last minute sometimes leads to many years of unnecessary state and federal habeas corpus litigation, and this Article documents nearly 300 years of wasted habeas corpus review. Additionally, last-minute commutations harm …


A Disclosure-Focused Approach To Compelled Commercial Speech, Andrew C. Budzinski May 2014

A Disclosure-Focused Approach To Compelled Commercial Speech, Andrew C. Budzinski

Michigan Law Review

In 2010, the Food and Drug Administration passed a rule revising compelled disclaimers on tobacco products pursuant to the Family Smoking Prevention and Tobacco Control Act. The rule required that tobacco warnings include something new: all tobacco products now had to bear one of nine graphic images to accompany the text. Tobacco companies filed suit contesting the constitutionality of the rule, arguing that the government violated their right to free commercial speech by compelling disclosure of the graphic content. Yet First Amendment jurisprudence lacks a doctrinally consistent standard for reviewing such compelled disclosures. Courts’ analyses typically depend on whether the …


Rationality's Reach, Adam B. Badawi Apr 2014

Rationality's Reach, Adam B. Badawi

Michigan Law Review

Economic analysis and the rational actor model have dominated contracts scholarship for at least a generation. In the past fifteen years or so, however, a group of behaviorists has challenged the ability of the rational choice model to account for consumer behavior. These behaviorists are not trying to dismantle the entire enterprise. They generally accept the fundamentals of economic analysis but argue that the rational actor model can be improved by incorporating evidence of decisionmaking flaws that people exhibit. Oren Bar-Gill has been one of the foremost and influential proponents of a behaviorist take on contracts, and his recent book, …


Responding To Independent Juror Research In The Internet Age: Positive Rules, Negative Rules, And Outside Mechanisms, Robbie Manhas Mar 2014

Responding To Independent Juror Research In The Internet Age: Positive Rules, Negative Rules, And Outside Mechanisms, Robbie Manhas

Michigan Law Review

Independent juror research is an old problem for jury trials. It invites potentially prejudicial, irrelevant, and inaccurate information to guide jury decisionmaking. At the same time, independent juror research compromises our adversarial system by preventing parties from responding to all the evidence under consideration and obfuscating the record on which the jury’s decision is made. These threats have only increased in the internet age, where inappropriate sources of information are ubiquitous and where improper access is hard to detect. Nevertheless, courts and parties continue to engage in the same inhibitory measures they have employed for decades. This Note argues for …


Personalizing Default Rules And Disclosure With Big Data, Ariel Porat, Lior Jacob Strahilevitz Jan 2014

Personalizing Default Rules And Disclosure With Big Data, Ariel Porat, Lior Jacob Strahilevitz

Michigan Law Review

This Article provides the first comprehensive account of personalized default rules and personalized disclosure in the law. Under a personalized approach to default rules, individuals are assigned default terms in contracts or wills that are tailored to their own personalities, characteristics, and past behaviors. Similarly, disclosures by firms or the state can be tailored so that only information likely to be relevant to an individual is disclosed and information likely to be irrelevant to her is omitted. The Article explains how the rise of Big Data makes the effective personalization of default rules and disclosure far easier than it would …


Rethinking Reporter's Privilege, Ronnell Andersen Jones May 2013

Rethinking Reporter's Privilege, Ronnell Andersen Jones

Michigan Law Review

Forty years ago, in Branzburg v. Hayes, the Supreme Court made its first and only inquiry into the constitutional protection of the relationship between a reporter and a confidential source. This case - decided at a moment in American history in which the role of an investigative press, and of information provided by confidential sources, was coming to the forefront of public consciousness in a new and significant way - produced a reporter-focused "privilege" that is now widely regarded to be both doctrinally questionable and deeply inconsistent in application. Although the post-Branzburg privilege has been recognized as flawed in a …


Stop Being Evil: A Proposal For Unbiased Google Search, Joshua G. Hazan Mar 2013

Stop Being Evil: A Proposal For Unbiased Google Search, Joshua G. Hazan

Michigan Law Review

Since its inception in the late 1990s, Google has done as much as anyone to create an "open internet." Thanks to Google's unparalleled search algorithms, anyone's ideas can be heard, and all kinds of information are easier than ever to find. As Google has extended its ambition beyond its core function, however it has conducted itself in a manner that now threatens the openness and diversity of the same internet ecosystem that it once championed. By promoting its own content and vertical search services above all others, Google places a significant obstacle in the path of its competitors. This handicap …


The Politics Of Privacy In The Criminal Justice System: Information Disclosure, The Fourth Amendment, And Statutory Law Enforcement Exemptions, Erin Murphy Feb 2013

The Politics Of Privacy In The Criminal Justice System: Information Disclosure, The Fourth Amendment, And Statutory Law Enforcement Exemptions, Erin Murphy

Michigan Law Review

When criminal justice scholars think of privacy, they think of the Fourth Amendment. But lately its domain has become far less absolute. The United States Code currently contains over twenty separate statutes that restrict both the acquisition and release of covered information. Largely enacted in the latter part of the twentieth century, these statutes address matters vital to modern existence. They control police access to driver's licenses, educational records, health histories, telephone calls, email messages, and even video rentals. They conform to no common template, but rather enlist a variety of procedural tools to serve as safeguards - ranging from …


Information Escrows, Ian Ayres, Cait Unkovic Nov 2012

Information Escrows, Ian Ayres, Cait Unkovic

Michigan Law Review

A variety of information escrows - including allegation escrows, suspicion escrows, and shared-interest escrows - hold the promise of reducing the first-mover disadvantage that can deter people with socially valuable private information from disclosing that information to others. Information escrows allow people to transmit sensitive information to a trusted intermediary, an escrow agent, who only forwards the information under prespecified conditions. For example, an allegation escrow for sexual harassment might allow a victim to place a private complaint into escrow with instructions that the complaint be lodged with the proper authorities only if the escrow agent receives at least one …


Outsourcing Regulation: How Insurance Reduces Moral Hazard, Omri Ben-Shahar, Kyle D. Logue Nov 2012

Outsourcing Regulation: How Insurance Reduces Moral Hazard, Omri Ben-Shahar, Kyle D. Logue

Michigan Law Review

This Article explores the potential value of insurance as a substitute for government regulation of safety. Successful regulation of behavior requires information in setting standards, licensing conduct, verifying outcomes, and assessing remedies. In various areas, the private insurance sector has technological advantages in collecting and administering the information relevant to setting standards and could outperform the government in creating incentives for optimal behavior. We explore several areas that are regulated more by private insurance than by government. In those areas, the role of the law diminishes to the administration of simple rules of absolute liability or no liability, and affected …


New Pleading, New Discovery, Scott Dodson Jan 2010

New Pleading, New Discovery, Scott Dodson

Michigan Law Review

Pleading in federal court has a new narrative. The old narrative was one of notice, with the goal of broad access to the civil justice system. New Pleading, after the landmark Supreme Court cases of Twombly and Iqbal, is focused on factual sufficiency, with the purpose of screening out meritless cases that otherwise might impose discovery costs on defendants. The problem with New Pleading is that factual insufficiency often is a poor proxy for meritlessness. Some plaintifs lack sufficient factual knowledge of the elements of their claims not because the claims lack merit but because the information they need is …


Property Rules, Liability Rules, And Uncertainty About Property Rights, Stewart E. Sterk May 2008

Property Rules, Liability Rules, And Uncertainty About Property Rights, Stewart E. Sterk

Michigan Law Review

Clarity can be a considerable virtue in property rights. But even when property rights are defined clearly in the abstract, ascertaining the scope of those rights in concrete situations often entails significant cost. In some instances, the cost of acquiring information about the scope of property rights will exceed the social value of that information. In those circumstances, further search for information about the scope of rights is inefficient; the social harm avoided by further search does not justify the costs of the search. Potential resource users, however make decisions based on private costs and benefits, not social costs and …


Information Asymmetries And The Rights To Exclude, Lior Jacob Strahilevitz Aug 2006

Information Asymmetries And The Rights To Exclude, Lior Jacob Strahilevitz

Michigan Law Review

The American law generally regards the "bundle of rights" as property's dominant metaphor. On this conception of property, ownership empowers an individual to control a particular resource in any number of ways. For example, he may use it, transfer it, exclude others from it, divide it, and perhaps even destroy it. The various rights in the bundle, however, are not equal in terms of importance. To the contrary, American courts and commentators have deemed the "right to exclude" foremost among the property rights, with the Supreme Court characterizing it as the "hallmark of a protected property interest" and leading property …


Foreword: On Academic Fads And Fashions, Cass R. Sunstein May 2001

Foreword: On Academic Fads And Fashions, Cass R. Sunstein

Michigan Law Review

Why did critical legal studies disappear? Will it reappear? Why does the Federalist Society prosper? Why, and when, do people write books on constitutional law, rather than tort law or antitrust? Why did people laugh at the notion of "animal rights," and why do they now laugh less? Why do law professors seem increasingly respectful of "textualism" and "originalism," ideas that produced ridicule and contempt just two decades ago? How do book reviewers choose what books to review? Why has law and economics had such staying power? Academics are generally committed to truth, and they are drawn to ideas that …


Private Order Under Dysfunctional Public Order, John Mcmillan, Christopher Woodruff Jan 2000

Private Order Under Dysfunctional Public Order, John Mcmillan, Christopher Woodruff

Michigan Law Review

Businesspeople need contractual assurance. Most transactions are less straightforward than a cash sale of an easily identifiable item. Buyers need assurance of the quality of what they are purchasing, and sellers need assurance that bills will be paid. The legal system may not always be available to provide contractual assurance - and when the law is dysfunctional, private order might arise in its place. Many developing and transition economies have dysfunctional legal systems, either because the laws do not exist or because the machinery for enforcing them is inadequate. In such countries, bilateral relationships, communal norms, trade associations, or market …


The Quest For Enabling Metaphors For Law And Lawyering In The Information Agae, Pamela Samuelson May 1996

The Quest For Enabling Metaphors For Law And Lawyering In The Information Agae, Pamela Samuelson

Michigan Law Review

A Review of James Boyle, Shamans, Software, and Spleens: Law and the Construction of the Information Society and M. Ethan Katsh, Law in a Digital World


Whose Genes Are These Anyway?: Familial Conflicts Over Access To Genetic Information, Sonia M. Suter Jun 1993

Whose Genes Are These Anyway?: Familial Conflicts Over Access To Genetic Information, Sonia M. Suter

Michigan Law Review

This Note argues first that courts and legislatures should follow a presumption against mandating disclosure of a person's genetic information to third parties. Second, genetic testing for the benefit of a third party should not, and constitutionally cannot, be compelled. Part I presents an overview of genetics and discusses the special legal and ethical issues genetic testing poses. Part II examines the issue of nonconsensual disclosure to family members, who could potentially use the information from tests that have already been performed. This Part concludes that there should be a presumption against disclosure. Part III examines a related, but different, …


The Law's Secrets, Gary T. Marx May 1990

The Law's Secrets, Gary T. Marx

Michigan Law Review

A Review of Legal Secrets: Equality and Efficiency in the Common Law by Kim Lane Scheppele


A Prior Restraint By Any Other Name: The Judicial Response To Media Challenges Of Gag Orders Directed At Trial Participants, René L. Todd Apr 1990

A Prior Restraint By Any Other Name: The Judicial Response To Media Challenges Of Gag Orders Directed At Trial Participants, René L. Todd

Michigan Law Review

Gag orders directed at trial participants do not directly intrude into the media's editorial process, but instead result in a reduction of the total communication available regarding trial proceedings. In this way, participant-directed gag orders are effective, albeit indirect, restraints upon the media. This Note examines the dynamics of these participant-directed restrictions and their consequent effect upon the media. Part I examines participant-directed gag orders in relation to traditional prior restraint doctrine. After discussing the history of prior restraint doctrine and the present standard of prior restraint analysis, Part I relates efforts by courts to apply. prior restraint doctrine to …


Can Ignorance Be Bliss? Imperfect Information As A Positive Influence In Political Institutions, Michael A. Fitts Apr 1990

Can Ignorance Be Bliss? Imperfect Information As A Positive Influence In Political Institutions, Michael A. Fitts

Michigan Law Review

In Parts I and II, I shall summarize the law-and-economics and civic virtue perspectives on the value of political information and their proposals for reforms in the political process that would stimulate greater political information. These two literatures are often viewed as distinct in their objectives: one seeking to improve means/ends rationality; the other seeking to improve goal formation - a function that I loosely describe as normative, ethical, or value-based. Nevertheless, they share some common practical approaches where information is concerned. In Part Ill, I shall discuss the instrumental advantages to limiting political information, focusing particularly on the role …


Corporations And Information: Secrecy, Access, And Disclosure, Michigan Law Review Mar 1982

Corporations And Information: Secrecy, Access, And Disclosure, Michigan Law Review

Michigan Law Review

A Review of Corporations and Information: Secrecy, Access, and Disclosure by Russell B. Stevenson, Jr.


Government Information And The Rights Of Citizens, Michigan Law Review Jun 1975

Government Information And The Rights Of Citizens, Michigan Law Review

Michigan Law Review

This Project delineates the federal and state responses to these two fundamental societal concerns. The course of the discussion suggests the vitality of these concerns, and the flexibility and continuing development of the governmental responses. Clearly, the interests in maximizing disclosure of government-held information and minimizing the handling and dissemination of unnecessary or inaccurate personal information can conflict. The contours of this conflict, only intimated herein, will doubtless become more bold with the maturation of the opposing statutory schemes.


Deterring Misuse Of Confidential Government Information: A Proposed Citizens' Action, Joseph J. Kalo Aug 1974

Deterring Misuse Of Confidential Government Information: A Proposed Citizens' Action, Joseph J. Kalo

Michigan Law Review

Part I of this article offers two examples-predicated on historical fact-that illustrate the possible adverse consequences of disclosure of confidential government information. Part I also examines present statutory and regulatory safeguards against such disclosure and analyzes their effect. Part II sets forth a proposal for reducing the possibility that confidential government information will be improperly used and for recouping government losses by means of a citizens' action. when it is so used.


Antitrust Law--Restraint Of Trade--Antitrust Implications Of The Exchange Of Price Information Among Competitors: The Container Corporation Case, Michigan Law Review Mar 1970

Antitrust Law--Restraint Of Trade--Antitrust Implications Of The Exchange Of Price Information Among Competitors: The Container Corporation Case, Michigan Law Review

Michigan Law Review

Traditionally, it has not proved difficult to find policy considerations which justify the existence of programs of price information exchange among competitors. There has been widespread agreement that businessmen require knowledge of all the economic forces which affect their operations. Justice Holmes once said: "I should have thought that the ideal of commerce was an intelligent interchange made with full knowledge of the facts as a basis for the forecast of the future on both sides." Similarly, Justice Brandeis commented that "[t]he Sherman Law ... certainly does not command that competition shall be pursued blindly, that business rivals shall remain …


Personal Privacy In The Computer Age: The Challenge Of A New Technology In An Information-Oriented Society, Arthur R. Miller Apr 1969

Personal Privacy In The Computer Age: The Challenge Of A New Technology In An Information-Oriented Society, Arthur R. Miller

Michigan Law Review

The purpose of this Article is to survey the new technology's implications for personal privacy and to evaluate the contemporary common-law and statutory pattern relating to data-handling. In the course of this examination, it will appraise the existing framework's capacity to deal with the problems created by society's growing awareness of the primordial character of information. The Article is intended to be suggestive; any attempt at definitiveness would be premature. Avowedly, it was written with the bias of one who believes that the new information technology has enormous long-range societal implications and who is concerned about the consequences of the …