Three years ago, the U.S. Congress passed the Credit CARD Act of 2009. This ambitious piece of consumer protection legislation sought to relieve consumer debt burdens by targeting credit card industry abuses and providing new disclosures. Congress acknowledged that the legislation would not help individuals who borrow irresponsibly on their credit cards, implicitly assuming that it could not...
Techniques for Mitigating Cognitive Biases in
Fingerprint Identification
Since the U.S. Supreme Court’s holdings in Daubert v. Merrell Dow Pharmaceuticals, Inc. and Kumho Tire Co. v. Carmichael, which articulated that judges have a gatekeeping responsibility to ensure that all expert testimony is sufficiently reliable, academic critics have reviewed forensic science evidence with greater scrutiny. While fingerprint identification has historically been touted as...
Implicit Bias in the Courtroom
Given the substantial and growing scientific literature on implicit bias, the time has now come to confront a critical question: What, if anything, should we do about implicit bias in the courtroom? The author team comprises legal academics, scientists, researchers, and even a sitting federal judge who seek to answer this question in accordance with behavioral realism. The Article first provides...
The Supreme Court’s Regulation of Civil Procedure: Lessons From Administrative Law
In this Article, we argue that the U.S. Supreme Court should route most Federal Rules of Civil Procedure issues through the notice-and-comment rulemaking process of the Civil Rules Advisory Committee instead of issuing judgments in adjudications, unless the Court can resolve the case solely through the deployment of traditional tools of statutory interpretation. While we are not the first to...
To Show Virtue Her Own Feature
Each year, the UCLA School of Law presents the Rutter Award for Excellence in Teaching to an outstanding law professor. On April 3, 2012, this honor was given to Professor Pavel Wonsowicz. UCLA Law Review Discourse is proud to continue its tradition of publishing a modified version of the ceremony speech delivered by the award recipient.
Forthcoming Symposium: Twenty-First Century Litigation: Pathologies and Possibilities A Symposium in Honor of Stephen Yeazell
It is with great pleasure that we announce the 2012-2013 Symposium topic: Twenty-First Century Litigation: Pathologies and Possibilities A Symposium in Honor of Stephen Yeazell We thank Professors Joanna Schwartz and Jennifer Mnookin for submitting the selected proposal that examines the state of modern civil litigation and, in so doing, celebrates the work of Professor Yeazell. He is the leading...
Liability Holding Companies
An international debate continues to unfold in banking, corporate governance, and finance on whether the capital structure of the world’s largest financial institutions is too heavily dependent on debt, too little on equity. Two of us, with coauthors, have argued elsewhere that there is no socially beneficial purpose for this overreliance on debt, and that such reliance increases the likelihood...
Congress in Court
Congress rarely participates in litigation about the meaning of federal law. By contrast, the executive branch joins in federal litigation on a regular basis as either a party or amicus curiae. Congress simply assumes that the president’s lawyers adequately represent its interests save in those rare instances when the two branches have a direct conflict. This Article questions that assumption...