Digital Commons Network^™

Stubhub For Courts? Technology, Markets, And New Solutions To Court Congestion, Ronen Avraham, William H. J. Hubbard

Coase-Sandor Institute for Law & Economics Research Paper Series

Rescheduling of court hearings is ubiquitous but virtually ignored by academic scholarship. This is so, despite its contributions to court congestion, a perennial problem for courts that has been the subject of repeated, and repeatedly unsuccessful, efforts at reform. In this Article, we aim to show that rescheduling merits scholarly attention, and by diagnosing why and how it contributes to court congestion and delay, we both explain why most efforts at reducing delay fail and identify new possibilities for speeding up dockets. We draw inspiration from online platforms such as StubHub and SpareFare, technologies that have facilitated rescheduling through easy-to-use …

The Evolution Of Experiential Legal Education, Adam Chilton, Peter Joy, Kyle Rozema

Coase-Sandor Institute for Law & Economics Research Paper Series

To help bridge the gap between legal education and legal practice, in 2014 the American Bar Association adopted a requirement that law students take at least six credits of “experiential” courses. Despite limited research on the effects of this reform, the ABA is currently considering a new re- form that would require law students to take twice as many experiential credits to graduate. We provide new evidence for this debate by studying the evolution of experiential legal education and the impacts of the 2014 reform. We compile data reported by law schools to the ABA to document a dramatic rise …

Law School Record, Vol. 71, No. 1 (Fall 2024), Law School Record Editors

Law School Record

• Message from the Dean
• The Law School celebrates its annual Hooding and Diploma Ceremony
• Coase-Sandor Institute celebrates a milestone
• Judith Wright Fellowship marks an anniversary
• Jenner & Block Supreme and Appellate Clinic Scores a victory
• Exoneration Project secures three key wins
• AI and the Law
• In the Sports Arena
• Theory in Practice
• Professor Alison LaCroix discusses her new book
• The Law School welcomes three new faculty members
• Professor Farah Peterson wins a prestigious award
• Students discuss their summer experiences
• Development News
• Reunion highlights
• In Memoriam
• Giving Back: Vanessa Countryman,'05

Administrative Subordination, Bijal Shah

University of Chicago Law Review

Much of the scholarship on immigration enforcement and environmental justice assumes that agencies negatively impact vulnerable and marginalized people as a result of individualized bias or arbitrariness in administration. This Article argues that, beyond idiosyncrasies or flaws in administrators themselves, the poor impact of administration on minorities emanates from institutional systems. In doing so, this Article introduces a framework of institutional oppression into the study of administration that illustrates how agencies subordinate minority interests to the ends of administrative competence and self-preservation.

A healthy federal bureaucracy is sustained by administrative efforts to reduce institutional burdens, improve efficiency, conserve resources, and …

Law School Announcements 2024-2025, Law School Announcements Editors

Announcements

• Officers and Faculty
• The Law School - History
• Programs of Instruction
• Curriculum
• Student Activities and Organizations
• Funds and Endowments

Mutually Assured Democracy: Cooperating Under The Compact Clause To Combat Partisan Gerrymandering, Samuel P. Leroy

University of Chicago Law Review

No abstract provided.

Weak-Willed Legislatures And Statutory Interpretation, Helen Zhao

University of Chicago Law Review

Not all statutes are created equal. Contributing to the literature on “super statutes,” I suggest that an analogy to the philosophical concept of weakness of will can illuminate circumstances under which some statutes ought to stand above others. Analogizing to philosopher Richard Holton’s account of weak will, I develop an account in which some statutes express long-term commitments, are intended to foreclose future deliberation, and enact reasons into the law. Such statutes have the status of what Holton calls “resolutions.” Like an individual resolving to stop eating meat, yet finding themself unable to resist, Congress can be weak willed when …

Some Thoughts On A Developmental Approach To A Sound Basic Education, Goodwin Liu

University of Chicago Law Review

No abstract provided.

Protecting Children's Access To A Sound Basic Education In The Age Of Political Polarization, A Comment On Goodwin Liu And Kristine Bowman's Essays On Children's Education In The Restatement, Emily Buss

University of Chicago Law Review

Justice Goodwin Liu and Professor Kristine Bowman have taken two very different approaches in their essays commenting on the Restatement’s¹ coverage of the law governing children’s education. In Some Thoughts on a Developmental Approach to a Sound Basic Education,² Justice Liu focuses near exclusively on the Restatement’s articulation of the core educational standard, the “sound basic education,” and presses for an expanded application of that standard to children from birth through young adulthood.³ In The New Parents’ Rights Movement, Education, and Equality,⁴ Bowman addresses the entire structure of the educational provisions of the Restatement, which straddle …

Adolescents In The Justice System: A Progress Report On The Restatement Of Children And The Law, Richard J. Bonnie

University of Chicago Law Review

Professor Elizabeth Scott, the chief reporter of the American Law Institute’s (ALI) Restatement of Children and the Law,¹ has often observed that the nation’s widespread commitment to juvenile justice reform in the twenty-first century should be grounded in two premises: (1) the laws and practices of the juvenile justice system must be grounded in and guided by evolving knowledge about adolescent development; and (2) youth-serving institutions, including the justice system, must collaborate to erase substantial racial disparities in intervention, discipline, and punishment.² This Symposium will explore the current draft of the Restatement of Children and the Law with …

Defunding Cities: Reconsidering The Fiscal Sanctioning Measures Of State Punitive Preemption Statutes, Eliza Martin

University of Chicago Legal Forum

In an effort to deter and punish cities for passing ordinances that conflict with state priorities, states are utilizing a new form of legislative power: punitive preemption. It is generally considered a legitimate use of state power to utilize statutes to preempt local measures and ordinances deemed inconsistent with state policy. State legislatures, however, are attaching punitive mechanisms to preemption legislation that, in the event of local noncompliance, create criminal and civil liability for local officials, provide removal mechanisms for elected officials, and allow for the fiscal sanctioning of local governments.

This Comment considers whether local governments are legally protected …

International Law As A Tool For Reviving, Preserving, And Protecting The Tajik Language In Uzbekistan, Lindsay Saligman

International Program Papers

No abstract provided.

Uzbekistan And The Autocrat’S Parchment Problem, Paul Mapara

International Program Papers

No abstract provided.

Annual Report: 2023-2024, Coase-Sandor Institute For Law And Economics

Academic Center Annual Reports

No abstract provided.

Administrative Enslavement, Adam Davidson

Articles

No abstract provided.

Tailwiz: Empowering Domain Experts With Easy-To-Use, Task-Specific Natural Language Processing Models, Austin Peters, Tim Daj, Jonah Gelbach, David Freeman, Daniel Khang

Articles

Experts outside the field of machine learning (ML) are interested in using ML techniques to analyze their textual data, but they are inhibited by a lack of convenient natural language processing (NLP) tools. To address this issue, we present tailwiz, an easy-to-use Python tool, powered by supervised fine-tuning of NLP models. tailwiz caters to domain experts by abstracting away technical ML knowledge and running conveniently on personal computers, the preferred mode of computation among domain experts. We show that tailwiz outperforms domain experts’ current textual analysis techniques on a majority of real-world tasks, up to a 384.8% F1 increase (46.18% …

The Role (And Limits) Of Developmental Neuroscience In Determining Adolescents’ Autonomy Rights: The Case For Reproductive And Voting Rights, Emily Buss, Julie Maslowsky, Laura Wray-Lake

Articles

No abstract provided.

The Magnet School Wars And The Future Of Colorblindness, Sonja Starr

Articles

The Supreme Court’s recent decision striking down the use of race-based classifications in university admissions reflects its growing commitment to the concept of “colorblindness,” which has implications well beyond education. In anticipation, many schools and other actors are already moving toward alternative, facially race-neutral strategies for promoting diversity and reducing racial disparity. But what will happen when those policies too are challenged because they have race-related motives? Will courts soon find all race-conscious policymaking unlawful based on its ends? This is the next stage of the legal battle over colorblindness, and it is already underway.

The first wave of this …

The Shadow Of The Law Of The Police, Adam Davidson

Articles

No abstract provided.

The Common Political Foundations Of Originalism And Cost-Benefit Analysis, Jonathan S. Masur, Eric A. Posner

Coase-Sandor Institute for Law & Economics Research Paper Series

Cost-benefit analysis (CBA) and originalism are rarely discussed together, and seem to belong to different worlds of legal scholarship. The two methods are used by different institutions in different spheres of law for different purposes; what could they have in common? Nothing, or so it would seem. Yet closer inspection reveals surprising commonalities—both in terms of structure and function, on the one hand, and in historical pedigree and political economy, on the other. CBA and originalism are what we will call midlevel legal methods. Midlevel legal methods are neither normative commitments nor legal doctrines, but recurrently used methodologies that are …

The New Outlawry, Darrell Miller, Jacob Charles

Articles

From subtle shifts in the procedural mechanics of self-defense doctrine to substantive expansions of justified lethal force, legislatures are delegating larger amounts of “violence work” to the private sphere. These regulatory innovations layer on top of existing rules that broadly authorize private violence—both defensive and offensive—for self- protection and the ostensible maintenance of law and order. Yet such significant authority for private violence, and the values it projects, can have tragic real-world consequences, especially for marginalized communities and people of color.

We argue that these expansions of private violence tap into an ancient form of social control—outlawry: the removal of …

The Consequences And Constitutionality Of Training Police To Blame Victims, Richard Mcadams, Margareth Etienne

Articles

No abstract provided.

Machine-Learning Human Rights, Han-Wei Ho, Patrick Chung-Chia, Nuno Garoupa, Martin Wells, Yun-Chien Chang, Tom Ginsburg

Articles

Utilizing a comprehensive panel dataset spanning from 1900 to 2020, this study introduces an innovative methodology for the analysis and categorization of legal documents, specifically national constitutions. Contrary to the predominant reliance on unsupervised methods within the field, this research incorporates a supervised machine-learning approach, notably the SEMMS method, alongside traditional unsupervised algorithms. This dual approach facilitates a nuanced analysis of the human rights provisions contained within national constitutions, resulting in the identification of both traditional and novel constitutional groupings. Broadly speaking, the more traditional common law-civil law divide does not seem particularly relevant in this context. Furthermore, our methodology …

Private Security And Public Police, Ben Grunwald, John Rappaport, Michael Berg

Public Law and Legal Theory Working Papers

Private security officers outnumber police by a wide margin, and the gap may be growing. As cities have claimed to defund the police, many have quietly expanded their use of private security, reallocating spending from the public to the private sector. It is difficult to know what to make of these trends, largely because we know so little about what private security looks like on the ground. On one prevalent view of the facts, a shift from public to private security would mean little more than a change of uniform, as the two labor markets are deeply intertwined. Indeed, academics, …

The Trouble With Classifications, Aziz Z. Huq

Public Law and Legal Theory Working Papers

The Supreme Court relies increasingly on anti-classification rules to implement the Constitution’s commands of even-handed state treatment. These rules direct attention to whether an instance of a forbidden classification is present on the face of a challenged law. They contain two necessary steps. First, a court defines a general category of impermissible terms. Second, a court ascertains whether an instance of the category is found in enacted text—triggering the familiar strict scrutiny analysis. So defined, anti-classification rules now dominate Equal Protection, Free Speech, ‘dormant’ Commerce Clause, and even Free Exercise jurisprudence. The Roberts Court celebrates them as “commonsense,” citing their …

Trade Secrecy's Information Paradox, Christopher Buccafusco, Jonathan S. Masur, Deepa Varadarajan

Public Law and Legal Theory Working Papers

Trade secret law is meant to encourage socially beneficial behaviors by permitting firms to protect their investments in the creation of valuable information. In theory, the ability to protect valuable information will make firms more likely to create that information in the first instance. But the law can also be used to shield socially harmful behaviors from public oversight. Firms can assert trade secret protection to prevent journalists, watchdogs, and criminal defendants from learning whether they are engaged in dangerous, wrongful, or biased activity. Ideally, trade secret law should sort socially beneficial uses from socially harmful ones, permitting only the …

Administrative Enslavement, Adam Davidson

Public Law and Legal Theory Working Papers

There are currently over a million people enslaved in the United States. Under threat of horrendous punishment, they cook, clean, and even fight fires. They do this not in the shadow of the law but with the express blessing of the Thirteenth Amendment’s Except Clause, which permits enslavement and involuntary servitude as punishment for a crime.

Despite discussions of this exception in law reviews, news reports, and Netflix documentaries, few commentators have recognized that this enslavement happens silently. No prosecutor, judge, or defense attorney tells convicted people that they will be enslaved as punishment for their crime. It is only …

Asking Gpt For The Ordinary Meaning Of Statutory Terms, Christoph Engel, Richard H. Mcadams

Public Law and Legal Theory Working Papers

We report on our test of the Large Language Model (LLM) ChatGPT (GPT) as a tool for generating evidence of the ordinary meaning of statutory terms. We explain why the most useful evidence for interpretation involves a distribution of replies rather than only what GPT regards as the single “best” reply. That motivates our decision to use Chat 3.5 Turbo instead of Chat 4 and to run each prompt we use 100 times. Asking GPT whether the statutory term “vehicle” includes a list of candidate objects (e.g., bus, bicycle, skateboard) allows us to test it against a benchmark, the results …

The Common Political Foundations Of Originalism And Cost-Benefit Analysis, Jonathan S. Masur, Eric A. Posner

Public Law and Legal Theory Working Papers

Cost-benefit analysis (CBA) and originalism are rarely discussed together, and seem to belong to different worlds of legal scholarship. The two methods are used by different institutions in different spheres of law for different purposes; what could they have in common? Nothing, or so it would seem. Yet closer inspection reveals surprising commonalities—both in terms of structure and function, on the one hand, and in historical pedigree and political economy, on the other. CBA and originalism are what we will call midlevel legal methods. Midlevel legal methods are neither normative commitments nor legal doctrines, but recurrently used methodologies that are …

Criminal Procedure In A Time Of Abolition, Adam Davidson

Public Law and Legal Theory Working Papers

As the ranks of prison industrial complex abolitionists grow, the question of whether, and if so how, they should engage with criminal procedure doctrine becomes ever more pressing. This Essay engages Devon W. Carbado’s Unreasonable: Black Lives, Police Power, and the Fourth Amendment’s interrogation of whether to “blame” Chief Justice Warren for the expansion of the carceral state brought on by his opinion in Terry v. Ohio to begin exploring that question. It argues that while a laser-like focus on doctrine betrays an individual-focused theory of change that is likely to be both ineffective and anathema to abolitionist praxis, abolitionists …