Apr 16, 2026 Allison Anna TaitTrusts & Estates
Carla Spivack & Deborah Gordon,
Donative Freedom, Disrupted, 91
Brook. L. Rev. __ (forthcoming, 2026), available at
SSRN (Feb. 5, 2025).
Donative freedom is the guiding principle of inheritance law. This is something that many of us who teach the subject tell students every semester, at the outset of a Wills and Trusts class. We keep repeating this truism because donative freedom turns out to be the answer to many of the questions we encounter, questions about why a certain rule exists or why a court case produces a certain result. What happens less frequently is sustained inquiry into the principle of donative freedom, its history, and the political economy supporting it.
In their article, Donative Freedom, Disrupted, Carla Spivack and Deborah Gordon engage in just such an inquiry, taking on the primacy of donative freedom as an ordering mechanism and foundational principle in inheritance law. Three pillars, Spivack and Gordon tell us, have traditionally supported the edifice of donative freedom: philosophy, history, and economics. These pillars have been reinforced over time, bolstered in their foundation by theorists, legislators, and courts. Nonetheless, Spivack and Gordon observe, reports concerning the strength and utility of these pillars have been greatly exaggerated. Continue reading "Less Freedom and More Equality"
Apr 15, 2026 Anthony SebokTorts
The Pain Brokers by Prof. Elizabeth Burch (Georgia) describes the terrible treatment suffered by a group of women who had a defective surgical device implanted into their bodies. Unlike the more familiar stories about products liability involving DES or asbestos, The Pain Brokers focuses not on the wrongdoing that led to the defective products reaching the market, but on the wrongdoing that followed the discovery of the defendants’ liability. This is the story of the mass tort system being weaponized against plaintiffs.
The Pain Brokers is a work of general nonfiction which will appeal to various audiences. It takes the reader into a world that many may have already encountered in books like Michael Lewis’ Liars Poker and films like The Wolf of Wall Street. No one in the early 21st Century would be shocked to discover that lawsuits can be commodified and sold just like junk bonds or crypto currency. The book will appeal to readers who believe that America is dangerously obsessed with financialization, to the detriment of the larger society. Continue reading "The Shame of Mass Torts"
Apr 15, 2026 Seth EndoCourts Law
Multidistrict litigation (MDL) cases now comprise a majority of the federal docket. And MDLs often are one of the only means of providing victims of mass-torts with the possibility of redress. But even after Federal Rule of Civil Procedure 16.1 took effect on December 1, 2025, there is limited guidance for courts, lawyers, and litigants. Despite this, as Nora Freeman Engstrom identifies, “These decisions can affect hundreds of thousands of litigants and, in many cases, the legitimacy of the civil justice system itself.” Unsurprisingly, MDLs provide a frequent subject for legal scholars.
Even the best scholarship frequently misses a vital component, however—the on-the-ground experiences and stories of the litigants themselves. Elizabeth Chamberlee Burch’s new book builds on her earlier work to address this gap, providing a unique window into the pelvic-mesh MDLs and how unscrupulous lawyers, doctors, and con artists preyed on vulnerable women. Continue reading "The Lost Story of the Pelvic Mesh Litigants"
Apr 14, 2026 Diane RingTax Law
In Client-Attorney Privilege: The Last Barrier to Tax Transparency, Siddesh Rao explores the tension between ongoing global efforts at tax transparency and disclosure and legal systems’ commitment to client-attorney privilege. In a world in which information vital to effective tax enforcement is frequently hidden from view, who should be compelled to provide that information and on what terms? The answers to these questions have large stakes. On the tax revenue side, the failure to enforce the tax laws meaningfully, especially against large and sophisticated taxpayers, may diminish both the fisc and public confidence in the tax system. Conversely, making information and transparency demands on legal advisors puts at risk fundamental principles in legal systems premised on a special relationship between attorneys and their clients. The balance between these two priorities faces increasing pressure as states have devoted more attention to transparency and disclosure while at the same time taxpayers have, according to various observers, strategically misused claims of privilege to shield their transactions, structures and assets from tax authorities.
To evaluate this tension and offer recommendations, Rao adopts a comparative perspective, considering applications across common law and civil law jurisdictions, exploring common contexts for privilege “abuse,” and detailing the effects of transparency-forcing regimes such as mandatory disclosure and anti-money laundering rules. Although we may often think about client-attorney privilege as an internal, domestic legal issue, the rise of this tension is indeed global, as Rao documents. It is a culmination of both individual state responses to tax enforcement challenges, and a globally expressed commitment to tax transparency and disclosure in a world in which much sophisticated tax planning is cross border. Continue reading "Showdown or Balancing Act: Reconciling Our Commitments to the Tax System and the Legal System"
Apr 13, 2026 Tal ZarskyTechnology Law
Bryant Walker Smith & Matthew T. Wansley,
Regulating Robotaxis, 99
So. Cal. L. Rev. __(forthcoming 2026), available at
SSRN (Oct. 12, 2025).
The promise of widespread use of fully autonomous vehicles by private users has yet to materialize. Promoting and implementing the rapid adoption of this technology is evidently more complex than initially imagined. Yet driverless taxi services, or “robotaxis,” are already here. Several U.S. cities now offer such taxi services, with a clear prospect of expansion. In Regulating Robotaxis, Bryant Walker Smith and Matthew T. Wansley seize this moment to analyze the pros and cons of this phenomenon while proposing a regulatory blueprint for future expansion and deployment of robotaxis throughout the United States. The paper is a must read for anyone interested in this emerging business model and its implications.
The paper begins by setting the scene and introducing the basic technologies featured in these vehicles, especially their sensors and software, as well as the roles humans still play in their operation. Next, it maps out the existing robotaxi markets, which are currently dominated by firms linked to today’s digital giants: Waymo, a subsidiary of Alphabet (the parent company of Google); Zoox, a subsidiary of Amazon; and Tesla. This enables the authors to do two things: examine the impact of widespread use of autonomous vehicles, and call attention to the implications of the emergence of autonomous taxi fleets as powerful players at technological, economic, and political junctures. Continue reading "Hailing a Fleeting Moment – On Regulating Autonomous Taxi Fleets"
Apr 10, 2026 Jedidiah KronckeLegal History
María Montoya’s A Workplace of Their Own examines labor conflict in Colorado’s mining industry from the late 19th to the early 20th century, a period marked by acute violence that has long attracted study by a range of historians. Yet Montoya’s attention to new local, national, and even transnational elements of these conflicts recontextualizes existing accounts while reminding us of the all-too-often forgotten violence at the heart of American labor history.
Montoya frames her engagement around two dyads: the 1914 Ludlow Massacre and the 1927 Columbine Mine Massacre; and the visions of labor relations advanced by the two inheritors of Colorado’s then-largest mining companies, John D. Rockefeller, Jr. and Josephine Roche. The book excavates these massacres not as discrete episodes but as outgrowths of broader contests over the agency of labor in the workplace and the relative influence of local and national coalitions seeking to manage labor conflict. This reorientation is then powerfully illustrated by Rockefeller and Roche’s competing, if not openly hostile, attempts to rehabilitate their families’ reputations by using Colorado as a testing ground for models of industrial peace that later influenced national debates and legislation. Continue reading "The Forgotten Violence and Perpetual Tensions of American Labor History"
Apr 9, 2026 Andrea BoyackProperty
“The waters are rising, but so am I. I am not going under, but over.”
~ Catherine Booth, founder of the Salvation Army
In his recent article, Struggle Against the Water: Connecting Fair Housing Law and Climate Justice, Professor Jade Craig explains the outsize impact that flooding has had and will continue to have on Black communities in the United States. Rising sea levels and intense weather-related hazards destroy property and displace people. Over the past several years, more people have been displaced by natural disasters than by war. Climate changes fuel increasingly dire global and local refugee crises. The “struggle against the water” is real. Research demonstrates that so-called “100-year” floods now occur much more frequently – once a decade or even annually. Flood devastation poses a mortal threat to people living in floodplains. And a majority of the 30 million Americans who live in flood-prone areas today are both poor and Black. Continue reading "Fairer Housing in the Face of Frequent Floods"
Apr 8, 2026 Maartje van der WoudeCriminal Law
There is a tendency in socio-legal and criminological scholarship to approach border policing through its most visible moments: the violent encounter, the discretionary stop, the dramatic deportation, the spectacular failure or abuse. Irene Vega’s Bordering on Indifference: Immigration Agents Negotiating Race and Morality invites us to look elsewhere. Not away from power or harm, but toward the quieter, routinized, and morally ambiguous labor through which immigration enforcement is sustained day after day. It is here, Vega shows, that the U.S. immigration system derives much of its resilience, and much of its cruelty.
Based on extensive ethnographic interviews with Border Patrol agents and ICE deportation officers, the book offers a deeply textured account of how frontline immigration agents come to understand their work, their authority, and themselves. Vega is not interested in asking whether agents are “good” or “bad.” Instead, she asks a more unsettling question: how do agents learn to live with, justify, and normalize a system that produces suffering on such a vast scale? Continue reading "Bordering on Indifference: The Moral Work of Immigration Enforcement"
Apr 7, 2026 Kristina NiedringhausLexLibrarianship and Legal Technology
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?"
Apr 6, 2026 Leah LitmanLegal Profession
Maybell Romero,
Gossip, 115
Geo. L. J. __ (forthcoming, 2026), available at
SSRN (Feb. 1, 2026).
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?"
