Sep 18, 2025 Amy MonahanHealth Law
Wendy Netter Epstein & Christopher T. Robertson,
Can Legal Knowledge Save Lives? A Randomized Experiment in Preventative Health Screenings, available at
SSRN (June 25, 2025).
Despite the Affordable Care Act’s fifteen-year-old mandate for full coverage of preventive care, potentially life-saving cancer screenings remain persistently underutilized. In Can Legal Knowledge Save Lives? A Randomized Experiment in Preventive Health Screenings, Professors Christopher Robertson and Wendy Netter Epstein delve into this critical health policy puzzle and present the results of a survey that aims to uncover the extent to which ignorance about the legal requirement for free preventive care contributes to underutilization and whether experience with medical debt might also play a role.
The literature has long established that individuals in the United States receive recommended cancer screenings at suboptimal rates and that cost concerns play a role in that outcome. The ACA’s preventive care mandate was explicitly designed to address this piece of suboptimal utilization by removing cost from the equation. It is doubtful that free coverage would entirely remove barriers to care, as the screenings themselves often come with some discomfort and inconveniences. Yet, it is crucial for lawmakers and health policy stakeholders to understand whether and to what extent law can help move patients toward optimal utilization by examining the extent to which individuals covered by health insurance actually understand the coverage terms that might influence their care decisions. Continue reading "Preventive Care Utilization and Health Insurance Literacy"
Sep 17, 2025 Aníbal Rosario-LebrónFamily Law
Clare Ryan,
The Public/Private Home,
110 Cornell L. Rev. __ (forthcoming 2025), available at
SSRN (August 10, 2024).
This past June, when the Supreme Court delivered its opinions in United States v. Skrmetti and Mahmoud v. Taylor, it entered a new era in the weaponization of rights against sex, sexual orientation, and gender identity and expression (SSOGIE) equality. In this new era, the Court is advancing its anti-equality agenda by co-opting parental rights to the detriment of minors’ wellbeing and autonomy. It did so by ruling on parental rights in Mahmoud while pointedly refusing to engage them in Skrmetti, thereby reinforcing the law’s entrenched treatment of children as property. To understand how this new weaponization emerged, how its advancement can be halted, and how children’s rights can be advanced, it is indispensable to examine the theoretical foundations and shifts in the doctrine of parental rights that have led to its current form. Clare Ryan’s The Public/Private Home precisely provides such a framework.
Ryan’s forthcoming piece in the Cornell Law Review calls for reexamining the concept of family autonomy and privacy and its derivative doctrine of parental rights in light of the profound transformations in contemporary family life. She argues that the assumptions underpinning the public/private divide that shaped these doctrines no longer hold as they do not reflect lived reality. Ryan highlights that the law’s assumptions regarding where the provision of public goods falls on the family/public dichotomy have been subverted by family practices that have moved many activities, such as work, schooling, and healthcare, into what the law still considers the private sphere and vice versa. For instance, on the other side of the spectrum, through social media platforms, homes have become sites of intense surveillance, data collection, and profit by making private life more visible to the public, including the state. Such transformations, Ryan contends, have profound implications for the doctrine of parental rights. Continue reading "Blurring the Boundaries of the Public/Private Home in the Era of the Weaponization of Parental Rights"
Sep 16, 2025 Natsu Taylor SaitoEquality
Enslaved Africans occasionally poisoned those who abused them. As legal scholars, how do we process this? You may have jumped, as I did, to drafting a mental list of legal justifications that could apply in a poisoning case. Or you may have assumed, as I did, that such legal defenses would be the focus of Angi Porter’s analysis in her new article “POISON! An Africana Legal Studies Investigation into Enslaved Africans and their Deadly Roots.” In fact, however, Porter, an assistant professor at American University’s Washington College of Law, does something wildly, brilliantly, courageously different.
POISON! moves outside of the framework of the enslavers and their legal system to assess the use of poisons by enslaved Africans from the perspective of indigenous African governance. With this shift, Porter confirms that the emergence of Africana Legal Studies brings us a new methodology, not just an expansion of the subject matter at hand. Utilizing her meticulous research on poisonings, the knowledge held by African healers, and what she terms the governing Protocol of West African Akan speakers, Porter helps us see that these enslaved Africans may best be understood not as individuals forced to act in self-defense but, instead, the enforcers of a collective Protocol that governed and protected their communities. Continue reading "Roots of Freedom"
Sep 15, 2025 Mila SohoniAdministrative Law
Looming over our law, or lurking beneath it, are theoretical frameworks that guide how we think about it. With respect to administrative law, there are two such influential frameworks that will immediately spring to mind and that share much in common: originalism and cost-benefit analysis.
What? Readers might already be scratching their heads. This strange pairing would seem to be worlds apart. Originalism is the stuff of lofty theory and founding-era history and hard-fought debates concerning the nature of fundamental rights and the separation of powers. Cost-benefit analysis, in contrast, is the stuff of pocket protectors and green eyeshades and hard-fought debates concerning discount rates and valuations. Originalism is for lawyers; cost-benefit analysis is for economists. But as Professors Jonathan Masur and Eric Posner demonstrate in a recent article, The Common Political Foundations of Originalism and Cost-Benefit Analysis, the two have more kinship than meets the eye. Continue reading "Twins Separated at Birth"
Sep 12, 2025 Maartje van der WoudeCriminal Law
Legal scholars in the United States may be tempted to see the British immigration system as distant or parochial, marked by its own bureaucratic idiosyncrasies and Commonwealth-era legacies. But Mary Bosworth’s Supply Chain Justice makes clear that this is a mistake. This searing ethnographic analysis of immigration detention in the United Kingdom reveals not just a national policy architecture, but a global paradigm of border enforcement—one that resonates powerfully with ongoing developments in the United States.
At its heart, Supply Chain Justice is a meditation on outsourced state power: what happens when liberal democracies turn over core functions—especially the coercive task of incarceration—to private corporations, acting under performance-based contracts with limited oversight and diffuse responsibility. Bosworth uses the concept of the “supply chain” to describe the web of public and private actors—guards, managers, administrators, NGOs, civil servants—who collectively operate the UK’s immigration detention system. Continue reading "Outsourcing the Border, Outsourcing Justice"
Sep 11, 2025 Maureen CarrollCourts Law
Daniel Wilf-Townsend,
Deterring Unenforceable Terms, 111
Va. L. Rev. __ (forthcoming 2025), available at
SSRN (June 6, 2024).
Most of us (if not all) have entered a contract with one or more terms that a court would not enforce. From non-compete agreements in states that prohibit them, to leases that purport to limit the implied warranty of habitability, to waivers that disclaim liability for injuries resulting from the drafting party’s negligence, contracts containing clearly unenforceable terms have become ubiquitous. The usual remedy (such as it is) for the inclusion of such a term is for a court to decline to enforce it.
That remedy, Daniel Wilf-Townsend argues, is woefully inadequate. In Deterring Unenforceable Terms, he proposes to supplement it with “a general, affirmative prohibition on clearly unenforceable terms in contracts offered by a sophisticated drafter to large numbers of unsophisticated counterparties.” That proposal might seem bold, but over the course of the article, it starts to appear quite restrained. Continue reading "Should drafters be penalized for clearly unenforceable terms?"
Sep 10, 2025 Tom C.W. LinCorporate Law
Sergio Alberto Gramitto Ricci, Daniel J.H. Greenwood, & Christina M. Sautter,
The Shareholder Democracy Lie, 78
Fla. L. Rev. __ (forthcoming 2026), available at
SSRN (Feb. 18, 2025).
Governance is hard; democratic self-governance is even harder. The governance of our political institutions and corporations is replete with evidence of such difficulties. Yet, the alternatives to democratic self-governance, while administratively easier, are filled with their own dangers. As such, appeals to democracy and conceptions of democracy have long been used in law, business, and politics throughout history to justify policies and actions of varying democratic ends.
In The Shareholder Democracy Lie, Professors Sergio Gramitto Ricci, Daniel Greenwood, and Christina Sautter offer a deeply researched and rigorously reasoned critique of one of corporate law’s most enduring metaphors and misleading myths: shareholder democracy. The authors argue that the noble rhetoric of shareholder democracy does not reflect legal, institutional, and historical realities—and that this rhetorical distortion carries real consequences for corporate governance, political legitimacy, and social progress. Continue reading "The Shareholder Democracy Promise"
Sep 9, 2025 Omri Ben-ShaharContracts
- Haggai Porat, Behavior-Based Price Discrimination and Data Protection in the Age of Algorithms, available at SSRN (Oct. 31, 2022).
- Haggai Porat, Bargaining with Algorithms: An Experiment on Algorithmic Price Discrimination and Consumer and Data Protection Laws, available at SSRN (Apr. 29, 2025).
A central interest in consumer law is the harm AI algorithms might cause to consumers. Firms are increasingly gaining the power to target individual consumers in manipulative ways and charge prices tailored to each buyer’s ability to pay. People may end up buying things they do not need or regret, at prices exceeding those in the pre-algorithmic market. Rivers of academic ink are spilled in describing the potential harms and recommending urgent regulatory action. Some of that work is very good, although the entire genre is suffering from an acute oversight: it ignores the documented benefits pricing algorithms are bringing to consumers. Personalized prices have been repeatedly shown in the empirical economic literature to benefit low-income consumers (and why not? The easiest thing for these algorithms to infer is individual purchasing power, calibrating the price to match it).
An assumption that runs through much of the legal literature on pricing algorithms is the passivity of consumers. Short of anonymizing themselves by changing the privacy settings (and good luck with that), there is nothing consumers can do to blur their profiling by sellers’ algorithms. Consumers, in other words, are price-takers, and are said to be in peril. Continue reading "Can Consumers Roar Back?"
Sep 8, 2025 Lyrissa B. LidskyConstitutional Law
In the face of mass digital data harvesting and manipulation, the need for effective data privacy protection is imperative. In Data as Likeness, Professor Zahra Takhshid offers new legal tools to address this need by urging us to reconceptualize one of the common law privacy torts, namely, the tort of appropriation of name or likeness. Her contribution, however, is not limited to reconceptualizing the appropriation tort. She also offers valuable insights into how to secure Article III standing for data privacy harms.
Takhshid’s reconceptualization is built on the insight that “[o]ur digital persona or likeness is our personal data.” Thus, appropriation of our data is an appropriation of our likeness, worthy of compensation through tort law. Takhshid’s reconceptualization turns the appropriation tort into a means to hold Big Tech and others accountable for their ubiquitous collection and transmission of personally identifiable data, which, according to Takhshid, constitute wrongful exploitation of the individual. This approach would also treat deepfake creation, geolocation data collection, and the deployment of facial-recognition technology as exploitations of digital persona. Continue reading "Are You the Sum of Your Data? Appropriation of Digital Persona as Appropriation of Likeness"
Sep 5, 2025 Michael C. DuffWork Law
Alvin Velazquez,
The Death of Labor Law and the Rebirth of the Labor Movement, B.C.L. Rev. (forthcoming), available at
SSRN (Feb. 13, 2025).
In The Death of Labor Law, Professor Alvin Velazquez asks: what if the National Labor Relations Act (NLRA) dies because, as some employers want, the US Supreme Court declares – at this very late hour – that Act unconstitutional? (P. 18.). Assuming that happens, Velazquez offers “a silver lining” by showing how, by doing so, “the Court could serve as a catalyst for a series of (most likely) unfortunate events as well as fervent organizing opportunities.” (P. 7.) Thus, from death comes life. The article falls within a tradition of labor law scholarship that insists (like Oliver Wendall Holmes’ dissent in Vegelahn v. Guntner) that labor conflict is inevitable and labor law is always a provisional accommodation between labor and capital.
In particular, Velazquez considers how the NLRA might collapse (Pp. 13-25); reminds readers that labor law and labor conflict preexisted the NLRA (Pp. 49-50); takes solace in the Norris-LaGuardia Act’s bar on federal courts issuing labor injunctions in peaceful private-sector labor disputes (P. 38); and reminds readers that a defunct NLRA may mean a dissolution of unduly complex federal preemption doctrines, in turn freeing states to innovate in the area of labor relations in ways they cannot do now. (Pp. 31-38.) The article covers a great deal of ground. It will stimulate and provoke labor law readers and perhaps also general legal readers focused on major administrative law developments. Continue reading "Beyond Collapse: Why Labor Law Probably Can’t End"
