Law Commons^™

Personalizing Mandatory Rules In Contract Law, Omri Ben-Shahar, Ariel Porat

University of Chicago Law Review

Mandatory rules provide people protections they might otherwise fail to secure in their contracts. Because people vary in the degree of protection they need and the cost of protection they can afford, one-size-fits-all rules are too weak for some and too strong for others. This Essay examines the case for personalized mandatory protections. With the increasing availability of information about consumers, the law may soon be able to tailor mandatory protections that vary with each individual’s characteristics. We show that personalized protections increase the overall contractual surplus and prompt more people to enter into contracts. It eliminates crosssubsidies within a …

Algorithmic Price Discrimination When Demand Is A Function Of Both Preferences And (Mis)Perceptions, Oren Bar-Gill

University of Chicago Law Review

Sellers are increasingly utilizing big data and sophisticated algorithms to price discriminate among customers. Indeed, we are approaching a world in which each consumer will be charged a personalized price for a personalized product or service. Is this type of price discrimination good or bad? The normative assessment, I argue, depends on the target of the discrimination. Sellers are interested in the consumer’s willingness to pay (WTP) for their goods or services: they maximize profits by charging a price that is as close as possible to the consumer’s WTP. This WTP is a function of consumer preferences on the one …

Contents / Editorial Information

University of Chicago Law Review

No abstract provided.

Constitutional Liquidation, William Baude

Articles

No abstract provided.

The Games They Will Play: Tax Games, Roadblocks, And Glitches Under The 2017 Tax Legislation, David Kamin, David Gamage, Ari Glowgower, Rebecca Kysar, Darien Shanske

Articles

No abstract provided.

18 U.S.C. § 3553(A)'S Undervalued Sentencing Command: Providing A Federal Criminal Defendant With Rehabilitation, Training, And Treatment In"“The Most Effective Manner", Erica Zunkel

Articles

No abstract provided.

Innovation Policy Pluralism, Daniel Hemel, Lisa Larrimore Ouellette

Articles

No abstract provided.

Human Rights Implications Of Global Surrogacy, Executive Summary, University Of Chicago Law School - Global Human Rights Clinic

Global Human Rights Clinic

No abstract provided.

Human Rights Implications Of Global Surrogacy, University Of Chicago Law School - Global Human Rights Clinic

Global Human Rights Clinic

The growth of the gestational surrogacy industry in the last few decades has raised concerns about the human rights of the parties involved. Partly due to those concerns, several of the countries where surrogacy was once widespread have recently prohibited the practice. Yet the human rights implications of surrogacy are highly complex, and it is far from clear that a global surrogacy prohibition is the best or even most feasible way to address rights concerns. This report aims to advance an understanding of the human rights impact of laws, policies and practices around surrogacy. The report considers the practice of …

Contract Governance In Small-World Networks: The Case Of The Maghribi Traders, Lisa Bernstein

Articles

No abstract provided.

The New Legal Liberalism, Emma Kaufman

Articles

No abstract provided.

An Empirical Analysis Of Sexual Orientation Discrimination, J. Shahar Dillbary, Griffin Edwards

University of Chicago Law Review

This study is the first to empirically demonstrate widespread discrimination across the United States based on perceived sexual orientation, sex, and race in mortgage lending. Our analysis of over five million mortgage applications reveals that any Fair Housing Administration (FHA) loan application filed by same-sex male co-applicants is significantly less likely to be approved compared to the white heterosexual baseline (holding lending risk constant). The most likely explanation for this pattern is sexual orientation–based discrimination—despite the fact that FHA loans are the only type of loan in which discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation is prohibited.

Moreover, we find …

The Uses And Abuses Of Presidential Impeachment, Tom Ginsburg, Aziz Huq, David Landau

Public Law and Legal Theory Working Papers

With the charging and trial of President Trump, impeachment has once again assumed a central role in United States constitutional law and politics. Yet because so few impeachments, presidential or otherwise, have occurred in American history, we have little understanding of how removing presidents in the middle of a term alters the direction of a constitutional democracy. This article illuminates the appropriate scope and channels of impeachment by examining the law and practice of presidential removal globally. We first catalog possible modalities of impeachment through case studies from South Korea, Paraguay, Brazil, and South Africa. We then deploy large-n empirical …

Some Doubts About “Democratizing” Criminal Justice, John Rappaport

Public Law and Legal Theory Working Papers

The American criminal justice system’s ills are by now so familiar as scarcely to bear repeating: unprecedented levels of incarceration, doled out disproportionately across racial groups, and police that seem to antagonize and hurt the now distrustful communities they are tasked to serve and protect. Systemic social ailments like these seldom permit straightforward diagnoses, let alone simple cures. In this case, however, a large, diverse, and influential group of experts—the legal academy’s “democratizers”—all identify the same disease: the retreat of local democratic control in favor of a bureaucratic “machinery” disconnected from public values and the people themselves. Neighborhood juries, for …

The Impact Of Artificial Intelligence On Rules, Standards, And Judicial Discretion, Frank Fagan, Saul Levmore

Public Law and Legal Theory Working Papers

Artificial intelligence (AI), and machine learning in particular, promises lawmakers greater specificity and fewer errors. Algorithmic lawmaking and judging will leverage models built from large stores of data that permit the creation and application of finely tuned rules. AI is therefore regarded as something that will bring about a movement from standards to rules. Drawing on contemporary data science, this Article shows that machine learning is less impressive when the past is unlike the future, as it is whenever new variables appear over time. In the absence of regularities, machine learning loses its advantage and, as a result, looser standards …

Grounding Originalism, William Baude, Stephen E. Sachs

Articles

No abstract provided.

Inversion Aversion, Lee Anne Fennell, Richard H. Mcadams

Articles

No abstract provided.

Regulatory Bundling, Jennifer Nou, Jed Stiglitz

Articles

No abstract provided.

Unlikely Resurrection: Richard Posner, Promissory Estoppel, And The Death Of Contract, Douglas Baird

Articles

No abstract provided.

Fourth Amendment Gloss, Aziz Huq

Articles

No abstract provided.

Imagining An Antisubordinating First Amendment, Genevieve Lakier

Articles

No abstract provided.

Personalizing Precommitment, Lee Anne Fennell

Articles

No abstract provided.

Personalizing Mandatory Rules In Contract Law, Omri Ben-Shahar, Ariel Porat

Articles

No abstract provided.

Book Review: The New Legal Liberalism, Emma Kaufman

University of Chicago Law Review

No abstract provided.

Changing People's Preferences By The State And The Law, Ariel Porat

Coase-Sandor Institute for Law & Economics Research Paper Series

In standard economic models, two basic assumptions are made: the first, that actors are rational and, the second, that actors' preferences are a given and exogenously determined. Behavioral economics—followed by behavioral law and economics—has questioned the first assumption. This article challenges the second one, arguing that in many instances, social welfare should be enhanced not by maximizing satisfaction of existing preferences but by changing the preferences themselves. The article identifies seven categories of cases where the traditional objections to intentional preferences change by the state and the law lose force and argues that in these cases, such a change warrants …

Is Police Behavior Getting Worse? The Importance Of Data Selection In Evaluating The Police, John Rappaport, Aurelie Ouss

Coase-Sandor Institute for Law & Economics Research Paper Series

Public concern about harmful policing is surging. Governments are paying historic amounts for law enforcement liability. Has police behavior changed? Or is society responding differently? Traditional data sources struggle with this question. Common metrics conflate the prevalence and severity of policing harms with the responses of legal actors such as lawyers, judges, and juries. We overcome this problem using a new data source: liability insurance claims. Our dataset contains 23 years of claims against roughly 350 law enforcement agencies that contract with a single insurer. We find that, while lawsuits and payouts have trended upwards over the past decade, insurance …

Property Beyond Exclusion, Lee Anne Fennell

Coase-Sandor Institute for Law & Economics Research Paper Series

Property rights have long been associated with a simple and distinctive technology: exclusion. But technologies can become outdated as conditions change, and exclusion is no exception. Recent decades have featured profound changes that have made exclusion a less useful, less necessary, and more expensive way of regulating access to resources. This Article surveys the prospects for a post-exclusion understanding of real and personal property. It proceeds from the premise that property is built upon complementarities, the nature and scale of which have undergone seismic shifts. Physical boundaries and lengthy claims on resources are designed to group complementary elements together in …

Beyond The Marriage Tax Trilemma, Daniel J. Hemel

Public Law and Legal Theory Working Papers

For decades, the well-known “marriage tax trilemma” has played a central role in discussions of the tax treatment of the family unit. The “trilemma” refers to the mathematical impossibility of constructing a tax system that imposes the same tax liability across all married couples with the same income (couples neutrality), neither encourages nor penalizes marriage (marriage neutrality), and taxes higher income individuals at higher rates (progressivity). Numerous articles have proposed responses to the trilemma that choose two of the legs over a third or that seek to split the difference among the competing neutrality norms that the trilemma casts as …

How Clear Is "Clear" Enough?, Ryan D. Doerfler

Public Law and Legal Theory Working Papers

“How much ambiguity is enough?” was the deceptively simple question repeatedly put forward by Justice Neil Gorsuch in oral argument for American Hospital Association v. Becerra. Silly as the question was meant to seem, much turns on the response. Most obvious are the effects on the practice of administrative agencies and the implications for years of precedent surrounding the Chevron doctrine. But far beyond administrative law, the response also has substantial ramifications for the law of interpretation since it is centered in the complementary notion of clarity. Notwithstanding the stakes, the government’s lawyer struggled to give a concise response. Rather …

Abortion, The Disabilities Of Pregnancy, And The Dignity Of Risk, Mary Anne Case

Public Law and Legal Theory Working Papers

When abortion is discussed in the context of destigmatizing disability, it is usually in connection with the potential disabilities of the fetus. Disability rights activists increasingly encourage both lawmakers setting abortion policy and women contemplating abortion to think that a life with disabilities is worth living. In particular, they argue that a fetus diagnosed with Down syndrome, let alone one with a cleft palate, should not for that reason be aborted.While taking this line of argument into account, this Chapter will shift the frame of reference to various ways in which the law and bioethics of abortion treat pregnant women …