Authoruclalaw

Two primary arguments are advanced for the contemporary functional importance of federalist constraints on centralized political power. The first is captured in Justice Brandeis's famous invocation of the states as the laboratories of democracy in which "a single courageous State" may blaze new paths by trying "novel social and economic experiments." The second ties the smaller, decentralized...

At the conclusion of every class action lawsuit, a judge must hold a fairness hearing to assess the reasonableness of the outcome. The fairness hearing contains the promise of providing real monitoring of class counsel. In practice, it has not fulfilled this promise and scholars have largely, therefore, forsaken it. In this Article, William Rubenstein provides a sustained investigation of the...

Sometimes, no news is good news. In an important article, Theodore Eisenberg and Geoffrey Miller add to the emerging literature that uses empirical research to shed light on the real-world operation of class action lawsuits. The conclusions that Eisenberg and Miller draw about incentive awards to class representatives are consistent with the conclusions of their previous study of class-counsel...

In United States v. Booker, the U.S. Supreme Court held that the mandatory nature of the Federal Sentencing Guidelines violated the Sixth Amendment because they required a judge to enhance a defendant’s sentence based on facts that were neither found by a jury nor admitted by the defendant. The remedial portion of the opinion deemed the Guidelines “effectively advisory,” thereby permitting judges...

In Rojas v. Superior Court the California Supreme Court demonstrated its clear intent to encourage mediation by providing absolute privilege to evidence and materials “prepared for the purpose of, in the course of, or pursuant to, a mediation.” However, the Court declined to address the important question of how to determine when materials are prepared for mediation. The Court’s failure to...

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 such distinguished scholars as Lawrence Lessig, Robert Post, Mark Rose, Kathleen Sullivan, and David Nimmer. The UCLA Law Review has...

The vast majority of Americans favor sanctions that require offenders to engage in responsible behavior—to work, pay restitution, or support dependents; to participate in a mandatory job-training, literacy, or drug-treatment program; or to meet some other prosocial obligation. While this intuitive preference crosses political and ideological divides, nothing in our classical theories of...

One of the most widespread contemporary assumptions in the discourse of separation of powers is that while the president tends to have preferences that are more national and stable in nature, Congress is perpetually prone to parochial concerns. This deeply ingrained assumption not only pervades legal scholarly treatment of the administrative state, but it is also used to frame debates about the...