Category: Articles

The Supreme Court has long viewed mitigation evidence as key to saving the death penalty from constitutional challenge. Mitigation evidence about a capital defendant’s life history, combined with other procedural protections, is thought to alleviate arbitrariness in juries’ decisions of whether a defendant deserves to die. This Article presents original empirical research studying that hypothesis….

To date, no scholarly article has analyzed the theoretical basis of mental health courts, which currently exist in forty-three states. This Article examines the two utilitarian justifications proposed by mental health court advocates—therapeutic jurisprudence and therapeutic rehabilitation—and finds both insufficient. Therapeutic jurisprudence is inadequate to justify mental health courts because of its inability, by definition,…

A major focus of finance is reducing risk on investments, a goal commonly achieved by dispersing the risk among numerous investors. Sometimes, however, risk dispersion can cause investors to underestimate and under-protect against risk. Risk can even be so widely dispersed that rational investors individually lack the incentive to monitor it. This Article examines the…

This Article develops a construct of judges as gatekeepers and a set of principles to guide them in policing aggregate and derivative litigation. Part I provides an introduction to this type of litigation and the role of judges as agency cost monitors. Part II contrasts the “solutions” of this type of litigation with its costs,…

The idea that “real” men eat meat is firmly embedded in our culture. For those men who are benefited by the stereotype, eating meat serves as a confirmation of their manhood, a kind of marker of their privileged status as masculine men. This is not the case for men who do not eat meat. In…

The term “corporate raiders” previously struck fear in the hearts of corporate boards and management teams. It generally refers to investors who target undervalued, cash-flush or mismanaged companies and initiate a hostile takeover of the company. Corporate raiders earned their name in part because of their focus on value extraction, which could entail dismantling a…

John Hart famously observed, “We were all brought up on sophisticated talk about the fluidity of the line between substance and procedure,” but for most of Erie’s history, the Supreme Court has answered the question “Does this state law govern in federal court?” with a “yes” or a “no.” Beginning, however, with Gasperini v. Center…

This Article examines the relationship between individual consumption and consumption-based harms by focusing on the rise in consumption offsetting. Carbon offsets are but the leading edge of a rise in consumer options for offsetting externalities associated with consumption. Moving from examples of quasi offsetting to environmental offsetting and the possibility of poverty offset institutions, I…