It was an honor to deliver the 2024 Uri and Caroline Bauer Memorial Lecture at the Benjamin N. Cardozo School of Law, and to follow in the footsteps of the many legal luminaries who have delivered this lecture before. Given their chosen professions, it may be fair to assume that Uri Bauer was a believer in the rule of law and Caroline Bauer was a believer in government. Accordingly, I would like to talk about those two topics as they… Read More

Prospective theories of cybersecurity liability have traveled over some well-worn paths over the past three decades, resulting in some successes, but also in at least as many cul-de-sacs and dead ends. Part of this problem can be found in the difficulty and complexity of the subject itself. Courts, legislators, and regulators all face comprehension difficulties when they attempt to fit our existing legal system around cybersecurity, often resulting in half-measures and generalized solutions that are challenging to apply to the… Read More

Addictive products kill more than 700,000 people in the United States every year. Despite the large-scale risks that addiction poses, the law requires manufacturers of addictive products to disclose little-to-no information about the risk of addiction—the single most consequential characteristic of a class of products contributing to mass death every year. While consumers understand that addictive products are, in fact, addictive, they generally do not understand the magnitude of the addiction risks that they face. Metaphorically, consumers understand that they… Read More

The Supreme Court’s recent 5-4 decision in the controversial chapter 11 bankruptcy reorganization of opioid-maker Purdue Pharma ends the use of nonconsensual third-party “releases,” which discharge (eliminate) liabilities of nondebtors who may share liability with a corporate debtor. Although the majority opinion is correct that the Bankruptcy Code does not permit this, it failed to recognize the problematic exceptionalism of the lower courts which approved those releases or the “social” qualities of Purdue Pharma’s mass tort liability. Bankruptcy exceptionalism has… Read More

On April 7, 2023, a federal judge issued a nationwide stay on the United States Food and Drug Administration (FDA) approval of the abortifacient medication mifepristone. It was instantly a landmark case, decried as the first time in over one-hundred years that a federal court nullified an FDA drug approval. A few hours later, a second federal district court enjoined FDA restrictions on mifepristone. Two federal courts substantively evaluating FDA drug approval data in one day is unprecedented. It begs… Read More

This Article tracks how abolitionist and reformist debates are unfolding within urban schools’ attempts to smash the school-to-prison pipeline. We document how Chicago-area public school teachers are grappling with new restorative justice programs and their complex and divergent sociopolitical and institutional meanings. Drawing on over forty qualitative interviews with teachers, we illustrate how difficult widespread implementation of new conflict resolution mechanisms, in the name of restorative justice, are turning out to be. We analyze how teachers are interpreting restorative justice… Read More

Recent advances in data-driven technology in consumer financial markets, commonly referred to as “fintech,” have resurfaced the question of whether and to what extent data, particularly consumers’ personal data, should be a locus for regulatory intervention in these markets. While innovation in fintech and the accompanying increase in the processing of personal data offer to improve the functioning of consumer financial markets, like all advances in technology, they also come with costs and risks. In 2024, in a move that… Read More