Kristina Niedringhaus

Depending on who you ask, AI will either free us from the drudgery of our everyday lives, take our jobs, or wipe out humanity. It’s nearly impossible to glance at legal news without reading something about AI. There is, however, a lot more theorizing than actual data-driven research on how AI is working for (or against) the legal profession. However, Professor Lee Peoples reports on the results of his important study evaluating and comparing the performance of various specialized and non-specialized large language models (LLMs) in legal reasoning. Spoiler alert: it varies, and not necessarily how you might assume.

Before getting to the results, let’s examine how Prof. Peoples designed the study. Many first-year law students are taught to think like a lawyer using the IRAC method. As a refresher, this is a system using distinct steps to spot the Issue, identify the Rule, Apply the rule to the facts, and draw a Conclusion about the legal outcome. Prof. Peoples selected seven fact situations from a legal research and writing exercise book and anonymized to test beginning rule analysis, skilled rule analysis, beginning analogical reasoning, skilled analogical reasoning, beginning statutory analysis, intermediate statutory analysis, and skilled statutory analysis. Very importantly, Prof. Peoples told the LLMs not to train on the prompts used in the testing. Continue reading "Can your AI Think Like a Lawyer?"

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Leah Litman

There’s no one like Professor Maybell Romero in the legal academy (I say this, a la Violet Chachki, as a compliment, not a read).

In a searing article from several years ago, Ruined, Romero used her own experiences with rape and sexual assault to critique how the law and legal profession describe survivors as “ruined,” “broken,” or “destroyed.” Then, in Shamed, Romero expanded the lens: She used personal narrative and auto-ethnographic methods and applied them to individuals and institutions within the legal academy. That piece explored how survivors are shamed, in addition to being described as ruined—sometimes by members of the legal academy, as Romero recounts when describing (some of) the reaction to Ruined. Continue reading "Lady Whistledown…and the Legal Academy?"

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Sean Coyle

The Nature of Law is an insightful and engaging book that challenges almost every touchstone of modern jurisprudence. Proceeding from the thesis that laws must be understood after all as commands rather than rules, the book defends the thesis that law itself must be understood by reference to the common good. The view that the law consists of commands does not take us back to the Austinian jurisprudence that preceded H. L. A. Hart’s (the author maintains that John Austin’s theory is indeed radically defective), but challenges the modern consensus that Hart’s conception of law as a system of rules is really the advance it is supposed to be.

The book’s central sections deal with the question of whether there is an obligation to obey the law, not (as Joseph Raz maintains) merely because the law consists of reasons for action that apply to the subject anyway (P. 199), but because the law secures the common good in ways that cannot be successfully contemplated or advanced by multitudes of individuals, even if those individuals steadily wish to act for the common good. This thesis is linked to that of command, for the author argues that commands generate genuine obligations, and do not simply, as Hart suggested, oblige (Pp. 93-96, 204). In fact, it is Hart who runs into trouble, for his argument is based on the idea that rules are to be theorised as practices, but these can be shown to lack a normative element. Continue reading "Modern Analytical Jurisprudence"

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Laura Pedraza-Fariña

Inventors and their inventions are the building blocks of patent law: There simply is no patent law without inventors who seek to patent their inventions. One might think that a concept as foundational as inventorship would be both well-settled and extensively argued in legal opinions. But that is not the case. In fact, understanding who counts as an inventor and what constitutes an invention has surprisingly flown below the radar both in patent law scholarship and judicial opinions. In her article, The Inventorship Fallacy, Amy Motomura helps us with a deeply-researched and carefully-parsed analysis of the myriad and often contradictory ways in which courts have defined the “inventor” and the “invention.”

Motomura’s article makes a number of important contributions to the literature. First, it sheds light on the inventorship doctrine’s hidden role in policing the boundaries of related patent filings (what she calls the “indirect” role of inventorship). It then provides a taxonomy for how to think about who counts as an inventor, disaggregating the concept into three strands: manner, timing and substance. Ultimately, her inquiry into how courts define the “substance” of inventorship—that is, what a participant must contribute to become a true inventor—leads her to a second key descriptive contribution: defining who counts as an inventor requires defining what counts as an invention for inventorship purposes. This task, in turn, has no clear doctrinal answer. Rather, the Federal Circuit has implicitly articulated three mutually exclusive understandings of the invention as reflected in (1) the full scope of the claims; (2) only the novel and nonobvious elements of the claims; or (3) only the “not-well-known” or “not publicly accessible” elements of the claims. Continue reading "Dynamic Inventorship"

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Michael Yu

In Tax Sheltering Death Care, Professor Victoria J. Haneman proposes the creation of tax-advantaged 529 End-of-Life (EOL) Plans to incentivize individuals to plan for death care expenses (for funeral, burial, or cremation) in a thoughtful way. Her proposed 529 EOL Plan (which operates like the existing 529 Plan for educational expenses) is “politically strategic in its subtlety” according to Professor Haneman because it “provides both a structure through which savings is incentivized for all and a targeted deathcare benefit is also delivered to our most vulnerable.” (P. 630.)

Before discussing Professor Haneman’s proposed 529 EOL Plan, a brief explanation of existing 529 plans for educational expenses is in order. Professor Haneman notes that her proposal is similar to one type of existing 529 plans (a state-administered tax-deferred investment account for educational expenses) but not to a different type of plan (a prepaid tuition program for in-state post-secondary schools. (Pp. 647-48.) Existing 529 plans allow for an account: (1) to receive contributions, (2) to treat account income as income tax-exempt, and (3) to have account withdrawals be treated as income-tax exempt if the withdrawals are made for a “qualified” educational expense. (P. 648.) Although contributions to existing 529 plans are not deductible for federal income tax purposes, around thirty states allow some type of deduction against state taxes. (P. 648.) Continue reading "A Proposal for a 529 End-of-Life Plan for Death Care Expenses"

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Sam F. Halabi

For many of us, Derrick Bell’s Race, Racism, and American Law was a fundamental, devastating revelation about the role of law in constructing, reinforcing, and emboldening social institutions and structures that perpetuate and strengthen racism and de facto apartheid. Bell’s sphere was primarily the domestic United States—although of course it was not possible to completely separate the local from the global in 1973 and certainly is not today. Scholars influenced by Bell applied his lessons to other areas of legal research, including, but not limited to, international law. At its origin and continuing today, international law was anchored in racialized paradigms placing at their apex the “civilized” i.e. white and colonial sovereign powers, partially civilized countries like “Siam” and the Ottoman Empire, and “savage” or “barbarian” states comprised of what Frantz Fanon was later to famously describe as “the wretched of the earth.”

International law represents, therefore, an even more focused study of Bell’s precepts, and I welcome this new volume dedicated to this essential nexus of law and justice, Race, Racism, and International Law edited by Devon Carbado, Kimberle Williams Crenshaw, Justin Desautels-Stein, and Chantal Thomas. Featuring chapters from E. Tendayi Achiume and Aslı Bâli, Aziza Ahmed, Adelle Blackett, Christopher Gevers, Wadie Said, and Matiangai Sirleaf, in addition to the editors, the volume provides scholars of international law and racial justice one of the most important resources to date on how the history, agents, processes, and discourse of international law not only entrenched racial oppression as part of imperial global extraction and exploitation, but now sustain and feed this oppression within international legal rules and institutions. As wielders of these forces, the International Criminal Court is just as culpable as the World Trade Organization. Continue reading "Race, Racism, and International Law—Taking Derrick Bell’s Insights to the Next Level"

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Maya Manian

For more than forty years, HIV/AIDS has been understood as a paradigmatic public health crisis. The HIV/AIDS crisis generated extraordinary social movement activism and resulted in significant public health reforms. Yet, the dominant narratives of AIDS too often marginalize women’s experiences and obscure how deeply feminist advocacy reshaped not only the law but also the science of AIDS. In Risk and Resistance, Aziza Ahmed offers a powerful corrective to the historical narrative surrounding AIDS while also provoking broader questions about the nature of scientific knowledge itself.

Risk and Resistance is history, theory, and warning. The book is at once a rich archive of feminism and AIDS, a sharp challenge to the myth of science as a purely objective, neutral domain, and a conceptual lens for understanding contemporary public health crises in the MAHA era. Through a meticulously researched genealogy of feminist AIDS activism from the early 1980s through the 2010s, Ahmed shows how feminist social movements reshaped scientific consensus, transformed public health law, and altered the material distribution of life-saving resources. Continue reading "Public Health Law, Social Movements, and the Feminist Remaking of AIDS"

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Sarah Lorr

What makes a good mother? This question, once answered simply by staying alive, has become more complicated over time. For example, the recent Heritage Foundation Report, Saving America by Saving the Family: A Foundation for the Next 250 Years, seems to suggest that a good mother is defined, at least in part, by her marital status. Some might locate good mothering in the willingness and ability to deeply research childcare-related choices and provide labor-intensive care, while others caution against this sort of “intensive parenting.” And how should a mother feel? Is it healthy to feel conflicted about motherhood? Is it normal?

In a cultural context that prizes the selfless mother above all, Professor Elizabeth Kukura’s engaging and insightful article, Normalizing Maternal Ambivalence, argues that scrutinizing and punishing maternal ambivalence is the result of restrictive gender stereotypes about the self-sacrificing and overwhelmingly joyful mother. Maternal ambivalence, which is “both common and normal,” can be defined as having mixed feelings about mothering and the role of motherhood. Psychologists consider such complex, uncertain feelings about motherhood typical; the multiplicity of modern motherhood memoirs and their market success offer evidence that ambivalent feelings about motherhood are both common and relatable to many. Despite the ubiquity of maternal ambivalence, Professor Kukura shows us that it can be a basis to punish mothers in the criminal legal system and separate families in the family regulation system. Continue reading "How Should a Mother Feel?"

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Ezra Young

In her Supreme Court chambers, the late Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg prominently displayed a passage of Hebrew scripture: “Tzedek, Tzedek, tirdof.”¹ In English, the passage reads: “Justice, justice you shalt pursue.”²

Some Americans are ardently religious.³ And some, like Justice Ginsburg, believe they are religiously obliged to do right in both public and private life. Figuring out how far individuals may extend their religious exercise into the public sphere is difficult and increasingly fraught. As Justice Ginsburg elevated more than a decade ago in her dissent to Burwell v. Hobby Lobby Stores, Inc.,⁴ a legal rule that allows a religious person to affect the rights of someone who does not share their views is constitutionally suspect.⁵ Put another way, the big metaphysical questions some of us happily answer through faith alone are not always conducive to secular logics, let alone law. Continue reading "Religious Equality Run Amuck"

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• Renagh O’Leary, Supervising Sentencing, 57 U.C. Davis L. Rev. 1931 (2024).
• Renagh O’Leary, Ideological Testing, 103 N.C. L. Rev. 909 (2025).

Ji Seon Song

Over 3.6 million people are on some form of community supervision of either probation or parole.¹ This is almost double the number of people incarcerated in juvenile facilities, jails, and prisons. The alternative to incarceration has now become its own beast, leading to the new coinage of mass supervision or mass probation.² The problems with mass supervision and mass probation are many, as scholars have noted.³ Supervision in the community net-widens. It replicates and perpetuates racial inequality. Community supervision does not lead to a life free from the criminal legal system. Instead, people who are sentenced to probation and parole often cycle back into incarceration. Probation and parole expand the carceral footprint and do so in ways that infringe on the privacy, liberty, and dignity of lives, while also expanding law enforcement capabilities.

These criticisms implicitly include the actions of the agents of community supervision—probation and parole agents. But is there more to probation and parole than just supervision? As routine, embedded institutional actors who operate at the nexus of law enforcement, rehabilitator, counselor, and adjudicator, what other kinds of harms do they produce? This is where Renagh O’Leary’s work comes in. In the “new penology” described by Jonathan Simon and Malcolm Feeley,⁴ with its emphasis on risk management and control of those deemed dangerous, the agents of community supervision are important arbiters of risk management and assessors of dangerousness. In two articles, Supervising Sentencing and Ideological Testing, O’Leary delves deeper into the processes of community supervision agents, looking beyond their purely supervisory functions. Each article is noteworthy for its individual contributions, but reading them together reveals additional insights and implications. O’Leary’s work uncovers probation and parole agents as important ideological actors contributing to the “ideology of criminal procedure.” These principles of criminal procedure frame the cultures and interactions between the criminal justice actors and the public, constituting “a set of ideas and assumptions that undergird the operation of the criminal process and legitimize the status quo.”⁵ Continue reading "The Ideology of Community Supervision"

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