Dec 22, 2025 A. Michael FroomkinJotwell
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Dec 19, 2025 Ann E. TweedyEquality
In this current era of the weaponization of law against transgender people, I found the beauty and heartbreak of K. Iver’s Short Film Starring My Beloved’s Red Bronco fortifying. Iver is a trans, non-binary poet, but the poems in the book largely focus on their teen-age years when they identified as female and were in love with a young trans man who ultimately committed suicide.
These extremely difficult times we are now living in seem to call for poetry—even among law professors—because of its emotional immediacy, particularly its ability to transcend entrenched positions and arguments and to allow us to commune with others through the experiences poets describe. In this era of book bans and state-sponsored censorship, poetry and literature in general are perhaps less likely to have the wide reach they otherwise would, so, despite Iver’s book’s transformative potential, it may be unlikely that it will be read by many who are unsure about transgender rights or who reject them outright. However, as a trans ally and poet, I found the book deeply affecting, and I would highly recommend it to anyone. Continue reading "Iver’s Poetry as an Antidote to Law’s Weaponization Against Trans Folk"
Dec 18, 2025 Emily SatterthwaiteTax Law
Direct international aid flows directly to individuals and communities in the form of such essentials as food, water, medicine, and cash. As humanitarian crises erupt around the world, this form of assistance has become both politically contentious and more necessary than ever. Yehonatan Givati’s timely new paper, Income and Preferences for International Redistribution: Theory and Evidence, offers an enlightening framework to think about patterns of support for such aid programs. It builds on theoretical and empirical research that has established a relationship between preferences for domestic redistribution and income: poor citizens will likely support rich-to-poor redistributive policies within their own countries more than rich citizens. But what about international redistribution? How might an individual’s relative income level influence her support for internationally redistributive policies?
Givati begins by observing that the relationship between income and preferences for international redistribution is much less obvious than in the domestic context. Because lump-sum international redistribution must be financed through higher taxes, higher-income individuals have more to lose from international redistribution. This implies a negative relationship between income and support for international redistribution. At the same time, lower-income individuals may perceive that, given fixed funding levels, international redistribution will come at the expense of domestic redistribution. This implies a positive relationship between income and support for international redistribution. Continue reading "Do Rich or Poor Prefer International Redistribution More?"
Dec 17, 2025 Kristelia GarcíaIntellectual Property Law
Cathay Y. N. Smith,
Copyrighting Nature, 79
Vand. L. Rev. __ (forthcoming 2026), available at
SSRN (May 22, 2025).
From the use of copyright to combat revenge porn, to protecting slavish reproductions of public domain artworks, copyright law is sometimes invoked in circumstances where it either doesn’t, or shouldn’t, apply. Smith’s latest piece adds another (wonderful!) example to the growing list: the utilization of copyright to protect works that faithfully copy naturally occurring objects—from animals and flowers, to rocks and wood grain. In doing so, she sifts through a thicket of discordant case law to tease out a point of agreement: copyright protects only human contributions. This declaration should sound profoundly familiar to those following the ongoing battle between copyright and generative AI, in which the Copyright Office has explicitly limited registration to works—or the portion(s) of works—attributable to a human. Smith’s fascinating dissection of the case law surrounding copyright for natural objects demonstrates that there’s really nothing new about the copyrightability questions presented by generative AI, while her prescription for a “work of nature” doctrine offers a prospective blueprint for a “work of humans” doctrine with application far beyond the nature context.
In the 2003 case of Satava v. Lowry, the Ninth Circuit considered the copyrightability of glass-in-glass jellyfish sculptures. Ultimately, it issued an opinion that governs the copyrightability of creative works concerning natural objects today; namely, that “no copyright protection may be afforded to the idea of producing a glass-in-glass jellyfish sculpture or to elements of expression that naturally follow from the idea of such a sculpture.” The first part of this holding—that no copyright protection extends to the idea of a glass-in-glass jellyfish sculpture—merely restates copyright’s long-standing idea-expression dichotomy, which says that copyright protects only expressions, and not mere ideas. This explains, among other things, the curiously extensive collection of young adult vampire romance novels. Continue reading "Copyright for Dummies Humans"
Dec 16, 2025 Wendy EpsteinHealth Law
Sharona Hoffman & Ishani Ganguli,
Access to Primary Care and Health Care Fragmentation, __
U. Ill. L. Rev. __ (forthcoming 2026), available at
SSRN (Feb. 01, 2025).
Primary care has long been described as the cornerstone of a functioning health system. Yet, in the United States, it is a cornerstone under strain. Patients who seek appointments with primary care physicians (PCPs) often wait weeks or months before they can be seen. Faced with these delays, many turn to urgent care centers, retail clinics, direct-to-consumer telemedicine platforms, or even at-home testing kits. While these alternatives offer quick access, they come at a price: fragmented care that sacrifices continuity, coordination, and comprehensiveness.
Sharona Hoffman and Ishani Ganguli’s article, Access to Primary Care and Health Care Fragmentation, argues that long wait times and the resulting fragmentation are not only health policy problems but also legal problems. They make the case that the combination of shortages and fragmentation undermines equity, drives up costs, and creates liability exposure under both tort and anti-discrimination law. Their insightful dual framing is compelling: primary care access failures threaten patient outcomes, but they also expose providers and health systems to lawsuits and regulatory scrutiny. Continue reading "When Primary Care Wait Times Become a Legal Problem"
Dec 15, 2025 Josh Gupta-KaganFamily Law
Laura Savarese,
The Origins of Family Rights and Family Regulation: A Dual History, 78
Stan. L. Rev. __ (forthcoming, 2026), available at
SSRN.
In the standard story taught in typical Parents, Children, and the State or Children & the Law courses, analysis of parental rights has a clear beginning. In 1923, at the height of the Lochner era, in Meyer v. Nebraska, a case of first impression, the U.S. Supreme Court declared that “[w]ithout doubt” the Due Process Clause protected the right “to marry [and] establish a home and bring up children.” Two years later, in Pierce v. Society of Sisters, the Court recognized “the liberty of parents and guardians to direct the upbringing and education of children under their control.” But, in The Origins of Family Rights and Family Regulation: A Dual History, Laura Savarese demonstrates that the Court did not invent those rights. Rather, those cases followed a string of state court decisions from the end of the Civil War through the Progressive Era that established core legal protections for family integrity. Savarese’s work deepens our understanding of parental rights, helps protect those rights from potential attack, and informs legal advocacy to constrain the present-day family regulation (a.k.a. child protection) system.
Savarese identifies and fills an important gap in conventional understanding of foundational family law doctrines. The crucial rights that the U.S. Supreme Court would eventually articulate were born in parents’ resistance to the early family regulation system’s efforts to take and keep their children. That system empowered private institutions and organizations to house children who were found destitute or had been deemed neglected by their parents or delinquent. The family separations that resulted were largely upheld by state courts as lawful exercises of states’ parens patriae authority (a concept courts uncritically imported from English law), most famously in the Pennsylvania Supreme Court’s 1839 decision Ex Parte Crouse (4 Whart. 9). But, as Savarese points out, after the Civil War, parents began to succeed with state habeas petitions challenging children’s initial or continued commitment to these institutions because parents were denied notice of the charges against them or their children, or that specific cases violated statutory grounds. Continue reading "Before Meyer and Pierce"
Dec 12, 2025 I. India ThusiEquality
Andrea Freeman’s Ruin Their Crops is a bracing book— one that refuses to let law stay above the fray. The book’s title, drawn from President Washington’s command to “ruin their crops on the ground,” is more than historical reference; it’s a theory of power, waste, and control that pulses through this work with moral clarity. By centering food policy — a topic too often siloed as agricultural or technocratic — Freeman exposes how law actively structures hunger, malnutrition, and even food destruction in marginalized communities. This book is a powerful reminder that access to food, a fundamental socioeconomic right, is not peripheral to law, but one of its central battlegrounds. As Freeman stated in a recent interview, “It is the ground we stand on that sustains us. And it is this truism that frequently creates the illusion of alimentary choice while obscuring the structural racism embedded in U.S. American food politics.”
At a time when legal scholarship celebrates doctrinal complexity while distancing itself from lived experience, Ruin Their Crops does the opposite. Freeman pulls law down from abstraction and grounds it, quite literally, in the soil. She maps a legal genealogy of waste — from federally funded crop destruction to racialized school lunch programs — showing how food becomes a weapon, and hunger, a byproduct of governance. The book does what great legal scholarship should: it makes us see familiar structures differently, then implicates us in their ongoing design. Continue reading "Ruination as Policy: The Legal Architecture of Food Waste"
Dec 11, 2025 Maximo LangerCriminal Law
The Fourth Amendment right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers and effects against unreasonable searches and seizures has been celebrated as one of the most important bulwarks of freedom in American law. One of the main reasons for such a belief is that when warrants are required, they must be issued by a neutral and detached magistrate. Aside from anecdotal knowledge by legal practitioners and a very small set of empirical studies, we know very little about the actual process of search and seizure warrants. Unwarranted Warrants? An Empirical Analysis of Judicial Review in Search and Seizure by Miguel F.P. de Figueiredo, Brett Hashimoto and Dane Thorley is important because it fills a vacuum in this regard by presenting the largest empirical study on the judicial review of search and seizure warrants in the United States to date. It is also important because its empirical findings reveal substantial shortcomings in the warrant process in Utah that are likely present in other jurisdictions in the United States.
The authors base their analysis on a comprehensive dataset from Utah’s statewide electronic warrant platform. The dataset includes digital timestamps, full warrant affidavit texts of approved warrants, and identifying information about judges and officers. (P. 1983.) The digital timestamps allow the authors to analyze the time judicial officers take in reviewing warrant applications, and scraping the pdfs of the warrants and the warrant applications allowed them to collect data on the length, complexity, facts, and legal content of the warrants. (P. 1984.) In addition, the use of both quantitative and qualitative data allows the authors to get a more nuanced picture and analysis of the judicial review of warrant applications. Continue reading "Warranted Doubts: An Empirical Study and Critique of Fourth Amendment Practice"
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"
