Stopped in time and sealed in place. Hundreds of high-poverty neighborhoods of color are trapped in the vestiges of rural poverty, though they sit adjacent to incorporated cities and suburbs across the country. City growth through annexation has passed them by (though city crime may not have). Homes lack rudimentary… 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 »
Unlike political scientists and law professors who link Supreme Court decision making to public opinion, we argue that Supreme Court Justices care more about the views of academics, journalists, and other elites than they do about public opinion. This is true of nearly all Justices and is especially true… Read More »
Mariano-Florentino Cuéllar’s “Securing” the Nation: Law, Politics, and Organization at the Federal Security Agency is both a work of history and a reminder of echoes of the past in contemporary policymaking. It compares the great post-9/11 bureaucratic reorganization, which created the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), with one great… 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 »
Professor Rick Hasen’s important new article, The Democracy Canon, identifies an intriguing and, until now, largely unnoticed practice in many state courts: the construing of election statutes with a strong thumb-on-the-scales in favor of easing voters’ access to the polls, candidates’ access to the ballot, and ballots’ eligibility to be counted. … Read More »
Party control over case presentation is regularly cited as a defining characteristic of the American adversarial system. Accordingly, American judges are strongly discouraged from engaging in so-called “issue creation”—that is, raising legal claims and arguments that have been overlooked or ignored by the parties—on the ground that doing so is… Read More »
Americans listening to one of President Franklin Roosevelt’s fireside chats on a cabinet-sized radio in the late 1930s could not have imagined the eventual birth of the Internet technology used to disseminate this Article. They would have been hard pressed to imagine the spectacular growth of East Asian economies, or… 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 »
Political scientists and law professors have lately taken to asserting that quantitative studies of judging reveal worrisome findings about the rule of law in the U.S. judicial system. The authors of Are Judges Political? declare: “variations in panel composition lead to dramatically different outcomes, in a way that creates serious… Read More »