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Over the past thirty years, the U.S. Supreme Court and the Judicial Conference have modified the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure to address concerns that litigation costs too much, takes too long, and leads to unjust results. The Supreme Court’s opinions have focused primarily on fortifying what I refer to as the gateways of civil procedure— including motions to dismiss, motions for class...

Professor Stephen Yeazell once wrote, “A society based on the rule of law fails in one of its central premises if substantial parts of the population lack access to law enforcement institutions.”* One apparent threat to access to justice in recent years has been the erosion of notice pleading in the federal courts in favor of a plausibility-pleading system that screens out potentially meritorious...

This is an edited version of remarks I gave January 24, 2013, at the UCLA Law Review Symposium honoring the contributions of Professor Steve Yeazell to the field of Civil Procedure.

During the last four decades the United States has witnessed first the emergence and then the disappearance of civil litigation as a topic of partisan debate in national politics. Following two centuries in which neither party thought the topic worth mentioning, in the last decades of the twentieth and the first decade of the twenty-first century, both parties made it part of their agendas...

The central problem of rationality is to tame and domesticate the overwhelming complexity the human mind faces in its efforts to survive and thrive in a complex, unpredictable, and hostile universe. Much of the history of the human race is essentially the story of its expanding capacity to do just that, and the survival benefits that this process has bestowed on the species. Legal systems in...

Each year, the UCLA School of Law hosts the Melville B. Nimmer Memorial Lecture.  Since 1986, the lecture series has served as a forum for leading scholars in the fields of copyright and First Amendment law.  In recent years, the lecture has been presented by many distinguished scholars.  The UCLA Law Review has published these lectures and proudly continues that tradition by publishing an...

Once again, the U.S. Supreme Court will determine the constitutionality of affirmative action.  Once again, the focus will be on the diversity rationale for the policy.  And, once again, the discussion will likely center on whether the admissions regime of a particular school (this time, the University of Texas) can take steps to ensure that it admits a certain number—or to put the point more...

On December 17, 2010, a young Tunisian street vendor protesting an abusive police official set off a wave of democratic uprisings throughout the Arab world.  In rising up against their governments, the peoples of the Arab countries were confronting an age-old problem in political theory: When is it acceptable to rise up against an unjust authority?  This question is not only of great importance...

As banking has evolved over the last three decades, banks have become increasingly interconnected.  This Article draws attention to an effect of this development that has important policy ramifications yet remains largely unexamined—a dramatic rise in interbank discipline.  The Article demonstrates that today’s large, complex banks have financial incentives to monitor risk taking at other banks. ...

The Vienna Convention on Consular Relations (Vienna Convention), to which the United States is a party, requires signatories to notify the consulates of and to grant consular officers physical access to foreign criminal defendants.  While the treaty has mostly functioned well for its states parties, the United States has recently encountered substantial problems—and international ill will—for its...

Urban bias shapes social perceptions about sexual minorities. Predominant cultural narratives geographically situate sexual minorities in urban gay communities, dictate the contours of how to be a modern gay person, and urge sexual minorities to come out and assimilate into gay communities and culture. This Article contests the urban presumption commonly applied to all sexual minorities and...

After the financial crisis, Congress directed regulators to enact new rules on CEO pay at public companies. The rules would address the possibility that directors of public companies put managers’ interests ahead of shareholders’ when setting executive pay. Yet little is known about how CEOs are paid in companies whose directors have undivided loyalty to shareholders. These directors can be found...

A sea change is happening in finance. Machines appear to be on the rise and humans on the decline. Human endeavors have become unmanned endeavors. Human thought and human deliberation have been replaced by computerized analysis and mathematical models. Technological advances have made finance faster, larger, more global, more interconnected, and less human. Modern finance is becoming an industry...

The passage of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (PPACA) brought vast changes to the world of health insurance. Although much of the focus has been on the individual mandate provision’s constitutionality, this Comment explores a less- mentioned but equally important implication of PPACA: a change to the rationales behind the common law collateral source rule. The collateral source...