Legal Scholarship

The “public” is everywhere and nowhere in contemporary public law. Everywhere, in that the term is constantly invoked to justify and explain existing arrangements. Nowhere, in that serious attempts to identify a relevant public and elicit its input are few and far between. Scholars and officials depict the American public as playing myriad roles in governance—checking, guiding, approving, repudiating—without offering an account of how public preferences are formed or how they exercise influence on the questions of interest. This Article seeks to identify and call attention to the foundational dilemmas underlying this disconnect, to clarify their normative contours and intellectual history, and to propose a pragmatic response—grounded in the recovery of the public’s role as an author and not just a monitor of public law.

Professor Rachel Barkow has established herself as an indispensable voice in public and academic discourse on criminal justice reform.

For four decades, Harold Koh has been a pivotal figure in the evolving human rights movement.

Jeffrey John Rachlinski was born June 22, 1966, in Buffalo, New York. He graduated from Frontier Central High School in Hamburg, New York, in 1983, where he participated in such activities as band, Chess Club, French Club, Math Club, Mock Trial Group, and Quiz Club.

I’m not sure I’ll ever live it down. I actually said—out loud, to his face, a full ten minutes into our very first conversation—“Holy smokes, you’re Larry Tribe!”

The task of describing (or even hinting at) Eric Posner’s immense scholarly contributions in just a few thousand words is a daunting one.

There is arguably no more seminal a figure in the field of law and society than Professor Marc Galanter. That a Special Issue featuring dedications to several leading academic lights would be hosted by the University of Chicago Law Review is especially significant in terms of Marc’s inclusion because Chicago is where Marc came of age as a student.

It is with great pleasure that I write this Essay about Lucian Bebchuk, the James Barr Ames Professor of Law, Economics, and Finance at Harvard Law School. Bebchuk has made fundamental, influential, and lasting contributions to the field of corporate governance and has mentored an exceptional number of corporate scholars.

Every year on the first day of my course on information privacy law, I ask my students to define the concept of privacy.

Toward the end of the 1970s, the pioneering scholar and advocate Derrick Bell published two landmark articles. Both reflected critically on the school-desegregation litigation he had pursued as a young NAACP lawyer.