Municipal zoning, shockingly, may be the most consequential regulatory program in the United States. This Article develops metrics for measuring the extent to which a locality’s zoning practices are exclusionary, that is, limit construction of least-cost housing. It applies the metrics to actual zoning ordinances and zoning maps, materials that legal scholars have seldom closely appraised. The municipalities chosen for study lie in three metropolitan areas, the ones listed in the Article’s title. Of the three, zoning in Greater Austin,… Read More

Who wins in consumer arbitration? Historically, this question has been nearly impossible to answer, as most arbitration proceedings are a private black box, and arbitral forums release only limited summary statistics. One exception is the Financial Industry Regulatory Authority (FINRA), which arbitrates virtually all disputes between investors and stockbroker-dealers, and makes all of its nearly 60,000 written arbitration decisions publicly available in an online database. This Article is the first to use computational text analysis tools to study these decisions,… Read More

Prosecutorial discretion in immigration enforcement stands at a crossroads. It was the centerpiece of Obama’s immigration policy after efforts to pass comprehensive immigration reform failed. Under the Trump administration, it was declared all but dead, replaced by an ethos of maximum enforcement. Biden has promised a return to the status quo ante, but the record of using prosecutorial discretion to accomplish humanitarian goals in immigration enforcement under Obama was, at best, mixed. Moreover, it is unclear whether Biden can depend… Read More

Drawing on a case study of marriage equality litigation, this Article examines how practice setting affects the construction of risk and the emergence of conflict in social change litigation. Although private law firms often work collaboratively with social movement organizations to pursue common goals, conflicts also emerge when movement groups oppose “risky” private litigation which could imperil the movement’s ongoing impact litigation strategies. How do attorneys in private firms and social movement organizations vary in their framing of risk in… Read More

An estimated eight million undocumented workers live as a subclass of workers in the United States. Their essential work is cast in a shadow of “illegality” because federal immigration law prohibits employers from hiring such workers. As a result, undocumented workers are relegated to low-paying jobs in specific industries, such as agriculture, construction, or domestic work. Employers can easily take advantage of such workers by paying them less than the minimum wage or requiring them to work under dangerous conditions.

In a string of landmark corporate law rulings in the mid-2010s (most notably, Corwin v. KKR Financial Holdings), Delaware’s Supreme Court supposedly relaxed the standards of judicial review across a wide range of business transactions. Commentators predicted that this development would render corporate law irrelevant to the regulation of business behavior, thereby insulating managers from accountability and leading to a deterioration in corporate governance. Yet recent empirical studies have refuted the predictions: directors operating under the revamped decisional law still… Read More