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Juror Compensation Effects on Diversity and Participation: An Evaluation of the AB 1981 Jury Pilot Program for the Judicial Council of California
No full textIn 2022, California enacted Assembly Bill 1981 (AB 1981), establishing a pilot program to increase juror compensation and reimbursements across seven superior courts. The pilot aimed to improve juror pay to help cover jury service expenses such as transportation, parking, meals, and childcare, and to replace lost income for jurors without paid time off. Adequate juror compensation is an important step toward ensuring a strong and effective jury system. The Judicial Council of California engaged the National Center for State Courts (NCSC) to support and evaluate this initiative. However, the program was paused before being terminated when the California legislature reverted all unspent funds to help offset a budget shortfall, with Assembly Bill 136 formally ending the program in June 2025. This report presents findings from the limited data collected before the early termination
Crypto-Influencer Liability
Full text linkThe growth of celebrities endorsing cryptocurrencies over the past few years has resulted in many lawsuits and regulatory actions against them. This Article examines some of these recent actions using Google Trends as well as insights from scholarly marketing literature. We suggest that while celebrities can have an influence on the public in terms of searches and interest in cryptocurrencies, such influence is more nuanced. The impact of celebrity endorsements depends on how the public perceives the celebrity both in terms of their fame and their expertise. As such, any legal or regulatory actions will have to account for these nuances when seeking legal redress against celebrities whose endorsements may have been placed on products that ultimately failed or caused losses for those who invested in them
The Kincare Craze in Child Protection: Romanticism, Subterfuge, and Racial Separatism
Full text linkAmong recent developments in family law, the most prevalent issue on legislative agendas has been Kincare as an alternative to non-relative foster care when maltreated children cannot remain with parents. Long an available option legally but traditionally regarded with skepticism by child protection workers, Kincare is now idealized. A steady stream of state legislative bills aims to encourage or command child protection and foster care agencies to place maltreated children in the home of relatives or friends of their parents whenever one is available, ostensibly based on an assumption that this is categorically better for children than living with unrelated foster parents.
That assumption has romantic appeal. But the reality of Kincare’s benefits and pitfalls is far more complex. Moreover, motivations other than child welfare are driving Kincare advocacy. The best explanation for the recent fervor points to two aims. An immediate aim is to undermine federal child-welfare mandates that advocates for poor and minority-race parents and communities have long condemned—principally, foster care time limits and the prohibition on race-matching in adoption. A longer-term objective for some is a return to racial separatism in private life.
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This Article is a corrective to the false assumptions on which the Kincare campaign rides and a child-centered pushback against adult-focused and group-protective ideological agendas.
This abstract has been taken from the author\u27s introduction
Understanding the Mechanisms of Interpretative Change
No full textInterpretive methodology changes over time, and we appear to be in a period of particular ferment. In federal statutory interpretation, which is the focus of this Article, several important changes in interpretive methods have occurred in recent decades or are underway. There has been a gradual, decades-long shift away from intentionalist tools like legislative history. In addition, as the culmination of a series of smaller steps, the Supreme Court has just reshaped the doctrine governing deference to agency interpretations, a move that will require years of further clarification. And, although this shift is still taking shape, it appears that some Justices are attempting to reconfigure the toolkit of substantive canons.
Much is being written about whether these changes in interpretive methods are normatively desirable, but this Article instead addresses the less studied matters of how interpretive regimes change and how the Supreme Court makes and manages change in the interpretive regime. I refer to “managing” change because one lesson is that the Supreme Court is not the sole participant in interpretive change, as change also involves the lower courts, litigants, and the broader legal culture.
The Article provides several case studies of past and present changes in methods of statutory interpretation and analyzes the mechanisms through which courts bring about or control change, laying out the mechanisms’ various strengths and weaknesses. The Article also presents several prudential considerations that would-be regime changers have to confront. Even taking the Court’s desire for regime change as a given, these considerations suggest that the Court should pay more attention to the operations of the lower courts, should attend to doctrinal interactions, and should not go so fast that it cannot learn from the effects of its decisions