I. Introduction
President Clinton enacted “welfare reform” when he signed the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act of 1996 (PRWORA), which abolished Aid to Families with Dependent Children (AFDC) and created Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF). PRWORA greatly scaled back the extent of federal welfare assistance and passed… Read More »
Introduction
Few scholars would dispute that the way in which political institutions are designed affects the way that policymakers behave or the kinds of policies that are produced. Nor can it seriously be argued that courts are somehow an exception to the basic rule that institutional design matters. It is… Read More »
Is legal theory worth talking about? Worth studying? Does it make sense to imagine legal theory as a distinctive academic endeavor? Or does legal theory always collapse, either into a different academic discipline on the one hand, or into a variety of professional discourse on the other? We believe that… Read More »
In recent decades, research in behavioral psychology and experimental economics has undermined some of the fundamental principles of the “rational choice” model of neoclassical economics—in particular, the assumption that decision-makers have stable preferences. A large volume of data shows that people’s preferences are subject to a variety of cognitive biases… Read More »
Sarah, an eight-year-old girl, could not wait for her third-grade field trip to the Museum of Natural History. Best of all, her mother, Jill, who normally worked both a full-time job during the week and a part-time job on the weekend, took the day off to chaperone the trip. Just… Read More »
Collateral consequences are the additional legal penalties that attach to criminal convictions. These consequences are often hidden during the criminal process because they are considered to be civil, rather than criminal penalties. In the United States, these penalties include ineligibilty for public benefits, public housing, student loans, and various forms… Read More »
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 »