“More than the Numbers”: Empirical Evidence of an Innovative Approach to Admissions
By Anahid Gharakhanian, Natalie Rodriguez, and Elizabeth A. Anderson. Full Text. “I am proof that your LSAT score does not define you; law schools need to understand that every student’s lived experience is unique. Thanks to Southwestern’s admissions process I was able to show that I’m more than the numbers on my application.” This third-year…
Continue ReadingLeaving Langdell Behind: Reimagining Legal Education for a New Era
Symposium Keynote by Judith A. Gundersen. Full Text. “[T]he time seems right to ask ourselves, legal educators and bar examiners, who have different but related roles in the law student to lawyer continuum: how can we best work both independently and in collaboration to ensure that tomorrow’s law- yers are ready to take on the…
Continue ReadingMinnesota Law Review, Volume 107 Symposium Foreword
By Joshua Gutzmann. Full Text. For most of us (the Editors of Volume 107 of the Minnesota Law Review), the summer before starting law school was characterized by a global pandemic and a racial reckoning. Like many Americans, we experienced a toxic mix of feelings of isolation, hopelessness, and even anger; and we yearned for…
Continue ReadingAntitrust Federalism and the Prison-Industrial Complex
By Gregory Day. Full Text. States are not only prolific monopolists but also virtually unaccountable. Consider the prison-industrial complex, where states force inmates to pay monopoly prices while suppressing competition for commissary items, phone services, medicine, and more. While the Sherman Act would often ban these types of practices, states are immune from antitrust scrutiny…
Continue ReadingAutomated Agencies
By Joshua D. Blank and Leigh Osofsky. Full Text. When individuals have questions about federal benefits, services, and legal rules, they increasingly seek help from government chatbots, virtual assistants, and other automated tools. Most scholars who have studied artificial intelligence and federal government agencies have not focused on the government’s use of technology to offer…
Continue ReadingThe Public Stakes of Consumer Law: The Environment, the Economy, Health, Disinformation, and Beyond
By Rory Van Loo. Full Text. Consumer law has a conflicted and narrow identity. It is most immediately a form of business law, governing market transactions between people and companies. Accordingly, the microeconomic analysis of markets is the dominant influence on consumer law. But consumer law is often described as, and assumed to be about,…
Continue ReadingThe Law Enforcement Lobby
By Zoë Robinson and Stephen Rushin. Full Text. The law enforcement lobby represents one of the most important and undertheorized barriers to criminal justice reform. We define the law enforcement lobby as the constellation of entrenched actors within the justice system—particularly police unions, correctional officer unions, and prosecutor associations—that exert an outsized role in policy…
Continue ReadingTea and Donuts
By Derek E. Bambauer and Robert W. Woods. Full Text. U.S. trademark law often permits simultaneous use of the same brand by multiple entities. Its approach to deciding when and how this concurrent use is permissible has become antiquated, rooted in outdated assumptions about trade and telecommunications. By using the physical location of mark-users as…
Continue ReadingThere Is No Such Thing as Circuit Law
By Thomas B. Bennett. Full Text. Lawyers and judges often talk about “the law of the circuit,” meaning the set of legal rules that apply within a particular federal judicial circuit. Seasoned practitioners are steeped in circuit law, it is said. Some courts have imagined that they confront a choice between applying the law of…
Continue ReadingProcedural Posture and Social Choice
By Michael Risch. Full Text. Lawyers, judges, and professors have always been interested in the way cases unfold procedurally—their procedural posture. To date, however, nobody has provided a generalized theoretical framework to explain how procedural posture influences outcomes. This Article uses social choice theory to fill that void, providing much-needed insight into the ways that…
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