Sachin S. Pandya

In 1978, federal agencies enforcing employment discrimination law agreed to a “rule of thumb” to keep agency “attention on serious discrepancies” in rates of hiring, promotion and other employee selection decisions. 44 Fed. Reg. 11996, 11998 (March 2, 1979) (Question 11(A)). Absent certain conditions, if the selection rate for any race, sex, or ethnic group “is less than four-fifths (4⁄5) (or eighty percent) of the rate for the group with the highest rate,” take that as “evidence of adverse impact”, and thus possible illegal job discrimination. If not, then “generally” don’t. 29 C.F.R. § 1607.4(D). This rule is deliberately simple. But many have argued that this simplicity comes with a price: lower accuracy as compared to more complex statistical tests (e.g. Gastwirth and Miao 2009¹; Switzer et al. 2016²; Raghavan and Kim 2024³; Courey and Oswald 2025⁴; but cf. Meier et al. 1984⁵).

In a recent paper, Johann D. Gaebler & Sharad Goel offer the “robust outcome” test: a new simple statistical test of discrimination for cases where (1) a person makes a decision (e.g., a bank grants a loan) based on their prediction of a successful outcome (e.g. the grantee repays the loan); and (2) we later know the decision’s actual outcome (e.g. whether the grantee repaid the loan). Continue reading "In Search of A Simple Test for Job Discrimination"

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Christopher Walker

At the end of the Term in Trump v. Slaughter, the Supreme Court overruled Humphrey’s Executor—the bedrock precedent that upheld statutory limitations on the President’s removal power over leaders of so-called independent agencies. The formal logic of this unitary executive theory, some have argued, could apply to any other government official who exercises even a sliver of executive power. Indeed, dissenting in Slaughter, Justice Sotomayor argued that the decision could “have major implications for inferior officers and civil-service employees, which the majority studiously ignores.” I remain unconvinced that Slaughter will reach inferior officers like administrative law judges or most of the civil service. That said, Trump v. Slaughter, of course, will not be the final word on the unitary executive. Open questions remain, especially when it comes to inferior officers and others who exercise a significant amount of policymaking authority.

In Deportation in the Deep State, Eric Fish does a terrific job exploring some of these open questions in the context of immigration law. He focuses on what Jennifer Koh calls “shadow removals” (and Shoba Wadhia calls “speedy deportation”). Shadow removals refer to the deportation of noncitizens without review by an immigration judge, much less an Article III federal judge. Continue reading "The Unitary Executive at the Border (and Beyond)"

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Bridget Crawford

When I teach asset protection trusts, my students often imagine that I am talking about activities that occur in faraway places. The word offshore does a great deal of imaginative work: it makes wealth planning sound exotic, remote, and faintly illicit. One of the many gifts of Allison Anna Tait’s superb new book, The House That Family Money Built, is to show that foreign jurisdictions offering special protections for trusts have siblings much closer to home: the payday-loan storefront on the corner, the check-casher in the strip mall, the rent-to-own outlet two bus stops away. These consumer-oriented vehicles, Tait shows, are forms of fringe finance, and once you see them on the same map, you cannot unsee their resemblance to special legal protections for sophisticated estate planning.

The book pairs the financial lives of the very rich and the very poor. It asks what separates them and, more unsettlingly, what commonalities they share. Tait opens her chapter on the two populations with a line attributed to J. Paul Getty: “If you owe the bank $100 the bank owns you. If you owe the bank $1 million, you own the bank.” (P. 62.) Much of the book is an extended meditation on the distance between the hundred-dollar debtor and the million-dollar debtor, and on the legal architecture that makes the first ruinous and the second a source of power. What I admire most is that Tait rejects the disciplinary wall that usually keeps “wealth management” and “consumer debt” in separate rooms, taught by different professors and theorized in different literatures. She insightfully shows that they are one subject. The link is structural. The same debtor-creditor law that lets the wealthy place assets beyond their creditors’ reach, through trusts and exemptions, delivers low-income borrowers to creditors largely unprotected. As Tait shows, asset protection for the one is the mirror image of debt collection for the other. Continue reading "When Offshore is Everywhere"

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Cristina Tilley

Robert Prevost has many alter egos. He is a world-famous Chicago White Sox fan¹; the 267^th Pontiff of the Roman Catholic Church²; and, it seems, something of a torts scholar. Pope Leo’s 2026 encyclical letter, Magnifica Humanitas, sounded a global alarm about the coming wave of artificially intelligent injuries to humanity and demanded that communities of men and women operating outside the infrastructures of government, market, and academy take a lead in stanching that tide. Magnifica is a theological offering, but its secular format and ambitions are unmistakable. The Pontiff’s 38,000-word publication begins with a literature review, articulates a theory of social rights and duties, applies that theory to AI, and is larded with footnotes. Except for the fact that millions of people have actually read it, the manuscript has all the intellectual earmarks of a traditional law review article.

The piece begins with a brief history of Church social doctrine. In 1891, the first truly modern pope announced that he had an ecclesiastical “right and duty to examine social realities, make pronouncements about them, and indicate paths for finding just solutions.”³ The Church has since weighed in on issues ranging from the relationship between capital and labor to the crisis of climate change. (¶ 3 n.4, ¶ 4 n.6.) Over the course of these studies, it has been guided by a set of core principles including the equal worth of all individuals and the need for policymaking to serve the common good. (¶ 97.) Most important – and most relevant to Leo’s tort bona fides – it has insisted that social problems are best handled by those closest to the problem, a concept known as “subsidiarity.” Continue reading "In Praise of Pontification"

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Woodrow Hartzog

Readers of law journal articles wouldn’t be out of line for thinking that we legal scholars take ourselves too seriously and write too obtusely. We know it’s a problem and we wouldn’t blame you if you never wanted to pick up a law review again. Maybe it’s the jargon or our fixation on minutiae. Thankfully, every now and then someone in the legal academy has the foresight and skill to simply, powerfully, and hilariously explain and critique an industry that has long had it coming. This time, the object of scorn is the financial technology industry, or “fintech” for short. Hilary Allen’s FinTech Dystopia: A Summer Beach Read About Silicon Valley Ruining Things is the best kind of polemic, because it is informative, fun to read, and free. This book and its companion law review article seek to break through all the hype, smoke, and mirrors around fintech by breaking each tool, practice, or narrative into their component parts.

In doing so, Allen shows that the emperor has no clothes. Over nine chapters, she takes on a litany of financial solutions in search of problems—payday loan apps, cryptocurrency, and all the related claims of “democratizing finance” and “banking the unbanked.” Her goal is to “empower you to ask questions,” and she delivers. Come for clear explanations of how blockchains work, stay for the sardonic pop culture references. Continue reading "You Have to Laugh at Fintech, Or You’ll Cry"

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Neil H. Buchanan

California and New York City are the current epicenters of efforts to slightly increase the taxes paid by the extremely rich. Unsurprisingly, those extremely rich people are willing to use their considerable resources and power to try to convince voters and lawmakers that such taxes are a terrible idea. The anguished responses from the anti-tax side can be almost amusingly shrill, with one billionaire recently saying this on the record: “I must say that I consider the phrase ‘tax the rich’ — quote, tax the rich — when spit out with anger and contempt by politicians both here and across the country, to be just as hateful as some disgusting racial slurs.”

An especially forgiving person might call this a matter of opinion, I suppose, but it takes a particularly narrow view of one’s self-interest to equate calls to tax the wealthiest people in the world to the horrors of racism. In any event, with the rhetoric running so hot, it is essential to be able to rely on a measured, objective analysis of the actual proposals that are under consideration. Fortunately, Professors Brian Galle, David Gamage, Emmanuel Saez, and Darien Shanske (henceforth GGSS) have stepped up and provided a clear, exhaustive, and mercifully brief report on California’s proposed Billionaire Tax. Continue reading "“The Billionaire Tax: Dispassionate Analysis of a Policy that We Desperately Need”"

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Carol Necole Brown

In Public Housing Reimagined, Professor Rosa Newman offers a deeply thoughtful and timely intervention in housing law and policy—one that asks readers to reconsider not only how federal housing programs operate, but what they are for. At a moment when conversations about housing affordability, racial inequality, and wealth disparity are often siloed, Professor Newman’s article stands out for its insistence that these are, in fact, the same conversation.

The article’s core contribution is both conceptual and practical. Professor Newman reframes the Housing Choice Voucher program—long understood primarily as a tool for housing access—as a potential vehicle for wealth-building. In doing so, Professor Newman challenges the longstanding assumption that federal housing policy should focus narrowly on shelter, rather than on the broader question of economic mobility. Continue reading "Reimagining Housing Policy as Wealth Policy"

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Juliet Stumpf

As the elevator rises through the federal office building in downtown Portland, Oregon, one expects the sliding doors to open onto rows of federal bureaucrats keystroking policy into reality. Instead, a narrow hallway leads to the lobby of two diminutive courtrooms. This administrative court, like others scattered across the nation, is where immigration judges daily determine whether noncitizens will be expelled from the United States or remain in permanent or liminal immigration status. Some noncitizens arrive with their lawyers. But many appear pro se, or sometimes not at all. Shining light on immigration courts, Ingrid Eagly and Steven Shafer published their groundbreaking study of immigrant representation in 2015, A National Study of Access to Counsel in Immigration Court. I fan-girled their work here, and watched their revelations impact legal scholarship, briefs, opinions, and media.

Then the world changed. Even as statutory reform remains stuck in cryo, immigration policy has lurched wildly—from lots of enforcement, to more, to still more, until now when proclamations of mass incarceration and deportation of the worst of the worst sear national headlines. Immigration courts have lurched in time, if not in tune, with these developments, with backlogs weighing down due process. Meantime, communities, NGOs, states and localities responded to the threat of removal of thousands of long-term residents by trying to expand representation of noncitizens in their communities. Eagly and Shafer did what any self-respecting empirical scholarly team would when faced with this new reality. They created a troika, adding co-author Renee Moulton, rolled up their sleeves, and went back to work. Access to Counsel in Immigration Court is a master class in translating empirical analysis into accessible and compelling analysis. Continue reading "Bringing Justice to Immigration Court, By the Numbers"

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Sida Liu

Celeste Arrington’s From Manners to Rules: Advocating for Legalism in South Korea and Japan is an important contribution to the study of law and politics in East Asia and to sociolegal scholarship more generally. The book asks a deceptively simple question: why have South Korea and Japan, long described as societies that prefer informal ordering, bureaucratic guidance, and social norms over adversarial legalism, increasingly turned to more legalistic modes of governance? Arrington’s answer is that this turn to courts, lawyers, formal rights, and legal rules as tools of governance cannot be understood only as a story of state modernization, elite institutional design, globalization, or American influence. Instead, it must also be understood from the bottom up, through the work of lawyers, activists, and civil society groups who mobilized law to transform regulation and governance.

The book’s title captures this transformation elegantly. “Manners” suggest a traditional East Asian regulatory style based on “informal, flexible ‘soft-law’ measures, such as administrative guidance via nonbinding recommendations or warning letters” and dependent on “opaque networks of bureaucrats, political elites, and regulatory interests [that] cooperated to design and implement policies” (p. 4). “Rules,” by contrast, suggest a world in which obligations are articulated, rights are asserted, procedures are formalized, and compliance is monitored through judicial and administrative channels. Japan and South Korea have often been described as societies in which disputes were managed through apology, mediation, or administrative guidance rather than formal legal confrontation. ¹. Arrington does not deny the importance of this nonlegalistic approach, which “often ‘privatized’ disputes by granting preemptive but limited concessions or mobilized societal groups from the top down to help achieve policy aims” (pp. 4-5). Rather, she treats the rise of legalism in these two “hard cases” as the core puzzle of her book. Continue reading "Lawyer Activism and Legalism’s Uneven Paths in East Asia"

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Sara Mayeux

William Blackstone is, of course, an omnipresent name for law students and law professors alike. At least once a week during the semester, I teach a Supreme Court opinion that cites the eighteenth-century English jurist’s writings for some proposition or another. Typically, though, these opinions give no introduction to the man behind the quotations. Sentences begin with phrases like, “As Blackstone explained,” “Blackstone denounced,” and “Blackstone says,” as if the words come from some disembodied presence rather than an actual man.

As a result, William Blackstone the person can remain curiously abstract in legal education, for all the ubiquity of his name. In fact, I learned from Julia Rudolph’s article William Blackstone, Family Man that even those historians who are specialists in his era have lots of unanswered questions about his inner life: he “left no diary or other family or professional papers, and few of his personal letters have been found.” (P. 6.) In this article, Rudolph nevertheless draws upon what sources are available to assemble a portrait of Blackstone as “a husband, friend, and investor.” (P. 5.) For those of us who teach law or legal history, this article provides a memorable and humanizing portrait of the man behind all the quotations that we and our students encounter on a regular basis. Continue reading "The Real Housewife of William Blackstone"

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