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The foreclosure crisis left its mark on neighborhoods in countless ways. Remaining residents, those who continue to live in neighborhoods with many foreclosures, suffer unique harms because of adjacent foreclosed homes: depressed property values, higher crime, safety hazards, and reduced city services. In the current aftermath, attention has focused on preventing additional foreclosures and...

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...

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...

California recently passed bans on openly carrying an unloaded gun in public, but these bans may ironically result in increased concealed carrying of loaded guns in public. Before the recent string of mass shootings in Arizona, Colorado, and Connecticut, and before the U.S. Senate’s failed effort to pass gun control legislation, California strengthened its already strict gun control framework by...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...