Rosa Newman

Gentrification occupies an uneasy place in property scholarship. It is often invoked as evidence of property’s distributive failures: market allocation displaces vulnerable residents, concentrates capital, and entrenches inequality. In A Civil Rights Defense of Gentrification, Professor Carol Brown challenges this dominant narrative. Rather than treating gentrification as a phenomenon inherently at odds with civil rights, Brown argues that it can, under the right legal conditions, advance core commitments of the Fair Housing Act and the broader project of residential integration.

The article’s central contribution lies in its dual task of challenging prevailing assumptions and constructively reimagining legal strategies. Continue reading "Is Gentrification Always the Enemy?"

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Pat Gudridge

Apologies to Nina Simone …

Brandon Terry’s extensively developed, very intense book recasts how we think about the “Civil Rights Movement,” a sequence of confrontations beginning in 1960 with black college student sit-ins in declaredly whites-only lunch counters in Greensboro, North Carolina, Nashville, and other cities in the South. This nonviolent theater inspired demonstrators and sometimes provoked very violent white opponents. Other efforts (marches too, maybe most notably later in Birmingham and Selma, Alabama, and in Washington, D.C., among many other places) also multiplied rapidly and widely, spreading nationally. These various happenings were celebratory, controversial, transformative, resisted: epochal seemingly. Terry treats this civil rights movement as separate from the earlier NAACP constitutional law and litigation campaign by Thurgood Marshall. Brown v. Board of Education or Cooper v. Aaron do not figure much in Shattered Dreams Infinite Hope.

Professor Terry is a social sciences savant well-read across many fields, complicatedly writing here often as if a socially and politically preoccupied literary critic (not a law professor or historian, for example). He closely deploys three orienting frames – romance, irony, and tragedy. He also makes insistent, provocative use of the idea of “exemplar.” Was and is the civil rights movement exemplary? To what point or purpose? Terry depicts his explorations as immersed in thinking of a notably distinguished group: prominently, Immanuel Kant; Hannah Arendt; Martin Luther King, Malcolm X, and Barack Obama; John Rawls; Derrick Bell, and Henry Louis Gates; Calvin Warren and other Afropessimists; Nikhil Pal Singh, W. E. B. DuBois, and ultimately A. Philip Randolph. Professor Terry questions all concerned intensely, builds out his own perspective at length too – takes charge of his crowd of notables. He resists simplifications. No simple romance, happy or harrowing. No irony becomes atmospheric. Continue reading "Mississippi Goddam!"

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Erik Encarnacion

The rule of law matters. But what it requires is, as Jeremy Waldron famously observed, “essentially contested.”¹ There’s no shortage of scholarly work on the topic;² harder to find are accessible, article-length treatments that accomplish more than map entrenched positions or presuppose mastery of technicalities. We should therefore welcome Felipe Jiménez’s article, The Rule of Law.

The piece’s stated aim is modest. Jiménez seeks to restate and clarify existing ideals that, in his view, explain why the rule of law matters. But this modest enterprise delivers a user-friendly and philosophically serious account that distinguishes the rule of law from nearby concepts and explains why it remains so valuable. Continue reading "The Rule of Law, through Thick and Thin"

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Fred Jacob

Working with Statutes is a love letter to administrative agencies, and, if I may be so bold, to those of us who have been privileged to serve as their custodians.

Anya Bernstein and Cristina Rodriguez make a case for agency legitimacy rooted in loyalty, care, and – in my reading of their fine piece – affection. In contrast to the stereotype of the clockwatching bureaucrat, Bernstein and Rodriguez explain how agency staffers enthusiastically take on the mantle of caretaker, acting zealously to bring their law to bear on problems that fall under the congressional mandate. In this way – through the people who care for it – Congress ensures that a legislative program committed to an administrative agency remains efficacious across time and societal change.

Rejecting an approach that evaluates agency action through prisms of judicial review or legislative drafting, Bernstein and Rodriguez conduct a series of thirty-nine interviews with political and career appointees at eleven federal agencies to better understand agency authority from the inside out. From their extensive interviews, Bernstein and Rodriguez posit that agency superintendents’ commitment to a healthy statute is grounded in twin duties of loyalty and care to their administrative regimes. The duty of loyalty emanates from the agencies’ organic statutory text and the mission that flows from that text. The two are symbiotic: statutory language informs mission, and mission informs statutory construction. In this way, agency personnel distill their statutes to an “overarching set of values and objectives served by the regulatory regimes.” (P. 937.) These values allow agencies to identify problems that enter their statutes’ orbit and are appropriate for their administrative machinery to resolve through regulatory means. Continue reading "Administrative Agencies & the People who Love Them"

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Cesar Rosado Marzán

How many kinds of hammers can you name? Most people picture a claw hammer. A few might add a rubber mallet, and gamers might imagine a medieval war hammer. Skilled trades and craft persons, however, recognize dozens of designs, each built for a distinct job. A dead-blow hammer absorbs rebound; a tack hammer secures delicate upholstery. In other words, they know their hammers.

U.S. labor lawyers, by contrast, tend to reason within a constrained, Wagner Model vocabulary. The familiar, almost provincial categories appear on cue: plant or craft units, exclusive representation or members-only models, and good-faith versus bad-faith bargaining. But recent scholarship has been broadening our imagination. Professor Kate Andrias’s influential work on “sectoral bargaining,” along with contributions from other legal academics, social scientists, one historian, think tanks (both progressive and conservative), and Harvard’s Clean Slate Program, are pushing bargaining beyond the NLRA’s tired categories. A diversity of public figures, from  Senator Bernie Sanders, to Lyft President John Zimmer have also called for institutionalizing forms of sectoral bargaining. Yet critics, me included, have questioned whether many concrete examples, such as wage boards, actually involve bargaining at all. Professor Cynthia Estlund asserts they are systems of sectoral regulation, not bargaining.

Enter Professor Sara Slinn. In her upcoming chapter, Analytical Framework for Understanding Broader-Based and Sectoral Bargaining Models, Professor Slinn maps what counts as sectoral bargaining and what other tools exist. She argues that reform debates stall because scholars and policymakers use terms like “multi-employer,” “broader-based,” and “sectoral” interchangeably even though they describe different arrangements. Without a shared vocabulary, reform fragments. In other words, reformers need a clear analytical framework. Continue reading "Tools to Clear the “Sectoral Bargaining” Fog"

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Gerry W. Beyer

Who wouldn’t want to control things, even after death? The chance that your surviving family will not obey your wishes after you die is exactly why you create a last will and testament. We all long to control where our money and property goes, but shouldn’t people also be concerned with what for some of us is most important of all—where our body goes? William A. Drennan’s R.I.P.—A Financial Incentive to Protect Your Cadaver?, suggests a clever way for individuals to control the disposition of their body through financial incentives. This is valuable to everyone who wishes to have a body disposition different from what family members want for them as well as those who desire a unique or untraditional disposition. Drennan’s suggestion of financial incentives gives everyone what they want. You choose how to dispose of your final remains while your survivors get your cash.

In this article, Drennan points out although people have substantial control over what happens to their property after death, they have less power over what actually happens in the disposition of their own bodies. The article explains that state laws permit family members to override decedents’ instructions concerning the handling of their corpse. To address this, Drennan proposes the use of a financial incentive clause that gives the living family members a gift when and if they comply with a decedent’s specific disposition method. The article looks at the practicalities, enforceability, and public policy implications of this proposal while also uncovering philosophical tension between the rights of the dead and the interests of the living. Continue reading "Cash For Compliance, Buying Obidience After Death"

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Emily J. Stolzenberg, Toward a Private Law of Intimates’ Obligations, 111 Iowa L. Rev. (forthcoming), available at SSRN  (Feb. 2, 2026).

Hila Keren

Under most descriptions, contract law perceives parties as dealing with each other at arm’s length. It assumes the parties seek “to further their economic self-interest,”[1] and thus generally does not expect them to assist each other. As Richard Posner once put it in one of his decisions: “Contract law does not require parties to behave altruistically toward each other; it does not proceed on the philosophy that I am my brother’s keeper.”[2] Two excellent forthcoming articles offer a compelling challenge to this approach: Sarah Dadush’s Shared Responsibility in American Contract Law and Emily Stolzenberg’s Toward a Private Law of Intimates’ Obligations. I review the pair of articles in tandem to highlight the synergy between their significant contributions to contract law scholarship. While Dadush and Stolzenberg focus on contexts that could not be more distinct, I highly appreciate how they both illuminate the value of collaboration and cooperation in contractual relationships and argue that contract law could and should play a role in advancing them.[3] In her article, Dadush analyzes global transactions and complex supply chains at the heart of the market. Stolzenberg, by contrast, zooms in on intimate relationships between cohabitants at the market’s margins. Nevertheless, from those opposing angles, each forcefully emphasizes the collaborative or cooperative dimension of the contractual relationship. Continue reading "Collaboration and Cooperation Under Contract Law"

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• Arvind Narayanan & Sayash Kapoor, AI Snake Oil: What Artificial Intelligence Can Do, What It Can’t, and How to Tell The Difference (2024).
• Arvind Narayanan & Sayash Kapoor, AI as Normal Technology, available at Knight First Amend. Inst. (April 15, 2025).
• Arvind Narayanan & Sayash Kapoor, A Guide to Understanding AI as Normal Technology, available at AI as Normal Tech. (Sep. 9, 2025).

Paul Ohm

For those splashing around in the shallow water of AI Law and Policy, it’s a heady time to be mapping old laws onto transformative AI-based technologies, such as chatbots, image generators, and AI agents. But off toward the horizon in the deeper water are worrisome shadows, forecasts for the arrival of Artificial General Intelligence (AGI), and confident but contradictory predictions about how AGI will lead to either tech Nirvana or human extinction (and sometimes, confusingly, to both). Bobbing around out there are adversarial flotillas firing potshots at one another, flying obscure banners with confusing tribal names: e/acc, long-termism, TESCREAL, to name only three. The rational thing to do has been to cover one’s eyes and ears, trying to block it all out.

There is now a third and better option to either avoiding or diving deeply into the AGI waters: read the recent works by two Princeton computer scientists, Arvind Narayanan and Sayash Kapoor, who have started to engage with and rebut the most radical calls to action of the AGI-set. To get the full extent of their rich argument, you should read not only their recent book, AI Snake Oil, but also their subsequent series of online essays, some as long as traditional law review publications. Only by considering four different works together (and one imagines there will be more to read from the pair soon), does the full argument take shape. The good news is that their argument—if it is correct—dispels worst-case predictions about both the speed with which the problems of AGI will emerge and the radical nature of what we will need to do to respond to those problems. Continue reading "The New “Normal”"

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Susan Morse

Does the Seventh Amendment provide a taxpayer with the right to a jury before the government imposes tax penalties? This issue is live at the Tax Court, at Courts of Appeals, and at the Supreme Court. Fortunately, the tax literature includes two entries on this topic, one by Professor Steve Johnson and another by Professor Bryan Camp. Both are somewhat skeptical about a jury trial requirement, thought they emphasize different aspects of the question. Their work should illuminate the conversation, and inform the litigation.

Few thought tax penalties attracted jury rights prior to the 2024 Supreme Court decision in Jarkesy v. Securities and Exchange Commission. But after the Court decided that jury rights attached to securities fraud penalties, an analogous question arose in tax. A cert petition is pending in Hirsch v. U.S. Tax Court, where the Eleventh Circuit refused petitioner’s request for a writ of mandamus on the grounds that the Tax Court had unconstitutionally denied them a jury trial. Tax practitioners are following Hirsch closely. Continue reading "Jury Rights in Civil Tax Cases??"

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Anita Bernstein

In 2019 the phrase “a world designed for men” saw print when the Brazilian-English activist Caroline Criado Perez put it into the subtitle of a book. Criado Perez may not have been the first to notice the pattern of extraordinary unfairness documented in Invisible Women: Exposing Data Bias in a World Designed for Men but she wrote the most devastating report on the phenomenon I’ve ever seen, and I have been paying attention. Products Liability in a World Designed for Men by Melissa F. Wasserman connects this problem of gendered “who benefits? who pays?” with a careful, well-argued, and scientifically informed call for law reform.

The neutral-on-the-surface biases favoring men that Professor Wasserman examines in this article fit within design defect as a subset of products liability doctrine. The category may seem narrow. It’s not. Products Liability in a World Designed for Men takes 52 pages to document the issue it addresses, review the governing law, and offer recommendations. Limited space rather than any lack of urgent examples, I am sure, shortened what Professor Wasserman shares here. Continue reading "Male Supremacy as a Products Liability Defect"

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