In this Article, we consider what type of institution should provide legal transition relief and analyze the form that it should take. These questions are of great importance because the issue of legal transition relief—whether and how an institution should compensate parties because a change in the law adversely affects… Read More »
What do some Reconstruction-Era civil rights laws, the first federal income tax, and various pieces of New Deal economic legislation have in common? These are all laws that the Supreme Court has held totally invalid after concluding that they were partially unconstitutional.
The doctrine through which the Supreme Court accomplished… Read More »
Litigants, attorneys, judges, and jurors are thought to be the main players in the civil litigation system. However, expert witnesses are also required in the vast majority of civil trials. The expert witnesses are the ones who, for instance, tell the factfinder whether a mistake has been made in medical… Read More »
Many of today’s problems are global in nature and scope. Collective action problems such as global climate change and systemic risk in capital markets threaten to affect every person on the planet. Yet because these problems transcend national boundaries, a single nation cannot solve them alone. So what do we… Read More »
In Ledbetter v. Goodyear Tire & Rubber Co. a new act of discrimination occurred and a new limitations period arose each time an employer issued a paycheck to an employee that reflected… Read More »
In 1970, Ruth Bader Ginsburg, soon-to-be head of the ACLU’s Women’s Rights Project (WRP), had a novel idea: She decided to challenge the constitutionality of sex-based state action by bringing cases featuring male plaintiffs. Up to that point, only women had brought sex discrimination claims under the Fourteenth Amendment. By… Read More »
Legal payments are in many cases probabilistic. For example, in the criminal context, a fine is levied against a criminal only after a series of sequential probabilistic events occur: He must be caught by the police, charged by the prosecution, and convicted by a court in accordance with the procedural… Read More »
Suppose a Belgian resident earns all of his income in Germany. Under the Belgian-German tax treaty and Belgian law, only Germany would tax his income. But which country should grant him personal tax benefits—things like mortgage interest deductions and charitable deductions? Where a worker lives in one country but works… Read More »
Over the past forty years, damage class actions have come to play an increasingly significant regulatory role in the consumer context. Recent legal developments, however, have greatly diminished the damage class’s practical utility: While damage class actions remain viable on the books, in practice unfavorable federal precedent and nearly exclusive… Read More »
In 2007, the International Court of Justice (ICJ) defined the scope of state responsibility under the Genocide Convention for the first time when it reached the merits in the Genocide Case, a case arising from the violent breakup of the former Yugoslavia. The opinion immediately spurred extensive academic commentary, much of… Read More »