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Transparently Opaque: Understanding the Lack of Transparency in Insurance Consumer Protection

Consumer protection in most domains of financial regulation centers on transparency. Broadly construed, transparency involves making relevant information available to consumers as well as others who might act on their behalf, such as academics, journalists, newspapers, consumer organizations, or other market watchdogs. By contrast, command-and-control regulation that affirmatively limits...

Exclusion, Punishment, Racism and Our Schools: A Critical Race Theory Perspective on School Discipline

Punitive school discipline procedures have increasingly taken hold in America’s schools. While they are detrimental to the wellbeing and to the academic success of all students, they have proven to disproportionately punish minority students, especially African American youth. Such policies feed into wider social issues that, once more, disproportionately affect minority communities: the school...

Negotiating Nonproliferation: International Law and Delegation in the Iranian Nuclear Crisis

The Iranian nuclear crisis reflects international worries about Iran’s intentions in developing a nuclear energy program with potential military applications. This Article suggests that strengthening existing international institutions to more effectively provide ongoing verification of the civilian character of the Iranian program offers a diplomatic avenue of resolving this crisis. The...

Detention Without End?: Reexamining the Indefinite Confinement of Terrorism Suspects Through the Lens of Criminal Sentencing

While there has been a great deal of focus on who may be detained in the armed conflict with al-Qaeda and associated forces (the so-called war on terror), there has been relatively little consideration of how long the government may hold individuals. The Article provides a new approach to this issue. It argues that review of long-term terrorism detentions should be addressed not merely through...

Against Endowment Theory: Experimental Economics and Legal Scholarship

Endowment theory holds the mere ownership of a thing causes people to assign greater value to it than they otherwise would. The theory entered legal scholarship in the early 1990s and quickly eclipsed other accounts of how ownership affects valuation. Today, one finds appeals to a generic “endowment effect” throughout the legal literature. Recent experimental results, however, suggest that the...

Why Broccoli? Limiting Principles and Popular Constitutionalism in the Health Care Case

Crucial to the U.S. Supreme Court’s disposition of the constitutional challenge to the Affordable Care Act (ACA) was a hypothetical mandate to purchase broccoli, which the U.S. Congress never had considered and nobody thought would ever be enacted. For the five justices who concluded that the ACA exceeded Congress’s commerce power, a fatal flaw in the government’s case was its inability to...

“Let’s Have a Look, Shall We?” A Model for Evaluating Suspicionless Border Searches of Portable Electronic Devices

The Fourth Amendment’s border search doctrine has historically given the U.S. government the right to search, without individualized suspicion, the belongings of any individual crossing the U.S.border. Courts have traditionally justified this power by citing the government’s paramount interest in preventing the smuggling of dutiable goods and contraband such as illegal drugs. In the twenty-first...

An Article III Divided Against Itself Cannot Stand: A Critical Race Perspective on the U.S. Supreme Court’s Standing Jurisprudence

Article III of the U.S. Constitution requires standing to sue for federal subject matter jurisdiction over a case. Under the modern test for standing, plaintiffs must show that they suffered some concrete and imminent injury-in-fact as a result of the illegal conduct of the defendant. While many scholars and judges have critiqued the U.S. Supreme Court’s development and application of the injury...

Regulation by Liability Insurance: From Auto to Lawyers Professional Liability

Liability insurers use a variety of tools to address adverse selection and moral hazard in insurance relationships. These tools can act on insureds in a manner that can be understood as regulation. We identify seven categories of such regulatory activities: risk-based pricing, underwriting, contract design, claims management, loss prevention services, research and education, and engagement with...

When Courts Determine Fees in a System With a Loser Pays Norm: Fee Award Denials to Winning Plaintiffs and Defendants

Under the English rule, the loser pays litigation costs whereas under the American rule, each party pays its own costs. Israel instead vests in its judges full discretion to assess fees and costs as the circumstances may require. Both the English and the American rules have been the subjects of scholarly criticism. Because little empirical information exists about how either rule functions in...

Symmetry and Class Action Litigation

In ordinary litigation, parties often have different resources to devote to their lawsuit. This is a problem because the adversarial system is predicated on two (or more) parties, equal and opposite one another, making their best arguments to a neutral judge. The class action is a procedural device that aims to solve this problem by equalizing resources between individual plaintiffs and...

Atomism, Holism, and the Judicial Assessment of Evidence

How should judges go about assessing the admissibility of evidence? In this Article, I explore a key and underexamined issue within evidence law: the interpretive tension between atomism and holism. Should judges assess the admissibility of an item of evidence atomistically—piece by piece, and by itself? Or should they engage in a more holistic, synthetic, and relational inquiry? I argue that...

Altering Attention in Adjudication

Judges decide complex cases in rapid succession but are limited by cognitive constraints. Consequently judges cannot allocate equal attention to every aspect of a case. Case outcomes might thus depend on which aspects of a case are particularly salient to the judge. Put simply, a judge focusing on one aspect of a case might reach a different outcome than a judge focusing on another. In this...

Wolves and Sheep, Predators and Scavengers, or Why I Left Civil Procedure (Not With a Bang, but a Whimper)

This is a piece written on the retirement of Professor Stephen Yeazell, whose distinguished career is almost contemporaneous with my own time in law teaching. I started teaching Civil Procedure in the fall of 1973 fresh from a federal district court clerkship. I was attracted to the possibilities of using the civil litigation system to provide justice to those who were otherwise without much...