Law Commons^™

An Evidence Review Of Behavioural Economics In The Justice Sector, Brian Barry, Lucia Morales, Aiden Carthy

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Behavioural economics combines elements of economics and psychology to better understand how and why people behave the way they do in the real world. While behavioural economics originally sought to better understand economic decision-making, it has since grown in scope and application, and it is increasingly used by governments, government departments and other organisations to shape and implement public policies in a range of policy areas. This Review considers the application of behavioural economics theories and concepts (commonly referred to as behavioural insights) to the justice sector in a range of areas of justice policy in different jurisdictions. Areas of …

Due Process Alignment In Mass Restructurings, Sergio J. Campos, Samir D. Parikh

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Mass tort defendants have recently begun exiting multidistrict litigation by filing for bankruptcy. This new strategy ushers defendants into a far more hospitable forum that offers accelerated resolution of all state and federal claims held by both current and future victims.

Bankruptcy's structural, procedural, and substantive benefits also provide defendants with unique optionality. Bankruptcy's resolution promise is alluring, but the process relies on a very large assumption: that future victims can be compelled to relinquish property rights in their cause of action against the corporate defendant and others without consent or notice. Bankruptcy builds an entire resolution structure on the …

Just Say No? Shareholder Voting On Securities Class Actions, Albert H. Choi, Stephen J. Choi, Adam C. Pritchard

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The U.S. securities laws allow security-holders to bring a class action suit against a public company and its officers who make materially misleading statements to the market. The class action mechanism allows individual claimants to aggregate their claims. This procedure mitigates the collective action problem among claimants, and also creates potential economies of scale. Despite these efficiencies, the class action mechanism has been criticized for being driven by attorneys and also encouraging nuisance suits. Although various statutory and doctrinal solutions have been proposed and implemented over the years, the concerns over the agency problem and nuisance suits persist. This paper …

Democracy Harms And The First Amendment, Deborah Pearlstein

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The First Amendment tolerates—has long tolerated—the regulation of certain kinds of false speech. Indeed, regulable lies are not limited to traditionally less-protected categories of speech like defamation and commercial deception. They include an array of other established speech regulations, administered by government institutions every day, from criminal laws barring perjury and other lies to government officials, to disciplinary measures by elected bodies sanctioning members for false or otherwise objectionable speech. Yet while it is easy to identify the kinds of lies that existing doctrinal categories make regulable for the personal, physical, or reputational harms they inflict on individuals¸ it has …

Collaborative Constructions: Designing High School History Curriculum With The Lost & Found Game Series, Owen Gottlieb, Shawn Clybor

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This chapter addresses design research and iterative curriculum design for the Lost & Found games series. The Lost & Found card-to-mobile series is set in Fustat (Old Cairo) in the twelfth century and focuses on religious laws of the period. The first two games focus on Moses Maimonides’ Mishneh Torah, a key Jewish law code. A new expansion module which was in development at the time of the fieldwork described in this article that introduces Islamic laws of the period, and a mobile prototype of the initial strategy game has been developed with support National Endowment for the Humanities. The …

Resurrecting Arbitrariness, Kathryn E. Miller

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What allows judges to sentence a child to die in prison? For years, they did so without constitutional restriction. That all changed in 2012’s Miller v. Alabama, which banned mandatory sentences of life without parole for children convicted of homicide crimes. Miller held that this extreme sentence was constitutional only for the worst offenders—the “permanently incorrigible.” By embracing individualized sentencing, Miller and its progeny portended a sea change in the way juveniles would be sentenced for serious crimes. But if Miller opened the door to sentencing reform, the Court’s recent decision in Jones v. Mississippi appeared to slam it …

Jotwell's Thirteenth Birthday Celebration, A. Michael Froomkin

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No abstract provided.

Highly Automated Vehicles & Discrimination Against Low-Income Persons, William H. Widen

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Law reform in the United States often reflects a structural bias that advances narrow business interests without addressing broader public interest concerns.' This bias may appear by omitting protective language in laws or regulations which address a subject matter area, such as permitting the testing of highly automated vehicles ("HA Vs") on public roads, while omitting a requirement for a reasonable level of insurance as a condition to obtain a testing permit.2 This Article explores certain social and economic justice implications of laws and regulations governing the design, testing, manufacture, and deployment of HA Vs which might advance a business …

Reducing Prejudice Through Law: Evidence From Experimental Psychology, Sara Emily Burke, Roseanna Sommers

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Can antidiscrimination law effect changes in public attitudes toward minority groups? Could learning, for instance, that employment discrimination against people with clinical depression is legally prohibited cause members of the public to be more accepting toward people with mental health conditions? In this Article, we report the results of a series of experiments that test the effect of inducing the belief that discrimination against a given group is legal (versus illegal) on interpersonal attitudes toward members of that group. We find that learning that discrimination is unlawful does not simply lead people to believe that an employer is more likely …

Taming Unicorns, Matthew Wansley

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Until recently, most startups that grew to become valuable businesses chose to become public companies. In the last decade, the number of unicorns—private, venture-backed startups valued over one billion dollars—has increased more than tenfold. Some of these unicorns committed misconduct that they successfully concealed for years. The difficulty of trading private company securities facilitates the concealment of misconduct. The opportunity to profit from trading a company’s securities gives short sellers, analysts, and financial journalists incentives to uncover and reveal information about misconduct the company commits. Securities regulation and standard contract provisions restrict the trading of private company securities, which undermines …

Color Of Creatorship - Author's Response, Anjali Vats

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This essay is the author's response to three reviews of The Color of Creatorship written by notable intellectual property scholars and published in the IP Law Book Review.

Blame The Victim: How Mistreatment By The State Is Used To Legitimize Police Violence, Tamara R. Lave

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No abstract provided.

Freedom From Speech, Mary Anne Franks

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The importance of freedom of speech in a democratic society is usually taken as a given, but freedom from speech is no less important in safeguarding the values of truth, autonomy, and democracy. Freedom from speech includes both the right of the individual to not be forced to speak and the freedom to avoid the speech of others. This essay attempts to highlight the significance of freedom from speech in order to clarify the importance of the First Amendment right against compelled speech; provide an explanation for when the right of free speech yields to other rights; and offer a …

Too Much Of A Good Thing? A Governing Knowledge Commons Review Of Abundance In Context, Michael J. Madison, Brett M. Frischmann, Madelyn Sanfilippo, Katherine J. Strandburg

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The economics of abundance, along with the sociology of abundance, the law of abundance, and so forth, should be re-framed, linked, and situated in a common context for empirical rather than conceptual research. Abundance may seem to be a new, big thing, between anxiety over information overload, Big Data, and related technological disruptions. But scholars know that abundance is an ancient phenomenon, which only seemed to disappear as twentieth century social science focused on scarcity instead. Restoring the study of abundance, and figuring out how to solve the problems that abundance might create, means shedding disciplinary blinders and going back …

A Hague Parallel Proceedings Convention: Architecture And Features, Paul Herrup, Ronald A. Brand

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In Paul Herrup and Ronald A. Brand, A Hague Convention on Parallel Proceedings, 63 Harvard International Law Journal Online 1(2022), available at https://harvardilj.org/2022/02/a-hague-convention-on-parallel-proceedings/ and https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3894502, we argued that the Hague Conference on Private International Law should not undertake a project to require or prohibit exercise of original jurisdiction in national courts. Rather, the goal of current efforts should be to improve the concentration of parallel litigation in a “better forum,” in order to achieve efficient and complete resolution of disputes in transnational litigation. The Hague Conference is now taking this path. As the Experts Group and Working Group …

Judges, Judging And Otherwise, Michael Pollack

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Ask the average person to imagine what a judge does, and the answer will most likely be something right out of a courtroom from Law & Order — or Legally Blonde, Just Mercy, My Cousin Vinny, Kramer vs. Kramer, or any of the myriad law-themed movies and television shows. A judge is faced with a dispute brought by some parties and their lawyers and is charged with resolving it, whether it be a breach of contract, a tort action, a competing claim over property, a disagreement about the meaning of a statute, some accusation that someone …

Anticompetitive Merger Review, Samuel N. Weinstein

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U.S. antitrust law empowers enforcers to review pending mergers that might undermine competition. But there is growing evidence that the merger-review regime is failing to perform its core procompetitive function. Industry concentration and the power of dominant firms are increasing across key sectors of the economy. In response, progressive advocates of more aggressive antitrust interventions have critiqued the substantive merger-review standard, arguing that it is too friendly to merging firms. This Article traces the problem to a different source: the merger-review process itself. The growing length of reviews, the competitive restrictions merger agreements place on acquisition targets during review, and …

Government By Code? Blockchain Applications To Public Sector Governance, Pedro Bustamante, Meina Cai, Marcela Gomez, Colin Harris, Prashabnt Krishnamurthy, Wilson Law, Michael J. Madison, Ilia Murtazashvili, Jennifer Brick Murtazashvili, Tymofiy Mylovanov, Nataliia Shapoval, Annette Vee, Martin B. H. Weiss

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Studies of blockchain governance can be divided into analyses of the governance of blockchains (such as rules and power dynamics within a given network) and governance by blockchains (such as how blockchains can be implemented to improve self-governance of community-based peer production networks). Less emphasis has been placed on applications of distributed ledgers to public sector governance. Our review clarifies that the decentralization and distributive features that enable blockchains to link up loosely connected private organizations and public agencies to improve efficiency and transparency of government transactions. However, most blockchain applications lack clear advantages over the conventional digital recording of …

Racial Trauma In Civil Rights Representation, Angela Onwuachi-Willig, Anthony V. Alfieri

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Narratives of trauma told by clients and communities of color have inspired an increasing number of civil rights and antiracist lawyers and academics to call for more trauma-informed training for law students and lawyers. These advocates have argued not only for greater trauma-sensitive practices and trauma-centered interventions on behalf of adversely impacted individuals and groups but also for greater awareness of the risks of secondary or vicarious trauma for lawyers who represent traumatized clients and communities. In this Article, we join this chorus of attorneys and academics. Harnessing the recent civil rights case of P.P. v. Compton Unified School District, …

The Case For Banning (And Mandating) Ransomware Insurance, Kyle D. Logue, Adam B. Shniderman

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Ransomware attacks are becoming increasingly pervasive and disruptive, resulting in ransom demands becoming more exorbitant. Payments for ransom costs are increasingly being covered by insurance, which may offer coverage for a variety of cyber-related losses. Some commentators have expressed concern over this market phenomenon. Specifically, the concern is that the presence of insurance is making the ransomware problem worse based on the following theory: because there is ransomware insurance that covers ransom payments, and because paying the ransom is often far cheaper than paying the restoration and business interruption costs covered under the policy, there is an increased tendency to …

Square Pegs And Round Holes: Differentiated Instruction And The Law Classroom, Karen J. Sneddon

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As the academic semester begins, law students enter the classroom with sharpened pencils and charged laptops. Law professors enter the classroom with prepared notes and tabbed casebooks. But how will law professors ensure that the learning of each individual student is supported? Students do not take one path to law school. From English majors to engineering majors, students enter law school immediately upon graduating from college or years after graduation with various professional experiences. Despite criticism that legal education is resistant to change and over-relies on the Socratic Method, law school educators know that learning is not a one-size-fits-all experience. …

Autonomous Vehicle Regulation & Trust: The Impact Of Failures To Comply With Standards, William H. Widen, Phillip Koopman

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The autonomous vehicle (AV) industry works very hard to create public trust in both AV technology and its developers. Building trust is part of a strategy to permit the industry itself to manage the testing and deployment of AV technology without regulatory interference. This article explains how industry actions to promote trust (both individually and collectively) have created concerns rather than comfort with this emerging technology. The article suggests how the industry might change its current approach to law and regulation from an adversarial posture to a more cooperative one in which a space is created for government regulation consistent …

Inoculating The Next Generation Of Lawyers: Mandating Substances Use And Mental Health Education For Law Students, Janet Stearns

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No abstract provided.

Ai Insurance: How Liability Insurance Can Drive The Responsible Adoption Of Artificial Intelligence In Health Care, Ariel Dora Stern, Avi Goldfarb, Timo Minssen, W. Nicholson Price Ii

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Despite enthusiasm about the potential to apply artificial intelligence (AI) to medicine and health care delivery, adoption remains tepid, even for the most compelling technologies. In this article, the authors focus on one set of challenges to AI adoption: those related to liability. Well-designed AI liability insurance can mitigate predictable liability risks and uncertainties in a way that is aligned with the interests of health care’s main stakeholders, including patients, physicians, and health care organization leadership. A market for AI insurance will encourage the use of high-quality AI, because insurers will be most keen to underwrite those products that are …

The False Allure Of The Anti-Accumulation Principle, Michael E. Herz, Kevin M. Stack

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Today the executive branch is generally seen as the most dangerous branch. Many worry that the executive branch now defies or subsumes the separation of powers. In response, several Supreme Court Justices and prominent scholars assert that the very separation-of-powers principles that determine the structure of the federal government as a whole apply with full force within the executive branch. In particular, they argue that constitutional law prohibits the accumulation of more than one type of power—legislative, executive, and judicial—in the same executive official or government entity. We refer to this as the anti-accumulation principle. The consequences of this principle, …

Disaggregating Slavery And The Slave Trade, Jocelyn Getgen Kestenbaum

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International law prohibits slavery and the slave trade as peremptory norms, customary international law prohibitions and crimes, humanitarian law prohibitions, and non-derogable human rights. Human rights bodies, however, focus on human trafficking, even when slavery and the slave trade—and not human trafficking—are enumerated within their mandates. International human rights law has conflated human trafficking with slavery and the slave trade. Consequently, human trafficking has subsumed the slave trade and, at times, slavery prohibitions, increasing perpetrator impunity for slavery and the slave trade abuses and denying full expressive justice to survivors.

This Article disaggregates slavery from the slave trade and slavery …

The Power Of A Good Story: How Narrative Techniques Can Make Transactional Documents More Persuasive, Karen J. Sneddon

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Transactional documents are complex, multi-faceted documents reviewed by various audiences at multiple points in time. They are more than descriptive legal devices that dictate the exchange of widgets for cash. While the core of many transactional documents will be the acquisition, creation, or exchange of property or services, transactional documents do more than memorialize that understanding. At first glance, transactional documents may seem simply like expository texts that aim to create the private law between the transacting parties and educate the audience by delivering a sequence of instructions, but transactional documents do much more. They tell the stories of the …

A New Framework For Digital Taxation, Reuven Avi-Yonah, Young Ran (Christine) Kim, Karen Sam

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The international tax regime has wide implications for business, trade, and the international political economy. Under current law, multinational enterprises do not pay their fair share of taxes to market countries where profits are generated because market countries are only allowed to tax companies with a physical presence there. Digital companies, like Google and Amazon, can operate entirely online, thereby avoiding market country taxes. Multinationals can also exploit existing tax rules by shifting their profits to low-tax jurisdictions, thereby avoiding taxes in the residence country where their headquarters are located.

Recently, a global tax deal was reached to tackle these …

Lawyering The Presidency, Deborah Pearlstein

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Among its many profound effects on American life, the Trump presidency has triggered a surge of interest in the project of law reform to better check the exercise of presidential power. Yet these reform efforts arise against a wholly unsettled debate about the function and effectiveness of existing checks, perhaps none more so than the role of executive branch legal counsel. With courts often deferential, and Congress hamstrung by partisan polarization, scholars have drawn on the experiences of executive branch lawyers to assess whether counsel functions as part of an “internal separation of powers” form of constraint. Yet while these …

Is Bitcoin Prudent? Is Art Diversified? Offering Alternative Investments To 401(K) Participants, Edward A. Zelinsky

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Whether 401(k) plans’ investment menus should feature “alternative” investments is a fact-driven inquiry applying ERISA’s fiduciary standards of prudence, loyalty, and diversification. Central to this fact-driven inquiry is whether the alternative investment class in question is broadly accepted by investors in general and by professional defined benefit trustees in particular. A similarly salient concern when making this inquiry is the financial unsophistication of many, perhaps most, 401(k) participants. Accounting for these considerations, this Article concludes that REITs, private equity funds, and hedge funds can, with limits, today be offered as investment choices to 401(k) participants, but that cryptocurrencies (including Bitcoin), …