International privacy and trade law developed together but are now engaged in significant conflict. Current efforts to reconcile the two are likely to fail, and the result for globalization favors the largest international companies able to navigate the regulatory thicket. In a landmark finding, this Article shows that more than sixty countries outside the European Union are now evaluating whether

Bankruptcy scholars have long organized their field around a stylized story, a paradigm, of lender control. When lenders extend credit, the story goes, they insist on the borrower agreeing to strict covenants and granting blanket liens on its assets; then, if the borrower later encounters financial distress, they use their bargained-for rights as prods to steer the company toward a resolution favorable

During the litigation surrounding the 2020 election, the independent state legislature theory (ISLT) emerged as a potentially crucial factor in the presidential election. The ISLT rests on the Electors and Elections Clauses of the Constitution, which assign decisions about federal elections to state legislatures. Proponents of the ISLT, including Supreme Court Justices, assert that state constitutions’

The fields of antitrust, bankruptcy, corporate, and securities law are undergoing tumultuous debates. On one side in each field is the dominant view that each field should focus exclusively on a specific constituency—antitrust on consumers, bankruptcy on creditors, corporate law on shareholders, and securities regulation on financial investors. On the other side is a growing insurgency that seeks to

The Supreme Court has deemed the right to exclude one of the most fundamental property rights. Accordingly, the Court has offered the right to exclude heightened protection under the Takings Clause. However, the Court has left significant uncertainty about the scope of the right to exclude that is protected under takings doctrine. For instance, does the Takings Clause require compensation if the government

Bankruptcy courts conceive of their mission differently than other courts do. For the Supreme Court, bankruptcy cases are ordinary statutory cases to be resolved “clearly and predictably using well established principles of statutory interpretation.” Many bankruptcy judges, though, believe that bankruptcy courts serve a distinctive mission for which ordinary adjudicative methods do not suffice. Often

Asylum seekers are individuals who flee to other countries to find sanctuary from the persecution suffered within the borders of their home countries. The U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees estimated that by mid-2021 there were nearly 4.4 million individuals actively seeking asylum worldwide, and the most recent data available surprisingly suggest that the United States granted asylum to only 31,429

This Comment seeks to resolve an ongoing dispute among courts regarding the correct interpretation of “contrary to law” in 18 U.S.C. § 545, a statute that criminalizes the unlawful importation of goods. In particular, courts disagree about whether “contrary to law” includes administrative regulatory violations, which would massively expand the applicability of § 545’s severe criminal penalties.  This

The federal abstention doctrines govern the narrow circumstances under which a district court can decline to hear a case even though it has proper jurisdiction. One of those doctrines—Burford abstention—has generated a morass of confusion over when it applies and what goals it is meant to achieve. To find a way out of the morass, this Comment looks at contemporaneous developments in doctrines of federal

This Comment examines the joint venture exception in the international silver platter doctrine in the context of the use of wiretaps in federal narcotics cases. Under the international silver platter doctrine, evidence obtained through searches (like wiretaps) by foreign law enforcement on foreign soil and under foreign law is admissible in U.S. courts. The joint venture exception qualifies the international

Pharmaceutical litigation often begins when a generic drug company files an application to have its generic drug approved by the FDA. That application is received by the FDA in the District of Maryland. To “submit” it is a statutory act of patent infringement under the Hatch-Waxman Act. Establishing venue in subsequent Hatch-Waxman litigation can be complex because Hatch- Waxman litigation often involves

The Fair Housing Act is a groundbreaking federal law enacted in 1968 during the civil rights movement. Reflecting a policy judgment that the public’s interest in eliminating housing discrimination outweighs a prejudicial landlord’s property right to exclude, it prohibits landlords from rejecting tenants on a discriminatory basis. However, as the Act’s promises remain in the process of fulfillment,

For centuries, courts and legal commentators defined “jurisdiction” by reference to a court’s “power.” A court that lacked jurisdiction, under this conception, simply lacked the ability to bind the parties, and its resulting rulings could therefore be regarded by both litigants and later courts as void and of no legal effect. But in the middle decades of the twentieth century, the Supreme Court and

Implementation is at the core of lawmaking in our divided government. A rich literature covers the waterfront with respect to agencies’ implementation of legislative mandates, and another equally robust line of scholarship considers Congress’s implementation of treaties. Missing from those discussions, however, is another area of implementation central to U.S. foreign relations: the implementation

Can antidiscrimination law effect changes in public attitudes toward minority groups? Could learning, for instance, that employment discrimination against people with clinical depression is legally prohibited cause members of the public to be more accepting toward people with mental health conditions? In this Article, we report the results of a series of experiments that test the effect of inducing

For a wide variety of claims against the government, the federal courthouse doors are closed to all but those brought by powerful, organized interests. This is because hundreds of laws—colloquially known as “channeling statutes”—require disaffected groups to contest government bodies directly in appellate courts that hear cases individually. In theory, these laws promise quick, consistent, and authoritative legal

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In recent years, public universities have promulgated pronoun policies designed to encourage professors and students to respect the pronouns that others use to identify themselves. A professor who does not follow the pronoun policy and instead misgenders a student—or uses gendered words or pronouns that do not match that student’s gender identity—may be disciplined by their university for violating the

Across the United States, parents are increasingly refusing to vaccinate their children against harmful childhood diseases. Many of these parents utilize expansive exemptions to school-immunization laws to keep their children unvaccinated. Even as their children become teenagers and develop their own informed opinions about vaccines, most state and local laws provide these minors with no avenue to override

The negligence-versus–strict liability debate is over in tort law, and negligence has clearly won. Yet the fact that our accident-compensation system is fault based continues to attract much opposition in popular sentiment and academic circles. Standard economic analysis views strict liability as preferable to negligence because it is easier to administer and leads to better risk reduction: strict

Public education is “the most important function of state and local government” and yet not a “fundamental right or liberty.” This Article engages one of constitutional law’s most intractable problems by introducing “the public right to education” as a doctrinal pathway to a constitutional right to education process in three steps. First, it identifies that the otherwise right-to-education foreclosing

Pretrial detention seriously restricts the physical liberty of presumptively innocent people who have yet to be tried and convicted. The Bail Reform Act (BRA) imposes several procedural requirements that must be satisfied before a judge can order the pretrial detention of a federal defendant. At a detention hearing, the BRA allows a judge to order the pretrial detention of an arrestee who poses either

The Identity Theft Penalty Enhancement Act (ITPEA) increases penalties for crimes that involve the unlawful use of another person’s identifying information. A subsection of the ITPEA—the aggravated identity theft provision—imposes a mandatory two-year sentencing enhancement on a defendant who “uses” a means of identification of another person during and in relation to a predicate felony. Currently

Unlike typical litigants, pro se prisoners are unable to deliver filings to court or to have an attorney do so on their behalf. Such prisoners are forced to rely on their prisons’ mailing systems to file documents, which often results in those documents reaching the court after the applicable deadlines. Accordingly, the Supreme Court created a “prison mailbox rule” in Houston v. Lack, under which some

People sometimes want to harm other people. This truism points to a blind spot in law and economics scholarship, which generally assumes that people are indifferent to the effects of their actions on other people. Diverse areas of the law, such as hate-crime legislation and constitutional equal protection doctrine, reside in this blind spot because they are premised on the existence of animus. I argue

A central question in law and economics is whether nontax legal rules should be designed solely to maximize efficiency or whether they also should account for concerns about the distribution of income. This question takes on particular importance in the context of cost-benefit analysis. Federal agencies apply cost-benefit analysis when writing regulations that generate multibillion-dollar impacts on

“Experimental jurisprudence” draws on empirical methods to inform questions typically associated with jurisprudence and legal theory. Scholars in this flourishing movement conduct empirical studies about a variety of legal language and concepts. Despite the movement’s growth, its justification is still opaque. Jurisprudence is the study of deep and longstanding theoretical questions about law’s nature

Fraudulent schemes increasingly rely on wire transmissions and the internet as the economy and communications digitize. To combat these schemes, prosecutors have applied the wire fraud statute, 18 U.S.C. § 1343, to defendants located domestically and abroad. Applying the current standard for extraterritoriality under Morrison v. National Australia Bank Ltd., circuit courts disagree as to whether the

Inspired by the Supreme Court’s embrace of developmental science in a series of Eighth Amendment cases, “kids are different” has become the rallying cry, leading to dramatic reforms in our response to juvenile crime designed to eliminate the incarceration of children and support their successful transition to adulthood. The success of these reforms represents a promising start, but the “kids are different”

Conventional wisdom portrays contracts as static distillations of parties’ shared intent at some discrete point in time. In reality, however, contract terms evolve in response to their environments, including new laws, legal interpretations, and economic shocks. While several legal scholars have offered stylized accounts of this evolutionary process, we still lack a coherent, general theory that broadly

Defendants frequently attach supporting materials to Rule 12(b)(6) motions to dismiss for failure to state a claim. The plain text of Federal Rule of Civil Procedure 12(d) dictates that judges must either exclude this material or treat the motion as one for summary judgment. However, a substantial exception has emerged that threatens to swallow the rule.  The exception, called incorporation by reference

The Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA) provides a substantive guarantee to a “free appropriate public education” (FAPE) to students with disabilities. The education is to be provided “in conformity with” an “individualized education program” (IEP): an educational plan for the student that is created through a statutorily defined process. Scholars and courts have focused tremendous attention

The past two years have seen a proliferation of state laws that restrict how race may be discussed in public schools. Among other topics, these laws commonly ban presentation of the viewpoint that the U.S. government—or legal system—is racist. But such policies raise important First Amendment questions: while it is well accepted that school boards and state legislatures retain great discretion to promulgate

Writing for the University of Chicago Law Review Symposium 2022 on Law and Labor Market Power, Henry Walter suggests that antitrust reform efforts directed at labor markets should proceed slowly, mindful of reform's fragile political support and the potential for backlash.

Writing for the University of Chicago Law Review Symposium 2022 on Law and Labor Market Power, Marissa Piccolo evaluates when and how criminal antitrust enforcement can address the problem of labor monopsonies.

Writing for the University of Chicago Law Review Symposium 2022 on Law and Labor Market Power, Spencer J. Parts argues that private lawsuits and state enforcement were a suboptimal way of causing many national franchises to abandon the use of no-poach agreements.

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A longstanding tradition of research linking neighborhood disadvantage to higher rates of violence is based on the characteristics of where people reside. This Essay argues that we need to look beyond residential neighborhoods to consider flows of movement throughout the wider metropolis. Our basic premise is that a neighborhood’s well-being depends not only on its own socioeconomic conditions but

This Essay analyzes trends in violence from a spatial perspective, focusing on how changes in the murder rate are experienced by communities and groups of residents within the city of Chicago. The Essay argues that a spatial perspective is essential to understanding the causes and consequences of violence in the United States and begins by describing the social policies and theoretical mechanisms that

In an era of renewed enthusiasm for police reform, it could be instructive to examine how reforms—even successful reforms—fail. In the 1990s and 2000s, Chicago’s community-policing initiative was widely recognized as one of the most impressive in the country. In short order, it then collapsed. Community policing’s accomplishments were numerous, but it fell victim to issues commonly facing reform: money—especially

This Essay investigates Chicago city-government policy responses to the four largest homicide waves in its history: 1920–1925, 1966–1970, 1987–1992, and 2016. Through spatial and historical methods, we discover that Chicago police and the mayor’s office misused data to advance agendas conceived prior to the start of the homicide waves. Specifically, in collaboration with mayors, the Chicago Police

We describe and apply three empirical approaches to identify superfluous police activity, unjustified racially disparate impacts, and limits to regulatory interventions. First, using cost-benefit analysis, we show that traffic and pedestrian stops in Nashville and New York City disproportionately impacted communities of color without achieving their stated public-safety goals. Second, we address a

This Essay explores police practices that marginalize Black people by limiting their freedom of movement across the spaces of Black neighborhoods. In an earlier article, I theorized “racial territoriality” as a form of discrimination that “excludes people of color from—or marginalizes them within—racialized White spaces that have a racially exclusive history, practice, and/or reputation.” In this Essay

In this Essay, I argue that, in urban metros like Chicago, poor Black children are victims of not just gun violence but also the structural violence of systemic educational stratification. Structural violence occurs in the context of domination, where poor Black children are marginalized and isolated, vulnerable to lifelong subordination across many domains. Specifically, I argue that U.S. education

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Although the Second Amendment tends to dominate the discussion about legal limits on gun regulation, nothing has done more to shape the state of urban gun law than state preemption laws, which fully or partially limit cities’ ability to regulate guns at the local level. The goals of this short Essay are to shed light on this “Statutory Second Amendment” and to provide a basic framework for evaluating

Civil procedure serves a multitude of goals, from regulating the cost of fact gathering to dictating the rules of advocacy in court to promoting public participation in trials. To what extent can procedural design serve them all, or must rules sacrifice some interests to serve others? In this Article, we are the first to introduce a theory of procedural design that answers this question. We build upon

For much of the twentieth century, the U.S. government authorized and invested heavily in segregation and racial inequality. Often it did so through federal programs authorized under Congress’s Spending Clause powers. Federal spending allowed powerful national investments in areas like health, education, and housing but frequently created segregated hospitals, schools, and communities. From the New

Many states use merit-based judicial selection to limit political influence on state courts. Under merit selection, an independent, nonpartisan commission screens candidates for any open judgeship, sending a slate of finalists to the governor. Because the governor may appoint only from these approved finalists, merit selection constrains the ability of political officials to stack the courts with partisan

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When a musical opens on Broadway, what aspects of the production are covered by copyright’s protection of “dramatic works”? The script clearly is (although policing infringement is nigh impossible), but courts have yet to address whether the work of the director or designers should be afforded copyright protections. Nonetheless, within the close-knit professional New York theater community, rarely

In considering the value of the judicial takings doctrine, this Comment argues that we should look to a new area of law: procedure. Courts often have the authority to set procedure, and they use this authority for substantive ends. This Comment argues that applying the Takings Clause to procedure demonstrates the value of the judicial takings doctrine. It argues that the Takings Clause, rather than

As climate change threatens coastal areas with more frequent and intense flooding, the federal government has adopted a greater focus on mitigating the effects of natural disasters. While neighborhoods differ in terms of physical risk exposure, they also differ in social vulnerability—the characteristics that influence a community’s ability to safely weather a storm, withstand disruptions to employment

The Constitution’s promises of freedom of speech and common defense can, at times, be at odds. One acute example of that tension is the prepublication review process, by which the government reviews written works by certain current and former employees to ensure that they do not contain classified or other sensitive information. While this process surely has its merits in preserving national security

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This Essay presents a list of the fifty most-cited legal scholars of all time, intending to spotlight individuals who have had a very notable impact on legal thought and institutions. Because citation counting favors scholars who have had long careers, I supplement the main listing with a ranking of the most-cited younger legal scholars. In addition, I include five specialized lists: most-cited international