Law Commons^™

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 …

From Wtp To Wtf: Valuation And Distributive Discourse, Lee Anne Fennell

Coase-Sandor Institute for Law & Economics Research Paper Series

No abstract provided.

The Anatomy Of Marital Happiness, Sam Peltzman

Coase-Sandor Institute for Law & Economics Research Paper Series

Since 1972, the General Social Survey has periodically asked whether people are happy with Yes, Maybe or No type answers. Here I use a net “happiness” measure, which is percentage Yes less percentage No with Maybe treated as zero. Average happiness is around +20 on this scale for all respondents from 1972 to the last prepandemic survey (2018). However, there is a wide gap of around 30 points between married and unmarried respondents. This “marital premium” is this paper’s subject. I describe how this premium varies across and within population groups. These include standard socio demographics (age, sex, race education, …

Constitutional Drafting Processes And Constitutional Success, Adam Chilton, Murat C. Mungan, Mila Versteeg

Coase-Sandor Institute for Law & Economics Research Paper Series

Several recent constitution-making processes have been celebrated for being participatory, inclusive, and representative. However, many of these processes also failed. We theorize that aspects of these kinds of constitutional drafting processes could reduce the probability of constitutional success. To show why, we construct a “Constitution Drafting game” (CD game) in which representatives from different interest groups must draft a constitution. We consider the case where the probability of constitutional success is single peaked, but the value from successful adoption is increasing in the degree of issue protection chosen. The drafting process then leads to protection choices that are above those …

The Genesis Of Constitutions: A Natural Language Processing Approach, Tejas Ramdas, Patrick Chung-Chia Huang, Nuno Garoupa, Martin T. Wells, Yun-Chien Chang, Tom Ginsburg

Coase-Sandor Institute for Law & Economics Research Paper Series

The diffusion of constitutional ideas and models has been the subject of extensive scholarship. In this paper, we use natural language processing methods to examine the persistence of constitutional ideas and models, focusing on how 16 core and iconic constitutions influence 572 newer constitutions over a long period (1900–2020). Our findings indicate that “old” core constitutions (such as those of the U.S. of 1789, Spain of 1812, France of 1848, and to a lesser extent France of 1791) have maintained significant influence over those 121 years. Austria of 1920 and France of 1946 are the most influential among the 20th …

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 …

Algorithmic Selection Of Iconic Constitutions, Tejas Ramdas, Patrick Chung-Chia Huang, Nuno Garoupa, Martin T. Wells, Yun-Chien Chang, Tom Ginsburg

Coase-Sandor Institute for Law & Economics Research Paper Series

This chapter examines the influence of pre-20th century constitutions using a quantitative approach, comparing expert-selected “iconic” constitutions with those identified algorithmically. In prior work, human experts identified four influential constitutions: the U.S. 1791, France 1791, Spain 1812, and France 1848. Here, we employ a genetic algorithm and Document Term Matrix (DTM) analysis to assess which one or four of 180 pre-1899 constitutions had the greatest textual impact on 581 post-1900 constitutions. Two criteria guide the selection: coverage and originality. Through iterative optimization, the algorithm identifies the most textually influential constitutions, allowing for a direct comparison with expert selections. This chapter …

Fraudulent Transfer Law’S Forgotten Foundations, Douglas G. Baird

Coase-Sandor Institute for Law & Economics Research Paper Series

Fraudulent transfer law is one of the principal bulwarks of private law. Fraudulent transfer law, however, now faces a crisis. Courts have long assumed that it was easy to determine whether a debtor made a fraudulent transfer of its property. One could use traditional markers of ownership to determine whether the debtor transferred property to a confederate. But today most assets are intangible. Transactions happen in the blink of an eye, and they take place entirely on corporate books. Reliance on simple notions of what constitutes a “transfer” of property are wholly inadequate. Understanding what it means for a debtor …

The Limits And Promise Of Global Antitrust Law, Anu Bradford, Adam Chilton, Katerina Linos

Coase-Sandor Institute for Law & Economics Research Paper Series

A large body of evidence suggests that open, competitive markets are a key driver of economic development. In recognition of this fact, many of the world’s leading economies not only adopted their own antitrust laws to promote fair competition, but they also urged developing countries around the world to do the same. This resulted in a remarkable proliferation of global antitrust law over the last several decades. Many studies have empirically examined the effect of this development, and, consistent with the hopes of policymakers, they have largely found that adopting antitrust laws produces positive economic outcomes.

In this Article, we …

The Tom Sawyer Effect: Invisible Work And Labor Market Power, Eric A. Posner

Coase-Sandor Institute for Law & Economics Research Paper Series

Certain types of work-like behavior are not treated as paid labor in the law and are therefore not taxed or given workplace protections and are often not understood to be work by ordinary people. This kind of “invisible work” is exceedingly common. It encompasses not only the frequently discussed example of household labor, but also the work, or some of the work, of athletes, soldiers, students, artists, volunteers, religious and political figures, and consumers who implicitly trade work—and money—for products and services. Invisible work is the product of cultural understandings left over from the past or manufactured by businesses, which …

Those Elusive Algorithmic Harms: A Comment On Bar-Gill And Sunstein, Algorithmic Harm, Omri Ben-Shahar

Coase-Sandor Institute for Law & Economics Research Paper Series

Can we talk about harms of algorithms—of anything—without comparing them to the benefits? In Algorithmic Harm, Bar-Gill and Sunstein develop a theoretical framework to assess the impact of algorithms in consumer markets, focusing on harmful manipulation of unsophisticated buyers. But the same framework yields additional insights, not explored in the book—how algorithmic targeting and personalized prices benefit this same group of consumers. In this contribution to the book symposium, I examine this missing part, suggesting that algorithms’ ability to recognize different consumers often yields treatments favorable to weaker groups of consumers—an effect richly documented in the empirical economic literature. Absent …

Pillar Two: Much Ado About Next To Nothing?, Julie Roin

Coase-Sandor Institute for Law & Economics Research Paper Series

The OECD has spent the last fifteen years working on the design and implementation of rules for the taxation of the income derived from international transactions, rules that its members hope will both increase corporate tax revenues and minimize “destructive” tax competition. In 2021, it released its two-part “Inclusive Framework.” Although Pillar One of this Framework still languishes, legislation necessary for the implementation of Pillar Two, which is designed to force all countries to impose a minimum tax on income derived by large multinational enterprises, has been enacted by most of the countries in the European Union, Japan, South Korea …

Antitrust Analysis Of Vertical Restraints In Labor Markets, Eric A. Posner

Coase-Sandor Institute for Law & Economics Research Paper Series

Vertical restraints in labor markets are a neglected topic, but have taken on importance as the harms caused by labor market restraints have gained greater recognition. These restraints are typically a form of input foreclosure, which refers to action of a downstream buyer of inputs to hinder its competitors from accessing those inputs. But while labor markets are important input markets, there has been little discussion of how input foreclosure can be used to evaluate anticompetitive labor market transactions. This article fills that gap by providing a framework for analyzing input foreclosure in labor markets.

Ideological Concordance Between Students And Professors, Adam Bonica, Adam Chilton, Kyle Rozema, Maya Sen

Coase-Sandor Institute for Law & Economics Research Paper Series

We develop a measure of student-professor ideological concordance based on the share of faculty members who are more liberal than the students at a given school. We then use data on the ideology of students and professors in American law schools over more than a twenty-year period to estimate the degree of ideological concordance in the legal academy. We find that as professors have become more liberal over time, their students have become even more liberal. The result is that ideological concordance has increased over time and that by 2010 the average law student actually attended a law school with …

Grading Machines: Can Ai Exam-Grading Replace Law Professors?, Kevin L. Cope, Jens Frankenreiter, Scott Hirst, Eric A. Posner, Daniel Schwarcz, Dane Thorley

Coase-Sandor Institute for Law & Economics Research Paper Series

In the past few years, large language models (LLMs) have achieved significant technical advances, such that legal-advocacy organizations are increasingly adopting them as complements to—or substitutes for— lawyers and other human experts. Several studies have examined LLMs’ performance in taking law school exams, finding mixed results. Yet there have been no published studies systematically analyzing LLMs’ competence at one of law professors’ chief responsibilities: grading law school exams. This paper presents results of an analysis of how LLMs perform in evaluating student responses to legal analysis questions of the kind typically administered in law school exams. The underlying data come …

Purdue Pharma And The New Bankruptcy Exceptionalism, Anthony Casey, Joshua Macey

Coase-Sandor Institute for Law & Economics Research Paper Series

No abstract provided.

Bankruptcy Judging After Williamson, Vincent S.J. Buccola

Coase-Sandor Institute for Law & Economics Research Paper Series

This Essay asks how bankruptcy judges ought to orient their substantial, statutory discretion in business reorganization cases. The motivating observation is that bankruptcy law enacts a kind of forced integration of productive assets. To shed light on the contemporary problems that bankruptcy judges face, I thus look to two classic approaches to the economic theory of the firm-from Oliver Williamson and from Oliver Hart. I conclude that nonjudicial institutions have largely surmounted the problems to which their theories point, leaving a different, and probably narrower, set of issues to worry about. Bankruptcy judges who have a notion that their job …

Safety Score Liability, Omri Ben-Shahar

Coase-Sandor Institute for Law & Economics Research Paper Series

Data technology is increasingly deployed to assign safety scores to people and products. Could these scores be used by tort law to apportion liability for accidents? Instead of basing tort liability on negligence—on the level of care leading to the specific accident—“safety score liability” would impose liability commensurate with a party’s habitual propensity to behave unsafely. This article describes how safety score liability would work, the incentives it would create, and the principles limiting its adoption. The article suggests that the precision of AI tools generating such scores—scores that have already reshaped other channels of safety regulation in society— offers …

A Disability-Inclusive Theory Of “Ordinary” Care: Redistributing Accommodative Labor In Torts, Rachel Caldwell

University of Chicago Law Review

Everyone generally owes each other a duty of ordinary care—but what is “ordinary”? How does one act reasonably to meet this burden? The answer depends on a plaintiff’s disability status. This Comment analyzes the current reasonable per- son standard for disabled plaintiffs and the corresponding duty of “ordinary care” provided by defendants through a critical disability studies lens. The current system burdens disabled plaintiffs with accommodating themselves, rather than requiring defendants to include accessible care in meeting their general duty of ordinary care. To redistribute this inequitable distribution of accommodative labor, this Comment proposes three stackable policies: (1) courts should …

Weighing In: Why Obesity Should Be Considered A Qualifying Disability Under The Americans With Disabilities Act, Anne Marie Hawley

University of Chicago Law Review

Anti-fat bias has been described as the last socially acceptable form of prejudice. Weight discrimination persists even though obesity affects over 100 million adults in the United States and obesity rates have continued climbing over the past few decades. Despite the discrimination that fat people face, there is no federal protection against weight discrimination. One potential solution to the lack of existing legal protections is the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA).

Claimants challenging weight discrimination under the ADA argue that weight discrimination is a form of disability discrimination—namely, discrimination based on the medical condition of obesity. Although the medical community …

Post-Emption And The Mayoral Toolbox: Levers And Limits Of City Resistance To State Preemption, Quinton D. Lucas, Gavriel Schreiber

University of Chicago Law Review

States increasingly deploy aggressive preemption measures against disfavored localities. Scholars have raised the alarm, but cities’ subordinate legal status leaves them disempowered. To push back, municipal advocates need to thoroughly under- stand the complex bilateral relationship between cities and their states.

That is where I come in. As mayor of a progressive city in a conservative state, I swim in the hostile symbiosis that characterizes city-state relations. By drawing on real-life examples, closed-door conversations, and previously private documents, my coauthor and I demonstrate the potence of multipronged city power. We synthesize our stories into a thicker account of state motivation …

The Reconciliation Roots Of Fourth Amendment Privacy, Sophia Z. Lee

University of Chicago Law Review

The Roberts Court has made protecting “the privacies of life” a catchphrase of Fourth Amendment law in the digital era. The time is thus ripe for revisiting the doctrinal and political roots of this newly influential quote from the Court’s 1886 decision Boyd v. United States. Existing scholarship views Boyd and its paean to privacy as an opening salvo in the Supreme Court’s turn-of-the-twentieth-century deregulatory jurisprudence (often associated with the Court’s most famous substantive due process decision, Lochner v. New York). Scholars also assume Boyd’s emphasis on privacy was in keeping with the Founders’ view of the Fourth Amendment.

This …

When The Taker Goes Broke: Takings Claims In Municipal Bankruptcy, Joshua Kayne Kaufman

University of Chicago Law Review

When a municipality takes property, the former owners can allege a violation of the Takings Clause and try to recover just compensation. But what should happen when the municipality goes broke and enters municipal bankruptcy? Can the municipal Bankruptcy Code empower judges to release municipalities from their obligation to pay just compensation through a discharge? Or does the Takings Clause provide special constitutional protection to claims for just compensation from a municipality that immunizes the claims from discharge? This issue has played out in municipal bankruptcies in Detroit, Michigan; Stockton, California; and Puerto Rico—and courts are deeply divided on the …

Solving The Housing Puzzle, George J. Vojta

University of Chicago Law Review

This Comment analyzes the entrance of institutional investors into the single- family rental market after the Great Recession of 2008. The collapse of the housing market during the Great Recession fundamentally changed the ownership structure of U.S. single-family homes in two distinct ways. First, the number of families renting single-family homes soared. And second, institutional investors entered the single-family home market, buying many homes and converting them into rental properties. This postrecession reality has introduced a housing puzzle: the pricing trends of single-family rentals in the decade after the Great Recession suggest that institutional investors have captured monopolistic power over …

Intervention And Universal Remedies, Monica Haymond

University of Chicago Law Review

Civil procedure plays a pivotal role in shaping litigation, including some of the most divisive and politically consequential cases heard in federal court—those seeking nationwide injunctions to block federal policies. But we know very little about how such cases are actually litigated. It is often assumed that procedural rules, crafted to apply to many types of cases, work equally well in the nationwide-injunction context. This Article challenges that view. In fact, procedural rules are having a critical substantive effect on the outcomes of these cases. And they are undermining the very values they were designed to serve.

This Article examines …

Guns And The Right To Exclude: Saving Gunsat-Work Laws From Cedar Point’S Per Se Takings Rule, Tom Malaga Kadie

University of Chicago Law Review

The Supreme Court’s decision in Cedar Point Nursery v. Hassid has left considerable uncertainty in the realm of takings law. In Cedar Point, the Court announced a new rule that government-authorized physical occupations of property, even temporary ones, constitute per se takings. But the Cedar Point decision left significant questions unresolved regarding the scope of its per se takings rule and its various exceptions.

To resolve these questions, this Comment looks to the example of guns-at-work laws. Enacted by about half of the states, guns-at-work laws protect the right of a business’s employees, customers, and invitees to store firearms in …

Judicial Dark Matter, Nina Varsava, Michael A. Livermore, Keith Carlson Carlson, Daniel N. Rockmore

University of Chicago Law Review

Judicial reform efforts aimed at rectifying historical gender and racial inequalities understandably focus on increasing the number of women and people of color on the bench. While this is an important program, this Article sheds light on another aspect of the representation problem, which will not necessarily be resolved through greater diversity in judicial appointments. This problem has to do with the understudied and often opaque practices of judicial administration. Through a large-scale empirical study of federal appellate decisions, we examine the distribution of judges along the lines of gender and race across decision panels and find systematic gender and …

Network Harms, Andy Z. Wang

University of Chicago Law Review

When it comes to data, the whole is greater than the sum of its parts. There may be millions of people with the same birthday. But how many also have a dog, drive a red car, and have two kids? The more that data is aggregated, the more identifying, and thus sensitive, it becomes. In recognition of this principle, the law has developed safe harbors for firms that take steps to prevent aggregation of the data they sell. A firm might, for instance, anonymize its data by removing identifying information. But as the science academy has shown, a wide array …

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

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