Abstract Federal law has long prohibited insider trading in securities such as stocks and bonds. Yet many other financial assets—particularly derivatives and commodities—have historically fallen outside those rules. This Article asks why insider trading is penalized for some assets but not others. It argues that the goals of insider trading law are often pursued through alternative mechanisms...
Digital Evidence in U.S. Criminal Litigation: Risks to Racial Justice
Abstract Criminal defendants increasingly face the risks of digital evidence. These risks include intentional manipulation, accidental alteration, and even the threat that visual displays like footage or data visualizations lure viewers into an unquestioning acceptance of events as they seem to have unfolded. Some scholars have deemed the U.S. evidence system responsive to issues like intentional...
The Right to Truth
Abstract This Article argues that today’s anti-CRT statutes, book bans, and “divisive concepts” laws are not isolated culture-war skirmishes but the latest chapter in a long campaign—dating back to the Lost Cause and the United Daughters of the Confederacy—to legislate white innocence as national identity. By sanitizing slavery, suppressing discussions of systemic racism, and threatening...
The Public Harms of Private Surveillance
Abstract Private surveillance is rapidly reshaping public space. With inexpensive storage, widespread amplification, and integrated data sharing, modern surveillance networks operate with unprecedented scale, prevalence, and influence. Unlike the neighborhood watches of the past, these networks are always on, subjecting public movements to facial recognition from doorbell cameras, license plate...
Police Power Abolition
Abstract This Article employs the Law Review’s Discourse symposium on my book, Unreasonable: Black Lives, Police Power, and the Fourth Amendment, as a starting point to foreground and elaborate on an idea that I reference in that text: police power abolition. The Article begins by describing the central insight that motivates Unreasonable—namely, that simply limiting the frequency with which the...
Easy Cases and Hard Cases: Reflections on Law School Pedagogy
Abstract
Each year, the UCLA School of Law presents the Rutter Award for Excellence in Teaching to an outstanding law professor. On Thursday, April 14, 2024, this honor was given to Dean Russell Korobkin. UCLA Law Review Discourse is proud to continue its tradition of publishing a modified version of the ceremony speech delivered by the award recipient.
A Corporate Governance Proposal for Reforming Regulation D
Abstract This Comment argues that the explosive growth of Regulation D private offerings has outpaced the investor-protection foundations of federal securities laws. With minimal required disclosure and a lack of regulatory oversight, the Regulation D framework creates material information asymmetries for and collective action problems among investors. Previous reform proposals—expanding Form D...
Zoning the Subsurface
Abstract The vast rock formations underlying the United States stand at an important Demsetzian turning point, at which the externalities of inadequately defined property rights justify the costs of solidifying formal property rights for this resource. This need arises from the growing scarcity of pore space (tiny openings) in subsurface rocks—property that is critical to address climate change...