Dec 10, 2025 Roger M. MichalskiCourts Law
Susanne Lilian Gössl, “Mirin” and Beyond -Gender Identity, Domestic Private International Law, and Human Rights in the EU, __
Int’l J.L., Pol’y, & Family __ (forthcoming), available at
SSRN (May 20, 2025).
Fights over gender identity have preoccupied American politicians in recent years. The dialogue surrounding these issues has not always been civil and productive. Too often, voices with incendiary positions have been rewarded with the most attention. Help comes from what might seem, on first sight, like an unlikely source: private international law, or, as more commonly called stateside, conflict of laws.
In “Mirin” and Beyond, Susanne Lilian Gössl provides an account of how European legal systems deal with situations where different sovereigns have different or even clashing views on gender determination and change, including binary and non-binary approaches. Some countries use self-declaration (with more or fewer administrative requirements); some use biological sex at birth; some allow for non-binary gender options; others allow for only two genders. Imagine, for example, a person who is a national of Country A, gender transitioned in Country B, and resides in Country C. Which country governs that person’s status? How can and should a country deal with a gender determination of another country that conflicts with its views of if/when/how somebody might transition to another gender? Continue reading "Conflict of Laws as Pedagogy"
Dec 9, 2025 Sergio Alberto Gramitto RicciCorporate Law
What if you could embark on a journey through time and space, witnessing the birth and evolution of business organizations across civilizations? Barry Hawk’s remarkable new book, Family, Partnerships and Companies: From Assur to Amsterdam, offers precisely such an adventure—a sweeping historical panorama that traces the development of business associations from ancient Mesopotamian merchants to the Dutch trading houses that would eventually reshape global commerce.
Hawk’s achievement is nothing short of extraordinary. Rather than confining himself to the familiar terrain of English common law or European commercial development, he excavates the deep historical roots of business organization across nine distinct societies and cultures. From the Old Assyrian naruqqum of the early second millennium BCE to the joint stock companies of Renaissance Europe, Hawk demonstrates that the human impulse to pool capital, share risk, and organize commerce transcends geographical and temporal boundaries. His methodological approach represents a significant departure from traditional corporate law scholarship, which too often treats business organizations as products of modern legal evolution rather than as institutions with deep historical roots. Continue reading "A Time Traveler’s Guide to Business Organizations: Barry Hawk’s Journey From Assur to Amsterdam"
Dec 8, 2025 Daniel BarnhizerContracts
Albert H. Choi & George G. Triantis,
Designing Contract Modification, __
U. Chi. L. Rev. __ (forthcoming), available at
SSRN (Feb. 02, 2025).
This article by Professors Choi and Triantis hits close to home with how closely it models my personal experiences with oil and gas leases on my family’s farm during the leasing boom of the early 2000s. Specifically, the authors explore how parties can structure long-term contracts to maximize the expected value in the face of uncertainty regarding changes in relative bargaining power that may occur over the term of the contract by designing the contract to permit modification even if that modification merely redistributes the available surplus.
Beginning in about 2008-2010, discoveries in the Utica shale formation stretching from Quebec, Canada, down through Eastern Ohio, together with improved fracking techniques, led to a new oil boom. I assisted my uncle in negotiating a lease for his farm. Based on oral histories of prior experiences, we were reluctant to enter long-term leases without substantial protections against exploitative dealings over the term of the contract. By delaying, we were able to wait until we had more bargaining power as demand for new oil & gas leases increased, and eventually my uncle executed a lease on substantially better terms than the early-moving neighbor. On the other hand, by delaying, we also missed out on almost two years of royalty payments. Continue reading "Planning for Bargaining Power"
Dec 5, 2025 Helen NortonConstitutional Law
Guy-Uriel Charles, Luis Fuentes-Rohwer, & Farris Peale,
Reconstructing (The Law of) Democracy (Jun. 25, 2025), available at
SSRN.
Can the law of democracy save democracy? Maybe—but not if we’re counting on the courts to save us, answer Guy Uriel-Charles, Luis Fuentes-Rohwer, and Farris Peale in their thought-provoking (and sobering) article, Reconstructing (The Law of) Democracy. Their paper’s key insight observes that today’s most important election law cases involve questions of “partisan existentialism” that are not only entirely absent from earlier election law disputes, but are also beyond courts’ capacity to resolve.
The authors start by explaining why one might have thought that the courts could help us escape from today’s democratic dysfunctions. They describe the series of mid- to late 20th-century malapportionment, ballot access, and related election law decisions in which the Court was understood as protecting representative democracy from certain democratic dysfunctions. The “perceived success” of that series of cases—which began with Baker v. Carr and continued through Reynolds v. Sims and Williams v. Rhodes, among others—“helped to develop a foundational view: that the Court both could and should intervene to prevent breakdowns in the systems of representative democracy.” Continue reading "Can the Law of Democracy Save Democracy?"
Dec 4, 2025 Richard MurphyAdministrative Law
Recently, for whatever reason, I found myself thinking that it would be helpful to read something that could help me order my scattered thoughts about presidential control of regulatory power. Maybe because of all the executive orders. Fortunately, I ran across just the thing, Presidential Regulation, by Professors Timothy Meyer & Ganesh Sitaraman, which provides a wonderfully illuminating account of the nature, history, implications, and likely future of, well, presidential regulation.
Meyer and Sitaraman explain that presidential regulation “takes place when the President relies on his own powers—whether statutory, constitutional, or a combination thereof—to regulate the U.S. economy in ways not explicitly contemplated or directed by Congress.” (P. 807.) Presidential regulation is thus distinct from “presidential administration,” a la Justice Kagan, which involves presidents “shaping and taking credit for agency actions.” (P. 809.) Rather, presidential regulation involves direct exercise of powers delegated to the president by the Constitution or Congress. Continue reading "The What, When, How, and Why of Presidential Regulation"
Dec 3, 2025 Sandy SteelTorts
Nico Cornell’s terrific book Wrongs and Rights Come Apart rejects the commonly held view that moral wrongs are simply moral right violations. Rather, wrongs and rights ‘come apart’: there can be wrongs without right violations and right violations without wrongs.
The book proceeds by providing a range of powerful examples from law, philosophical writing, and literature to make its case. How can we tell, in these examples, whether a person has been wronged but their rights not violated? Cornell provides an account of the characteristic features of an entity holding a right: (1) the power to waive the correlated duty, (2) the fact that certain conduct can be demanded by that person, (3) enforceability of the correlated duty, (4) the presence of a special kind of reason (a trump or an exclusionary reason), and (5) a distinctive phenomenology. (Pp. 14-15.) Continue reading "Are Wrongs Always Right Violations?"
Dec 2, 2025 Deepa Das AcevedoWork Law
I’m always a little surprised by how rarely debates about academic freedom pay attention to the actual work of academia. Sure, there are anecdotes featuring syllabi wars or lectures gone wrong (or wrongly prevented from going on at all). But those vignettes —used to illustrate and persuade—are always hurried along so that the author can get to their normative argument defending academic freedom or announcing, once again, its demise. The vignettes aren’t really there to make us focus on the “what” and “how” of academic labor.
Archana Sridhar’s recent article isn’t exactly about granular academic labor practices, either. I doubt she’d consider it a “labor” piece at all. But in very refreshing way, she focuses on academic work structures and patterns in ways that generate insights about what makes academic freedom possible. Continue reading "Putting the Work of Academia Back into Academic Freedom Debates"
Dec 1, 2025 Sergio ParejaTrusts & Estates
Professors Allen and Rothman have written an excellent piece that addresses an issue of growing importance. While questions about privacy have always existed, technological changes that are occurring at a lightning-fast pace are creating demand for a consistent and clear legal framework. These technological changes include artificial intelligence, social media and email accounts, as well as the ubiquitousness of cameras and recording devices. This raises new questions regarding rights to a person’s name, image, voice, life history, beliefs, and identity after death.
Postmortem privacy refers to privacy protections that continue after death. The traditional view, which has been repeated for over a century, is that privacy rights end with death. The reality is much more nuanced, and courts sometimes do in fact protect some privacy rights after death. The growing importance of digital legacies and technologies makes reevaluating postmortem privacy critically important. Professor Allen and Professor Rothman’s article aims to build a theoretical and legal foundation for recognizing and shaping privacy rights after death. Continue reading "A Proposed Framework for Privacy Rights After Death"
Nov 28, 2025 James GrimmelmannTechnology Law
Tejas N. Narechania & Scott Shenker,
How to Save the Internet, __
Berkeley Tech. L.J. __ (forthcoming), available at
SSRN (Mar. 18, 2025).
Every time I teach Internet Law, I start by lying to my students about how the Internet works. I tell them the finely crafted story of how routing, packet-switching, and layering combine to produce a profoundly modular, decentralized, and standardized worldwide network. The only problem is that the Internet doesn’t work that way anymore, and hasn’t for years. Companies like Akamai, Cloudflare, and Amazon operate such massive networking infrastructure that they have warped Internet spacetime around them. The services they offer, and on which much of the Internet now depends, are integrated, centralized, and proprietary—the very opposite of what I tell my students.
Tejas N. Narechania and Scott Shenker’s How to Save the Internet brings the stories we tell about the Internet back into line with the Internet as it actually is. Narechania is a law professor and Shenker a computer scientist. Their article is a seamless fusion of their expertise—and a cogent guide to the Internet’s new normal and what it means for telecommunications policy and law. Continue reading "The Edge of Tomorrow"
Nov 27, 2025 Ezra RosserProperty
Professor Sara Bronin’s book, Key to the City, pulls back the curtain on how urban zoning works. And through in-depth city case studies, it shows how communities can be improved through zoning changes.
For those who write and teach in the property law space, the most interesting part of the book is probably how Professor Bronin pushes for major deregulatory changes without falling into the trap of arguing for the scrapping of all rules. And all readers who care about urban spaces will appreciate the breadth and depth of the community profiles used to both illustrate and inform Professor Bronin’s arguments.
This is a book that should be read by those who teach Property and by everyone who cares about the future of cities. Continue reading "Unlocking Dynamic Growth"
