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 »
My article Funding Irrationality addresses a relatively unexamined issue in the literature of class action settlements and public settlement funds: should the people who oversee a large settlement fund account for claimants’ irrational settlement decisions?
Much of the literature related to large settlements seeks to improve how judges and private… Read More »
Over the last two decades, the Restatement (Third) of Trusts—all influenced by modern portfolio theory—have reformulated the traditional approach to trust investing, jettisoning its ban on speculative investing. Modern portfolio theory’s central tenet is that the prudent investor should seek… Read More »
The Maine lobster fishery is a successful example of a managed natural resource commons. To ensure an ongoing supply of lobsters in the face of threats to the fishery from unregulated over-fishing, over a period of years Maine lobster fishermen crafted a set of formal and informal rules to determine… Read More »
This Editorial summarizes my forthcoming Note, 85 N.Y.U. L. REV. (forthcoming June 2010), in which I assert that our current regulatory structure is suboptimal in its regulation of the systemic risk created by the failure of large, interconnected “nonbank” financial institutions (in general, a nonbank financial institution is any institution that… Read More »
Congress enacted the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995 (PSLRA) to reduce plaintiffs’ lawyers’ influence in securities class actions. The PSLRA’s presumption that the class member with the largest financial interest would be named lead plaintiff was meant to ensure that the class, not a law firm, would be… Read More »
Whether patients should be able to contract out of the malpractice system has been a hotly debated subject in law and economics and health law literature. Advocates of patient choice argue that if the cost of having the option to bring a malpractice suit truly outweighs the benefit to a… Read More »
Corporate law academics have long sought to fully understand the process of state corporate lawmaking. For decades the debate was premised upon strong, ongoing state-to-state competition, with sharp disagreement on the directionality of that competition. In this decade, however, a powerful revisionist perspective has emerged that states do not compete,… Read More »
In 1930, during the Great Depression, Professor Karl Llewellyn declared in the Harvard Law Review that “ferment” was abroad in the law, proclaiming “realism” a powerful new scholarly force. In the past year, we have seen our own ferment: the world has shown us the folly of law’s most powerful… Read More »
By allowing the condemnation of private homes to make way for a “more attractive” private development, the U.S. Supreme Court in Kelo v. City of New London roused the fury of the libertarian legal academy and much of the public. In Kelo, the Court held that a plan for private economic… Read More »