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Police Gatekeeping
Get PDFThe role of policing in American society is more pervasive (and less visible) than many acknowledge. Police do not just patrol, arrest, and keep peace – they also gatekeep. Many and varied ostensibly non-criminal processes rely on police fact-finding to adjudicate claims, establish eligibility for resources, and take adverse action against individuals. This Article examines the phenomenon of police gatekeeping, both as a practical barrier to resources and remedies and as a hegemonic mechanism to construct the social conception of truth.
Recognizing the ways in which civil society relies upon police as gatekeepers of both practical resources and the social conception of truth is a first step toward reducing the role of the carceral state. The influence of police is hidden in the background of our daily lives. Shining a light on this influence – and questioning it – can allow us to rethink our ways of knowing and reimagine structures that promote autonomy, reduce hegemonic state control, and begin to take practical steps toward diminishing the supremacy of the carceral state in American civil society
Democratizing Constitutional Memory
Get PDFThe Court regularly makes claims on the past—claims that have grown in prominence since conservatives on the Roberts Court invoked “history and tradition” to overrule longstanding case law on religious free exercise, the right to bear arms, and the right to abortion in its 2021 term and to threaten other rights since. The Court claims its historically based approach constrains judges by focusing interpretation on objective and impersonal facts in the past
Winter 2025 - Judicial Analytics
Get PDFApplying to a clerkship? Client asking the likelihood a judge will grant their motion? Writing a brief and need to find citations a judge prefers? Curious what other attorneys think of that judge? In this session, you will gain hands-on experience using analytics databases to understand why each is critical to ensuring your success in the courtroom.
Resources covered: Lex Machina, Context, Almanac of the Federal Judiciary, Westlaw Litigation Analyticshttps://repository.law.umich.edu/legaltechseries/1004/thumbnail.jp
New Tech, Old Problem: The Rise of Virtual Rent-to-Own Agreements
Get PDFThis Article explores how fintech has disrupted the traditional rent-to-own (RTO) industry, giving rise to new, virtual RTO agreements (VirTOs). These VirTOs have enabled the RTO industry to expand into the service industry and to markets for products not traditionally associated with rentals, such as vehicle repairs, pet ownership, and medical devices. This Article analyzes this development.RTO agreements purport to rent products to a consumer until the conclusion of a set number of renewable rental payments, at which point ownership transfers. The fundamental characteristic of these agreements – and why they are not regulated as loans – are that the consumer is able to terminate the rental agreement without penalty at any time by returning the merchandise to the rental company. An extremely high-cost form of financing, RTO agreements were traditionally offered through brick-and-mortar stores, like Aaron’s or Rent-A-Center, to low-income, subprime consumers who could not obtain traditional credit. The introduction of fintech, however, has shifted the RTO business model from traditional one-stop shop, brick-and-mortar stores to partnerships between VirTO companies and retailers. As this Article explains, these new VirTOs have different attributes from traditional RTO agreements. In a VirTO, a third-party VirTO provider purchases the desired product from a brick-and-mortar retailer and then rents the product back to the consumer. The entire transaction between the retailer and VirTO company occurs online and unbeknownst to the consumer. This business model, however, has allowed VirTOs to emerge in a variety of specialized markets and services. Not only are these agreements a high-cost method to ownership, but consumers often have little understanding that they are renting their purchases.While VirTOs purport to be rentals, it is nearly impossible for a consumer to return a rental financed with a VirTO. This Article argues that VirTOs are not, in fact, RTO agreements because the items rented with VirTOs are not practical to return. Instead, VirTOs are a sophisticated form of disguised credit. This Article demonstrates that the VirTO industry is a legal fiction designed to avoid consumer protection statutes governing credit. Accordingly, VirTOs should be treated by courts as credit, subject to state usury and federal consumer protection laws. This Article also proposes a series of policy recommendations to regulate VirTOs and to ban such agreements for services and nonsensical products, like vehicle repairs and pets.While this Article focuses solely on VirTOs, its observations about the role of fintech in the RTO industry are instructive for other parts of the fringe economy being disrupted by new technology. The policy solutions proposed in this Article provide a model for potential strategies to protect low-income and subprime consumers from the most extreme abuses as fringe financing industries grapple with the introduction of fintech
The Discipline of Breaks: Making Time for Rest (and Revisions) in Legal Writing
Get PDFEditing your work involves the tricky business of finding the right mental distance between two versions of yourself: the version that did the drafting and the version that now needs to do the revising. Mastering that kind of cognitive division is not always an easy task
Researching antitrust law
Get PDFAntitrust is a dynamic area of law subject to rapid change. It is highly sensitive to the attitudes of regulators and market conditions, always looking forward to how decisions made today will affect businesses and the lives of individual consumers. Current events — and passionate consumers, or fans — can incur “Swift” antitrust scrutiny, as Live Nation Entertainment discovered recently.
Yet it is inextricably linked to more abstract considerations. The term “antitrust” is itself archaic, reflecting animosity to a business practice innovated by Standard Oil in 1882. Understanding the history of antitrust actions often requires understanding something of history broadly and politics specifically. Finally, applying antitrust law requires some grasp of economic principles such as efficiency, market power, and network effects. One book on the subject begins with the line, “Perhaps no field of law is as dominated by economics as antitrust law.”
With all this in mind, there is simply a lot that may be relevant when working on an antitrust or competition law problem. This column will attempt to point out some helpful resources for practitioners working in this field
The Humanization of War Reparations: Combatant Deaths and Compensation in Unlawful Wars
Get PDFRecent events have sparked a renewed interest in the law and practice of war reparations. While today it is uncontroversial that unlawful uses of force, including acts of aggression, entail the obligation of the wrongdoing state to make reparations, including by way of compensation, the precise extent of this obligation remains subject to debate. One particularly contentious aspect is whether, and to what extent, states that violate the prohibition on the use of force are obligated to pay compensation not only for harm caused to civilians and civilian objects, but also for damage caused to the armed forces of the defending state. In this article, we demonstrate that states that engage in unlawful uses of force are indeed obligated to provide compensation for this type of harm. However, we also explain how issues of causation, evidentiary standards, and the financial capacity of the wrongdoing state may in some cases limit the scope of such claims. Moreover, we demonstrate that compensating combatants is not only doctrinally sound but also normatively desirable as it highlights their role as the core victims of unlawful wars. Finally, we elaborate on some of the consequences of this conclusion, including in relation to the individualization of reparation claims, the moral and legal equality of combatants, as well as the normative principles underlying international humanitarian law (“IHL”)
Paying for Performance? Attorneys’ Fees in Securities Fraud Class Actions
Get PDFThis Article studies whether plaintiffs\u27 lawyers matter in securities class actions. We use inverse propensity score weighting (IPW) to compare the results in cases led by top-tier firms against those brought by lower-tier firms. This technique addresses case selection effects by using all of the cases led by a top-tier firm and then weighting the cases led by lower-tier firms based on how similar these cases are to the cases led by top-tier firms. We do find that top-tier lawyers obtain better outcomes for shareholders in a subset of securities class actions, specifically the cases against the larger (although not the very largest) companies. Outside of these cases, we find that most of the difference in the results obtained by top-tier and lower-tier firms disappears when we balance observable characteristics using the IPW technique. Although the top-tier firms do not get better results in most cases, they do invest more hours and money into their cases