Law Commons^™

"How Do I Design My Law Course?": A Quick Guide For New Professors, Steven Arrigg Koh

Faculty Scholarship

How do professors start teaching law? This question is a particular challenge for new law professors, who often lack resources for course design. Written from the perspective of a recently tenured law professor, this Essay offers four major categories of decisions: semester structure, classroom, final exam, and “professorial personality.” It argues that, for each decision, reasonable minds can differ. This Essay also provides some personal reflections on the decision-making to illustrate how one professor might weigh various considerations in course design. A final Appendix is a checklist for new professors.

Cardozo Law News Brief: September 11, 2026, Benjamin N. Cardozo School Of Law

Cardozo Law News Briefs

Highlights from the September 11, 2026 Cardozo Law News Brief include:

• Professor Matthew Wansley was quoted in The New York Times about Tesla’s Cybercab and the challenges of developing a reliable automated driving system.
• Professor Luis Calderón Gómez spoke to The Washington Post about the Trump administration’s proposal to remove tax exemptions from schools that consider race in admissions and the potential for legal challenges.
• Professor Zalman Rothschild spoke to Gothamist about New York’s vaccine requirements and renewed constitutional challenges to vaccination mandates.
• Adjunct Professor Gary Galperin was quoted in Newsweek about the Lindsay Clancy mistrial and the possibility of …

Child Welfare History Of Prison Inmates Would Provide Meaningful Data For Foster Care Policy Research And Planning, Maggie Zehring

Student Scholarship

Child welfare intervention in the United States continues to operate distinctly different in each states and community without a full picture of the overall system’s efficacy. While federal and state agencies collect extensive information on children’s movement in and out of the foster care system and related adjudication, there lacks a nationwide understanding of how kids fare after exiting the system. This note argues that Departments of Correction (DOC) nationwide should collect child‑welfare history from incarcerated individuals as part of existing intake procedures and regularly communicate the data for the federal Children’s Bureau to aggregate for longitudinal analysis of foster …

Ndls Communicator: Week Of 09.08.26, Notre Dame Law School

NDLS Communicator

The Latest News

• Notre Dame Exoneration Justice Clinic Client Iris Seabolt Exonerated
• Law professor Randy Kozel to succeed Tricia Bellia as Chair of Faculty Board on Athletics and NCAA Faculty Athletics Representative

Faculty Briefs

• Mary Ellen O'Connell
• Lloyd Mayer
• Derek Muller
• Kari Gallagher
• Msgr. John Paul Kimes
• David McIlroy
• Dennis Wieboldt '26 J.D.

Events

• Law & Economics Workshop - Janka Deli, UC Berkeley: Breaking Rules, Building Trade? Rule of Law Decline and Export Resilience in the European Union
• Faculty Colloquium - Clara Martins Pereira, ND London Law
• IGP: Lunch & Learn: Frederick Mostert 12:30 p.m., 1310 Biolchini Hall

Looking Ahead …

Brief Of Amici Curiae Criminal Law Scholars And Legal Organizations In Support Of Petitioner, Alabama Criminal Defense Lawyers Association, Florida Association Of Criminal Defense Lawyers, Kentucky Association Of Criminal Defense Lawyers, Criminal Defense Attorneys Of Michigan, North Carolina Advocates For Justice, Virginia Association Of Criminal Defense Lawyers, Due Process Institute, Ira P. Robbins, Kyle Singhal

Amicus Briefs & Court Filings

SUMMARY OF THE ARGUMENT: The Sentencing Guidelines are, in practice, the most consequential legal text in federal criminal law. Yet this Court has abstained from interpreting the Guidelines for decades. That practice is anomalous in the federal judiciary and should end. District courts must correctly calculate every defendant’s guideline range at every sentencing hearing. Courts of Appeals routinely hear appeals asserting guideline mistakes. And differences of appellate opinion over purely legal, highly consequential questions often arise. This Court apparently declines to hear such cases because the Sentencing Commission could resolve those conflicts. See Braxton v. United States,500 U.S. 344, …

Mmu: 09/07/26-09/13/26, Student Bar Association

Monday Morning Update

This Week @ NDLS

Mass Times

Commons Daily Menu

Saint of the Week

General Announcements

Ai-Supported Analysis Of Jury Deliberation Impact Factors, Jennifer Siciliani Phd

Generative AI Teaching Activities

Students conduct a controlled, two-run generative AI jury simulation to examine how a single socio-legal variable affects simulated jury deliberation. They compare and manually code the AI-generated outcomes against peer-reviewed human jury research to evaluate the model’s accuracy, limitations, and potential biases.

Appeal No.1067: Arrowhead Road Services, Llc V. Division Of Oil & Gas Resources Management, Ohio Oil & Gas Commission

Ohio Oil & Gas Commission Decisions

Review of Chief's Orders 2025-512

The Colorado River Water Supply Crisis In A Few Graphs: Part 2 Agricultural Water Use In The Lower Basin, Jack Schmidt, Anne Castle, Eric Kuhn, Kathryn Sorensen, Katherine Tara

The Traveling Wilburys of the Colorado River

Reductions in Lower Basin water use during the last four years, including

forecast use in 2026, are similar to the initial targets for Lower Basin shortages

described in the Final Environmental Impact Statement for Post-2026

Operational Guidelines and Strategies for Lake Powell and Lake Mead (FEIS)

and the accompanying Record of Decision (ROD).

6 Lower Basin consumptive

use in 2023, 2024, and 2025, and forecast for 2026 has been the smallest for

the entire 2010-2026 period. These four years of smallest use are between 1.4

and 1.7 million acre feet/year (maf/yr) less than the 7.50 maf/yr amount

generally recognized as …

Opposition To Renewable Energy Facilities In The United States: September 2026 Edition, Romany M. Webb, Ivonne Norman

Sabin Center for Climate Change Law

For the first time in nearly 2 decades, the United States is seeing rapid growth in electricity demand, driven by the data center boom as well as expanding electrification. Total electricity use in the United States reached a record high of 4,430 terawatt hours (TWh) in 2025 — almost 3 percent above 2024 levels — and is expected to continue growing at a similar rate through 2050. Meeting this increased demand, while continuing to advance action on climate change, will require a massive ramp up in renewable energy development. Notable progress was made in 2025, with utility-scale solar generation in …

The Coming Health Insurance Transition, Brendan S. Maher

Faculty Scholarship

For decades, the dominant form of private health insurance in the United States—by far—has been employment-based group health insurance. Somewhere in the range of 175 million employees and their families receive health care coverage through a system in which employers serve as financiers, procurers, administrators, and fiduciaries of the health insurance promise. An overwhelming percentage of those health insurance arrangements are governed by ERISA, with little room for state law.

That is going to change.

This Article explains—for the first time anywhere—why and how. Because of the tremendous and as-yet unrecognized power of an obscure-sounding funding arrangement called the Individual …

¿Digno Retorno? De La Ciudadanía Cultural A La Ciudadanía Truncada En El Retorno A México, Nancy Plankey-Videla, Luz E. Herrera

Faculty Scholarship

The chapter revisits citizenship by drawing on the findings of the Mexican Reintegration Project that interviewed 333 Mexicans that the U.S. deported or who returned to Mexico, and 18 civil society organizations that were part of the study. Many Mexicans in the United States experience a form of belonging, or cultural citizenship, even while being monitored by immigration and law enforcement. Upon returning to Mexico —whether forcibly or “voluntarily” - they experience a truncated citizenship that also complicates their sense of belonging to their own country of origin. They often do not have all the documentation needed to prove their …

The Health Status Of U.S. Democracy, Philip C. Bobbitt

Faculty Scholarship

In 1776, Thomas Paine wrote Common Sense, a pamphlet that galvanized American public opinion in the aftermath of the colonial confrontations at Lexington and Concord. The disorganized revolt against British authority was largely undecided on next steps, public opinion having failed to coalesce around capitulation to London or revolution against the British government. Paine’s argument for American independence was uncompromising. Prefiguring the Declaration of Independence that put King George III front and center in the emerging conflict, Paine wrote: “In the monarchies, the King is the Law but in America, Law is King.”

Democracy Needs The Administrative State, Gillian E. Metzger

Faculty Scholarship

In public debate, the federal bureaucracy is not typically praised for its democratic credentials. Consisting of a wide array of agencies staffed by a permanent civil service and governed by detailed regulations, the administrative state is more likely to be portrayed as a bastion of red tape and unelected power. To hear members of the Supreme Court tell it, for example, the administrative state’s “unaccountable bureaucrats” and “vast power[s]” pose a dire threat to constitutional democracy that only expanded presidential control can solve. President Trump has offered an even darker view, attacking a “deep state” of entrenched government officials as …

A Conventional Solution To Constitutional Stagnation?, David E. Pozen

Faculty Scholarship

Our charter of government is stuck. The last time the U.S. Constitution was revised was over 30 years ago, when the “fluky” and largely inconsequential Twenty-Seventh Amendment stole into the text two centuries after it was written. The last time Congress proposed an amendment was almost 50 years ago, when the District of Columbia Voting Rights Amendment was sent to its demise at the ratification stage. Although state constitutions remain far more dynamic, they too have experienced a declining rate of amendment in recent years.

International Law And Power Politics: On Koskenniemi's Perceptions Of Justice, Monica Hakimi

Faculty Scholarship

Martti Koskenniemi wrote ‘Perceptions of Justice’ against the backdrop of the 2003 Iraq War. The piece draws a stark distinction between American and European conceptions of justice – and approaches to international law. Over twenty years later, his distinction might still (or again) resonate. This retrospective analyses it in light of his other work and more contemporary events, arguing that it is a mix of misguided and confused. The United States and Europe have for decades, if not centuries, been profoundly entwined; each has significantly shaped and been shaped by its relationship with the other. The urgent question now is …

The Threat To Government Ethics, Richard Briffault

Faculty Scholarship

That was quite a week. Over seven days in mid-October:

• President Trump hosted a White House dinner for three dozen super-wealthy individuals and representatives of major corporations who pledged funds for his $300 million ballroom.
• The president commuted the sentence of former Congressman George Santos, who had served less than three months of an 87-month term for corruption, and canceled Santos’s obligation to pay restitution to his victims.
• The president fired, without providing a reason or giving the 30 days’ notice required by law, the Inspector General for the Export-Import Bank.
• We learned the president is demanding the Department of …

What Matters For Bar Success: Doctrinal Performance, Coursework Exposure, And First-Time Bar Passage, Jason Scott, Rob Hunter, Andrea Pals

AccessLex Institute Research

This study examines how enrollment and academic performance in doctrinal law courses relate to first-time bar passage. Drawing on a large, multi-institutional data set, we estimate the associations between doctrinal GPA, course completion, credit accumulation, and first-time bar passage using regression adjustment and doubly robust methods designed to reduce selection bias. Across all models, performance in doctrinal coursework emerges as the strongest and most consistent predictor of first-time bar passage, far outweighing the influence of credit accumulation or course completion. Although greater exposure to doctrinal and skills-based coursework is positively associated with bar passage, these effects are comparatively modest, reinforcing …

Prosecutorial Guidance And Non-Prosecution Policies: A Pragmatic Path Forward For Ai In Legal Services, Jessica Bednarz, Ericka Byram, Kelli M. Raker, Jeff Ward

Duke Center on Law & Technology

No abstract provided.

Analysis Of The Impacts Of Propositions 41 And 42 On California Public Finance, David Gamage, Brian D. Galle, Darien Shanske

Faculty Publications

This memorandum discusses the possible collateral damage that Propositions 41 and 42 (on the ballot in California on November 3, 2026) might cause.  The two propositions were concocted very quickly by billionaires in order to trick voters that will vote for Proposition 40 (the billionaire tax) also to vote for these propositions that are designed to undermine the billionaire tax.

The basic trick is that these propositions have plausible seeming veneers but hide a poison pill that aims to frustrate the functioning of the billionaire tax.  The veneers are “plausible seeming” because they address problems that are not problems.  For …

Predicting Less, Understanding More: Shifting The Use Of Machine Learning From Individual Prediction To Structural Insights In Systems That Affect Children And Families, Amanda J. Fairchild, Joshua Gupta-Kagan, Andrew Barclay

Faculty Scholarship

Machine learning algorithms have been deeply embedded across domains, valued for their capacity to analyze large-scale data and to support a range of descriptive and predictive tasks. Despite their versatility, most applications to date have focused on individual-level prediction at the expense of broader structural insights. This paper shifts that focus by using comprehensive demographic, juvenile justice, and other key data from child-serving agencies in one southern state to examine how juvenile and family court intake structures shape case outcomes in delinquency referrals. Specifically, we combine machine learning algorithms with a doubly robust, potential outcomes-based modeling procedure to estimate the …

Inequality, Collective Power, And Democratic Renewal, Kate Andrias

Faculty Scholarship

With each passing week since this essay series commenced, American democracy has come under greater threat. Leading political scientists have concluded that the U.S. is now better described as a competitive autocracy rather than a democracy. President Trump’s recent attacks on core institutions and violations of the rule of law — from the use of violent force by ICE to the investigation of the Federal Reserve Chair and the threats involving Greenland — were unimaginable even a few months ago.

Judging Fast And Slow, Bert I. Huang

Faculty Scholarship

The federal courts serve as our first responders in conflicts over constitutional rights and the separation of powers. They are called upon to react — fast — to legal challenges to governmental actions. To avert harm before it’s too late, they may rule within weeks, days, or even hours. They have done so in recent cases about free speech, freedom of the press, election law, independent agencies, federal workers, domestic troop deployments, spending and taxation, due process, search and seizure, and more.

The trial judges and appeals courts of the federal judiciary have long been tasked with this kind of …

A Bibliography Of Faculty Scholarship, Kathryn J. Dufour Law Library

Scholarly Articles

The purpose of this bibliography is to record in one place the substantial body of scholarship produced by the current faculty at the Catholic University, Columbus School of Law. From its humble beginnings under the tutelage of founding Dean William Callyhan Robinson, through its adolescent period when, like so many other American law schools, it was trying to define its pedagogical niche, to its eventual merger with the Columbus University Law School in 1954, the law school at Catholic University has always retained a scholarly and remarkably productive faculty. The sheer quantity of writing, the breadth of research and the …

Rebutting 38 False Claims About Solar, Wind, Electric Vehicles, And Battery Storage, Andrew Kieffer

Sabin Center for Climate Change Law

Achieving the United States’ ambitious emissions reduction goals depends in large part on the rapid adoption of wind and solar energy and the electrification of consumer vehicles. However, misinformation and coordinated disinformation about renewable energy is widespread and threatens to undermine the transition. In this report, the Sabin Center identifies and examines 38 of the most pervasive false claims about solar energy, wind energy, and electric vehicles, with the aim of promoting a more informed discussion.

W&L Law Library Annual Report 2025-2026, The Law Library At Washington And Lee University School Of Law

Law Library Annual Reports

No abstract provided.

Scientific Uncertainty As Political Aggression: A Manifesto For Those Who Value Science And Want To Save It From State And Corporate Control, Stephen Demeo

Publications and Research

A manifesto is an opportunity to publicly express strongly held beliefs about a topic that is personally important to an author. It is analytical as it is creative. “Scientific Uncertainty as Political Aggression” is a manifesto that intersects science and politics. It urges those interested in science to examine two different but related topics: scientific uncertainty in measurement—what it is, how it is determined, why it’s important— and the magnification of uncertainty through legal and linguistic tactics used by right-wing politicians and politically supported corporations.

For some time now, the Republican Establishment has cast excessive doubt on scientific findings through …

Ai Slop, Jessica Silbey, Woodrow Hartzog

Faculty Scholarship

The term “AI slop” has become popular to describe the output of generative AI systems seen as voluminous, low quality, or the result of little effort. When AI-generated music and videos flood platforms, they are called slop. Peer-reviewed journals and legal tribunals are drowning in low-quality and low-reliability AI slop submissions.  Employees are seen to be producing mountains of slop in their reports and communications with each other. The term has inertia and heft, and the phenomenon has significant consequences. Most of them are not good.

But the boundaries of “AI slop” and its usefulness in policy discussions are not …

Patents And Incentives To Assign, License, Or Litigate, Keith N. Hylton

Faculty Scholarship

This paper presents a model of the activity of patent intermediaries and potential infringers in a system of costly patent litigation.  Because the intermediary, in comparison to the inventor, has a more credible threat to sue, both the revenue from infringement litigation and the intrinsic value of the patent are greater in the intermediary’s hands.  The central finding is that intermediaries license patents to potential infringers when infringement litigation is inefficient. Intermediaries tend to acquire high-quality patents from inventors and assign low-quality patents to potential infringers. Another issue this model addresses is the differential between the private and the social …

Ndls Communicator: Week Of 08.31.26, Notre Dame Law School

NDLS Communicator

The Latest News

• Notre Dame Law School Welcomes Visiting Faculty for the 2026–27 Academic Year
• ND Law Professor Nicole Garnett Participates in United Nations Consultation on Educational Pluralism
• Notre Dame J.S.D. Candidates Present at the World Congress of Constitutional Law and ICONS

Faculty Briefs

• Sadie Blanchard
• Randy Kozel & Tricia Bellia
• Derek Muller
• Jennifer Mason McAward
• Rick Garnett
• Dennis Wieboldt '26 J.D.
• Announcing Global Visitors
• Dr. Clara Martins-Pereira
• Prof. Paul Yowell
• Prof. Dr. Stephan Wernicke
• Dr. Róisín Costello

Events

• Faculty Colloquium: Mary Ellen O'Connell, Enduring Law for a New Era: Overcoming Political Realism and the Pursuit of Wealth
• Supreme Court …