Multivariable regression may be the most prevalent and useful
task in social science. Empirical legal studies rely heavily on the
ordinary least squares method. Conventional regression methods
have attained credibility in court, but by no means do they dictate
legal outcomes. Using the iconic Boston housing study as a source of
price data,…[Read more]

A new technology of interpretation is taking the legal world by
storm. Legal corpus linguistics, an approach generally unknown in the
field until a few years ago, has suddenly become a focus for articles,
conferences, legal briefs, and even judicial opinions. Taking
advantage of evolving computational approaches and data collection
abilities,…[Read more]

The process of searching for relevant legal materials is
fundamental to legal reasoning. However, despite its enormous
practical and theoretical importance, law search has not been given
significant attention by scholars. In this Article, we define the problem
of law search and examine the consequences of new technologies
capable of…[Read more]

IRS Tax Notice 2014-21 was the first IRS issued guidance since
the creation of cryptocurrency. This guidance stated that all
cryptocurrency transactions are treated as property, meaning that
every transaction results in a gain or loss equating to the difference
between the price of the crypto at purchase and the price of the sale.
However,…[Read more]

In recent years, the challenges facing those with the mental
illness gender dysphoria have become apparent in the American legal
system.1 Disagreement regarding whether “sex” in civil-rights statutes
protects one’s chosen gender identity from discrimination receives the
most attention, but there is another challenge equally as daunt…[Read more]

Whether crime victims have rights before the formal filing of
criminal charges has recently come to the fore in one of the most
publicized criminal cases in memory. For more than twelve years,
victims of Jeffrey Epstein’s sex trafficking organization have
attempted to invalidate a non-prosecution agreement (NPA) entered
between Epstein and f…[Read more]

Drug treatment courts represent a paradigm shift in the
American criminal justice system. By focusing on providing drug
treatment services to low-level offenders with severe use disorders
rather than sentencing them to a term of incarceration, drug courts
represent a return to a more rehabilitative model for dealing with
individuals ensnared…[Read more]

In some urban communities, people are coming together to fight
food insecurity by opening cooperatively owned groceries in
neighborhoods where traditional grocery stores have closed.
Historically, some cooperatives require owners to work without pay
for a few hours a week, a month, or a year as a way to foster solidarity
and keep down labor…[Read more]

Thomas Piketty had himself a moment. It did not come easily or
quickly. When the academic economist first published his massive
text, Capital in the Twenty-First Century, in French in 2013,
summarizing over a decade of his and others’ work on capital and its
unequal ownership across time and cultures, he encountered a friendly
but muted r…[Read more]

The common law of contract has long recognized a duty of good
faith in performance.1 This Article argues that this duty is contract’s
core value—that good faith constitutes the distinct form of legal
obligation that contracts establish. An initial section introduces the
duty of good faith in performance through a series of doc…[Read more]

Water is essential to all life on this planet.1 The natural water
cycle allows life to continue as we know it: water starts as a liquid,
evaporates into the atmosphere as gas, recondenses into liquid, and
comes back to the earth as rain.2 Scientists call this the “hydrological
cycle.”3 Unfortunately, human actions can remove water from the…[Read more]

Our legal system has long tried to fit the square peg of artificial
intelligence (AI) technologies into the round hole of the current tort
regime, overlooking the inability of traditional liability schemes to
address the nuances of how AI technology creates harms. The current
tort regime deals out rough justice—using strict liability for s…[Read more]

Medical quarantines were once common in the United States,
but in the last fifty years they have been used infrequently by the
government. That changed with the spread of the novel Coronavirus
and the resulting Covid-19 illness in 2020. Cruise ships where the
virus had taken hold were quarantined, and passengers were
prohibited from…[Read more]

The emergence of the COVID-19 pandemic threatens the safety
of people attending large social gatherings, including organized
sporting events. As the number of deaths and hospitalizations from
COVID-19 skyrocketed in March 2020, the National Collegiate
Athletic Association (NCAA) suspended all member colleges’ spring
sports seasons. The NCAA h…[Read more]

Unsurprisingly, there is great variation between patent
examiner allowance rates. What is surprising is the magnitude of
these differences and the large delay in prosecution that can result
dependent on who you get as an examiner. Some patent examiners
allow patent applications quickly within just one or two Office
Actions resulting in only a…[Read more]

In 2013, Brent Levorsen was denied the opportunity to donate
plasma at a Utah Octapharma Plasma. That same year, Mark
Silguero was prevented from doing so at his Texas CSL Plasma. In
2016, George Matheis Jr. and Amy Wolfe faced the same fate at their
respective plasma donation centers, a Texas CSL Plasma and a
Pennsylvania CSL Plasma. Each…[Read more]

Sometime in 2015, the Baltimore Police Department (BPD)
struck a secret three-way partnership to subject its city to continuous
aerial surveillance by a private company.1 Under the hush-hush
partnership, Ohio-based Persistent Surveillance Systems (PSS)
regularly flew a small plane equipped with high-powered cameras
over Baltimore for months…[Read more]

As the world is seeking the exit strategy from the pandemic while
still combating the fast-moving spread of the virus in many countries,
we need an equally speedy and powerful tool to combat the
pandemic’s implications. On the forefront against COVID-19,
artificial intelligence (AI) technology has become a digital armament
in the d…[Read more]

In theory, the Daubert reliability standard for the admissibility
of expert testimony requires the judge to act as the gatekeeper and
prevent pseudo-expertise from reaching the jury. And in criminal
cases, Daubert is supposed to benefit the defense, as prosecutors
employ the vast majority of such witnesses—many of whom are
merely pro-state a…[Read more]

This Article uses the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Eleventh
Circuit’s divided decision in Otto v. City of Boca Raton in late 2020
as a springboard for examining battles in First Amendment
jurisprudence over proof of causation of harm and the level of
deference owed to the judgments of learned societies. A two-judge
majority held in Otto t…[Read more]