By Meirav Furth-Matzkin & Cass R. Sunstein. Full text here. Social norms have been used to nudge people toward specified outcomes in various domains. But can people be nudged to support, or to reject, proposed government policies? How do people’s views change when they learn that the majority approves of a particular policy, or that…

By Jeremy W. Bock. Full text here. Existing proposals for enhancing predictability in patent claim interpretation focus primarily on the process of adjudication and doctrinal issues, while rarely delving into the underlying psychological and environmental factors that might influence different readers to interpret the same claim very differently. Drawing on lessons from behavioral economics and cognitive…

By Lloyd Hitoshi Mayer. Full text here. More than fifty countries around the world have sharply increased legal restrictions on domestic nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) that receive funding from outside their home country and the foreign NGOs that provide such funding. These restrictions include requiring advance government approval before a domestic NGO can accept cross-border funding, requiring…

By Alexander Tsesis. Full text here. Primary and secondary school student speech cases raise a variety of conflicting concerns about civic growth, intellectual development, school discipline, and judicial discretion. This Article explains how courts should address the internal conflict within jurisprudence that, on the one hand, recognizes students retain their First Amendment rights, and, on the…

By Verity Winship & Jennifer K. Robbennolt. Full text here. Should agencies require admissions of wrongdoing from the targets of civil enforcement? Administrative agencies rely heavily on settlement as a key enforcement tool. Admissions of wrongdoing—or, more commonly, declarations that nothing is admitted—form part of these settlement agreements and the underlying negotiations. The Securities and…

By Christopher Serkin & Michael P. Vandenbergh. Full text here. Legal change has the potential to disrupt settled expectations and property rights. The Takings Clause protects some expectations by requiring compensation for the most significant costs of changes in the law. However, threats of takings claims and related claims of unfairness in political debates can discourage…

By Gregory N. Mandel. Full text here. This Article presents an original dataset of (1) every intellectual property decision made by the Supreme Court; and (2) every intellectual property statute passed by Congress from 2002 to 2016. Analysis of the data reveals that the Court and Congress have been significantly at odds over intellectual property law…

By Steven L. Schwarcz. Full text here. Domestic and international regulatory efforts to prevent another financial crisis have been converging on the idea of trying to end the problem of too big to fail—that systemically important financial firms take excessive risks because they profit from success and are (or at least, expect to be) bailed out…

By Jonathan Remy Nash, J.B. Ruhl, & James Salzman. Full text here. How much will our budget be cut this year? This question has loomed ominously over regulatory agencies for over three decades. After the 2016 presidential election, it now stands front and center in federal policy. Yet very little is known about the fundamental…

By Amandeep S. Grewal. Full text here. The 2016 presidential election brought widespread attention to a part of the Constitution, the Foreign Emoluments Clause, that had previously enjoyed a peaceful spot in the dustbin of history. That clause generally prohibits U.S. Officers from accepting emoluments from foreign governments, absent congressional consent. Several commentators believe that President…