Digital Commons Network^™

Ai Assistance In Legal Analysis: An Empirical Study, Jonathan H. Choi, Daniel Benjamin Schwarcz

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No abstract provided.

In Memoriam: Robert D. Cooter, Francesco Parisi

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The International Review of Law & Economics is publishing these notes in memory and celebration of Robert D. Cooter—its Editor from 1988 to 2004—offering brief reflections on him as teacher, scholar, and exemplar. A giant of law and economics, Robert D. Cooter combined breadth with creative insight: he helped build a systematic economic understanding of torts, contracts, and property, a novel approach to public law and Constitutional design, and opened new frontiers on the interaction between law and social norms and on the expressive power of law. His humanity and scholarly ethos—curiosity, humor, and intellectual honesty—left a lasting mark on …

Core Skills & "Cool Tools" From The Third Generation Of Fcil Librarians, Meredith Capps, Clement Lin, Devan Orr, Alison A. Shea, Loren Turner, Latia Ward

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There have been three generations of foreign, comparative, and international law (FCIL) librarians in the United States (US) in the postwar era. FCIL librarians of the first generation were foreign lawyers who emigrated to the US after World War II. Those of the second generation were American lawyer-librarians who built the infrastructure of FCIL librarianship into what it is today. The third generation of FCIL librarians includes the authors of this article. We perform many of the same research tasks as our predecessors, but we do so primarily online through an ever-evolving array of new and emerging technologies. This article …

Kill 1l, Prentiss Cox

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No abstract provided.

Towards The Faa's Next Century: Clarifying Disclosure Requirements In Arbitration, Andrea K. Schneider, Brian Farkas

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This essay provides a roadmap to the current landscape of neutrality and disclosure. It then suggests three possible reforms to the FAA that would provide better guidance to arbitrators, parties, and courts. Moreover, this essay argues that if the FAA cannot be sufficiently amended, states should take the lead. States can continue to more clearly outline disclosure requirements and enforce clearer standards than the current version of the FAA.

Doubting Thomas And Questioning Stare Decisis Under The Roberts Court, Wilfred U. Codrington Iii

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The article critically examines the erosion of stare decisis under the Roberts Court, highlighting concerns about the Supreme Court's increasing willingness to overturn established precedents. While acknowledging the importance of stare decisis in maintaining stability and equality, the author argues that its practical value is being undermined by ideological polarization and a departure from traditional legal reasoning. The article questions the Court's recent approach to precedent, particularly in cases like Dobbs v. Jackson Women's Health Organization and Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard, and critiques the conservative majority's aggressive use of judicial power.

The Big Four [Accounting] Law Firms: It's Past Time For The Practice Of Law To Get In The Game, Edward S. Adams, John H. Matheson

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New legal services models like ABSs and accommodations like UPL waivers provide multiple positive outcomes. These business structures increase access to legal services, particularly for low and middle-income individuals who are currently priced out of them. By allowing these services to be conducted by nonlawyers, the current supply gap could be closed or completely eliminated. Also, the increased pressure on law firms from corporations and ABSs promotes free market competition. Law firms will be forced to either find a way to differentiate their expertise and services or face a serious threat due to the rejection of the traditional billable hour …

An Alternate History Of Chevron, With A Lesson For Today, Michael E. Herz

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It is a banal truism that judicial deference to agency decisionmaking enables the executive branch to pursue its agenda, whatever that agenda may be. That was obvious to all in the early years of the Chevron decision, which was greeted enthusiastically on the right and skeptically on the left. In Chevron itself, and for a while thereafter, deference advanced the Reagan deregulatory program. Over the years, a subtler conclusion gained consensus: overall and in the long haul, judicial deference is likely to have a net pro-regulatory impact. Hence the right’s hardened opposition to Chevron leading up to its demise. But …

Undo Process: Examining Agency Procedural Levers To Access To Counsel, Haiyun Damon-Feng

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Every day, through internal adjudicative proceedings, agencies make thousands of rights determinations that affect critical matters such as financial security, family unity, personal safety, and individual liberty. Scholars and policymakers have recognized the significant impact that representation can have on adjudicative outcomes across the administrative state. Many agencies have implemented policies affirmatively seeking to boost an individual's ability to bring an advocate to assist with the adjudication process. In the immigration context, however, agencies have enacted procedural hurdles that have made it more difficult for individuals to reap the benefits of this assistance.

This Essay uses recent developments in the …

The Immigration Subpoena Power, Lindsay Nash

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For over a century, the federal government has wielded the immigration subpoena power in darkness, forcing private individuals, subfederal governments, and others to help it detain and deport. This vast administrative power has remained opaque even to those who receive these subpoenas and invisible to those it affects most. Indeed, the very people targeted by these subpoenas often don’t know they exist, much less how they facilitate arrest and deportation. For these reasons—and more—this power has escaped the legal battles raging over other immigration enforcement tactics and the scrutiny of journalists, scholars, and courts. Thus, as state- and locality-held information …

Rectifying The Rome Statute And Draft Articles On Prevention And Punishment Of Crimes Against Humanity To Include The Slave Trade, Jocelyn Getgen Kestenbaum

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The slave trade is commonly misperceived as a historical crime. Yet, the scourge of the slave trade is present throughout the world today. Combatting these ongoing atrocity crimes is essential to ensure that human rights are upheld by the international community. The crime of the slave trade fills an impunity gap, especially in light of recentharms perpetuated by the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS) against the Yazidi in Iraq. Revitalization of the conceptualization of the slave trade as a crime under international law might ensure greater enforcement of one of the oldest core international crimes. Critical proposed amendments …

The Impossibility Of Religious Equality, Zalman Rothschild

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The Supreme Court has recently adopted a new rule of religious equality: Laws unconstitutionally discriminate against religion when they deny religious exemptions but provide secular exemptions that undermine the law’s interests to the same degree as would a religious exemption. All the Justices and a cadre of scholars have agreed in principle with this approach to religious equality. This Essay argues that this new rule of religious equality is inherently unworkable, in part because it turns on treating that which is religious the same as its secular “comparators.” But religion is not comparable to anything neither in terms of its …

Decentering Property In Fourth Amendment Law, Michael C. Pollack, Matthew Tokson

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For the past several decades, privacy has been the primary conceptual foundation for Fourth Amendment search law. The canonical test for Fourth Amendment searches accordingly looks to whether the government has violated a person’s reasonable expectation of privacy. Yet privacy is no longer the sole determinant of Fourth Amendment protection, as the Supreme Court has recently added a property-based test to address cases involving physical intrusions on land or chattel. Further, given the ambiguity of the reasonable expectation of privacy test, a variety of influential judges and scholars have proposed relying primarily, or even exclusively, on property in determining the …

A Constitutional False Claims Act, Benjamin Mcmichael, Mackenzi Barrett, W. Kip Viscusi

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The False Claims Act (FCA) represents one of the most important sources, if not the most important source, of liability in the healthcare system and other industries that routinely provide goods and services to the federal government. Originally designed to police fraud during the Civil War, the FCA has become a general statute to enforce many other complex legal schemes. Because failure to comply with complicated statutes and regulations can lead to a reimbursement claim being defined as false under the FCA, the FCA serves as a blunt instrument to cudgel those who fail to comply with the minutiae of …

Remarks Following The Judge Frank M. Johnson, Jr. Memorial Lecture In Constitutional Rights And Liberties By The Honorable Judge Michelle Childs, Daiquiri Steele

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No abstract provided.

Somewhere Between Feminism And Misogyny: Classic Updike On The Modern Syllabus, Sue Norton

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Beginning with a retrospective approach, this essay navigates key works of literary criticism relevant to a small selection of John Updike’s most well-known fiction, his novel Rabbit, Run (1960) and two of his short stories “A&P” (1961) and “Separating” (1975), the three of which have frequently appeared on college syllabi. Through close readings, its aim is to provide a basis for classroom discussion about the misogynistic tone of Updike’s works so that professors of English and literary studies can confidently adapt their lesson plans and approaches in ways that are cognizant of today’s sensibilities on issues pertaining to girls, women, …

The Violence Of Bright Lines, Terrell Woolfolk, Kathryn E. Miller

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The U.S. Supreme Court interprets the Eighth Amendment to prohibit members of certain groups from serving extreme punishments, such as the death penalty and life without parole. For example, the Court has long banned death sentences for people with intellectual disability and for those who were under eighteen years old at the time of their crime. More recently, in Graham v. Florida and Miller v. Alabama, the Court extended this reasoning to sentences of life without parole for those under eighteen—prohibiting the sentence altogether for nonhomicide crimes and barring its mandatory imposition for homicides.

Many scholars and advocates have applauded …

Response: Diagonal Representation, Alma Magaña

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A lot has been written about the crisis of indigent defense and the plethora of factors that have led to the crisis, like the lack of guidance on how indigent defense providers can most efficiently distribute their insufficient resources. This lack of guidance has left jurisdictions across the country to their own devices, resulting in a national landscape of very different models, each with its own variations of the same problems plaguing indigent defense.

Notice Pleading’S Quiet Return, Alexander A. Reinert

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Fifteen years ago, the Supreme Court announced two significant civil procedure decisions – Bell Atlantic Corp. v. Twombly, 550 U.S. 544 (2007), and Ashcroft v. Iqbal, 556 U.S. 662 (2009). Together, Iqbal and Twombly marked a new approach to pleading in federal courts. No longer would courts apply the forgiving notice pleading standard, in force since the 1938 adoption of the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure. In its place, the Court introduced plausibility pleading, inviting district courts to apply their “judicial experience and common sense” to decide whether a claim was “plausible.” Commentators expressed alarm, predicting that the new standard …

Problems Of Compliance In Election Law, Lisa Marshall Manheim

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Elections do not operate in perfect compliance with the law. Instead, irregularities are routine and, to some extent, inevitable. The law of elections responds to this tension by recognizing that only some legal irregularities, under only some circumstances, have even the potential to invalidate an electoral process. One manifestation of this response involves variable standards of compliance. Doctrines implicated by these standards recognize that some election rules require only substantial compliance, rather than strict compliance, to be considered fulfilled. These compliance standards serve a vital role in election law regimes across the country. The basic operation of these standards is, …

Ending The Cycles Of Voter Suppression, Gilda R. Daniels

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No abstract provided.

A Critical Review Of Consumer Perception And Environmental Impacts Of Bioplastics In Sustainable Food Packaging, Junjie Lin, Amit K. Jaiswal, Swarna Jaiswal

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As awareness of environmental issues deepens and the demand for sustainability grows among societies, businesses, and consumers, minimizing the environmental impact of food packaging has become increasingly important. Bioplastics offer a promising solution due to their use of renewable resources (such as plants), their biodegradability, and their ability to retain the protective properties of traditional plastics. This review discusses recent advancements and trends in sustainable food packaging, emphasizing the role of bioplastics. Several typical types of bioplastics are introduced, along with an analysis of their advantages and limitations. Furthermore, this study investigates consumers' attitudes toward bioplastic food packaging, emphasizing their …

Factor Substitution Possibilities, Labor Share Dynamics, And Inequality In An Age Of Intangibles, Adnan Velic

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We examine the economy-wide degree of substitutability between intangible capital and other factor inputs in production using a large sample of advanced countries. In this context, we turn to studying the implications of intangible and tangible capital growth for labor income share dynamics. Compared to tangible capital, we find that intangible capital more strongly complements skilled labor. The analysis further indicates relative fungibility between tangible capital and a composite of intangible capital and skilled labor, in line with the rising prominence of knowledge-intensive tasks and AI-driven online platforms. The intrinsic nature of intangibles and their asymmetric effects across skilled and …

Subordinate Prosecutors’ Independence, Bruce A. Green, Jessica A. Roth

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This essay is about subordinate prosecutors’ independence to do what they think constitutes “seeking justice” when they perceive that their boss, or their boss’s boss, wants them to do something that is unjust—not illegal, but unjust. Of course, if subordinate prosecutors want to do either what they are told to do or what they infer that a higher-up wants them to do, they can do so, as long as the conduct is legal. Subordinate prosecutors might choose to disregard their own professional judgment of what justice requires because they share their boss’s objectives, because they see conforming as a route …

Substance And Process In Corporate Law: Theory And History, William Wilson Bratton, Simone M. Sepe

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Over the last half-century, corporate law has moved from substance to process as the Delaware courts have avoided direct review of the merits of transactions, substituting review of the processes that brought the transactions about. This is a familiar observation, perhaps a truism. But it is a truism that is undertheorized. This article addresses the theory gap, suggesting a structural reason for the trend. Simply, the courts avoid reviewing substance because they lack a theory of value. The theoretical void disables direct evaluation of transactional merits. Process review avoids this problem. Processes and their operation are the lawyer's stock in …

The Fox Effect? Implications Of Recruiting Corporate Law To Combat Misinformation, Lili Levi

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In 2023, Fox Corporation settled U.S. Dominion’s defamation action over Fox News’ broadcast of false election fraud claims after the 2020 presidential election for the staggering sum of $787.5 million. Now, a shareholder derivative action is pending in Delaware against the company’s board of directors for breach of state corporate law fiduciary oversight duties for their failure to prevent such defamatory programming. Beyond the specifics of the case, this development portends the emergence of a new politico-legal strategy—using corporate governance requirements as a weapon to promote press accountability and combat misinformation in public discourse. The question addressed in this Essay …

The Legacy Of Ferguson: Building Worker, Community, And Student Power To Respond To The Carceral State, Donna Coker, Melody Sinckler, Kira Mikes

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The 2014 killing of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri sparked national outrage regarding police violence in Black communities. But as time passed, Ferguson came to symbolize more than another episode of law enforcement violence. A Department of Justice (DOJ) report revealed that Ferguson's city coffers relied on an intentionally extractive criminal legal system that aggressively levied fines and fees in a racially discriminatory manner. As the DOJ findings illustrate, advocates seeking to transform or abolish the criminal legal system must rigorously analyze the political economy of the carceral system in their locale.

We describe a law school course aimed at …

Property And Information, Jeanne L. Schroeder, David G. Carlson

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The article proceeds as follows. As the information theory is a reaction to legal realism, Part I explores its antecedents in the work of Wesley Newcomb Hohfeld and Ronald H. Coase. Part II presents the information theory as arising from Professor Smith’s interpretation of the Coase theorem.11 In the imaginary world of TC0, we are supposedly indifferent to organizing by property and organizing by contract. Property eclipses contract as the organon of the economy because property reduces the cost of delineation and processing—of speaking and comprehending. We show that this theory is founded on a misunderstanding of Coase. Part III …

Intuitions In Tort Law And Theory, James A. Macleod

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This Essay highlights the many ways that ordinary conceptual and moral intuitions shape the development of tort law. It further argues that, for a range of doctrinal and institutional reasons, such intuitions deserve a central place in tort theorists’ efforts to explain, predict, justify, and reform the law of torts. Finally, given the stakes for both positive and normative tort theory, the Essay emphasizes the need for more systematic empirical research into the content and operation of people’s tort-relevant intuitions.

More Than A ‘Decorative Frill’: Meaningful Engagement With Feminism In International Law, Nienke Grossman, Jaya Ramji-Nogales

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No abstract provided.