UCLR Online
This Essay explores the future of legal prediction markets. Part I explains how markets work and what makes them hard to beat. Part II then turns to the largest legal prediction market to date: the outcome of Learning Resources. Finally, Part III considers whether markets are well-suited to forecasting legal outcomes, both in principle and in practice.
Each year, more than half of criminal defendants subject to the career offender sentencing enhancement are those with prior drug convictions. Because the goal of the Sentencing Guidelines is to “inject transparency, consistency, and fairness” into federal sentencing, clarity on how courts should assess decriminalized drug offenses as § 4B1.1 predicates is needed to restore uniformity to the system and satisfy the Guidelines’ original goals. This Essay calls upon the Sentencing Commission to clarify its intent, place time limits on decriminalized drug predicates for § 4B1.1, and restore greater uniformity to the system.
In 2024, Tennessee Governor Bill Lee signed the Ensuring Likeness, Voice, and Image Security Act (the ELVIS Act). The law offers expansive protections for a living or dead person’s name, image, likeness, and voice. Tennessee state courts have found an independent common law protection for the same right. While a federal district court held that the statutory protections offered by the Tennessee General Assembly supplanted the common law protections, this Case Note argues that Tennessee’s arrangement gives plaintiffs two distinct avenues to vindicate the right—giving litigants more opportunities to innovate in this area of law.
The goals of this Essay are threefold: (1) to chart the public trust doctrine’s history and evolution in the United States, (2) to map this evolution and framework onto culturally significant artwork, and (3) to reflect on the attempts of several foreign nations to accomplish similar objectives to get a sense for whether such an application is feasible.
Must employers bargain in good faith over a decision to replace union workers with AI? The context of AI-induced job loss is likely to blend motivations for reducing labor costs with motivations for changing business direction, creating interpretative ambiguities for courts. Such ambiguities should be resolved through a causal test that favors requiring the parties to bargain.
Because, unlike natural persons, a corporation does not have a single, unitary mind, the question of how to ascertain mens rea in a prosecution of a corporate entity presents an epistemological conundrum. The recent revival of the field of management cybernetics presents a new lens through which to examine those questions. This Essay draws on several of the central insights of management cybernetics to argue that a collective knowledge instruction is appropriate in cases where certain regulatory systems within the corporation have been attenuated to the point where they cannot operate with the complexity required by law.
The False Claims Act is powerful. It enables the government to deter, punish, and remedy fraud. But, to date, the full extent of the False Claims Act’s power has gone underappreciated. It can also be used to obtain equitable relief. And if scholars and government lawyers are serious about promoting civil rights (or other policy objectives), they should use False Claims Act injunctions as policy-advancing tools.
The Constitution’s pardon power offers a direct path to protect an ally from federal criminal liability. However, another vehicle for absolution exists—one which simultaneously avoids public scrutiny while securing amnesty. By issuing a discreet, specific nonenforcement directive to the Department of Justice (DOJ), a politically vulnerable President can achieve the result of pardon without signing one. This phenomenon, which this Essay terms the “shadow pardon,” transforms prosecutorial discretion into a covert form of amnesty, invisible to the public and immune from reversal once the relevant crime’s statute of limitations expires.
The United States faces a housing shortage, and construction costs keep rising. Tax policy can ease those burdens. This Essay proposes that the U.S. Treasury issue guidance to classify assets for bonus depreciation under Section 168 of the Internal Revenue Code.
Since the Supreme Court's announcement of the Lindke test in Lindke v. Freed (2024), lower courts have begun to apply the test on their own. This Case Note analyzes how those courts have applied the first prong of the Lindke test to determine whether public actors possessed actual authority to post on social media and considers open questions regarding the finding of actual state authority to post on social media.
In 2021, Congress passed the Ending Forced Arbitration of Sexual Assault and Sexual Harassment Act (EFAA). Notably, the EFAA assigns courts, rather than an arbitrator, the responsibility for determining the sufficiency of a plaintiff’s allegations. This has led to disagreements between federal district courts over the appropriate pleading standard when determining whether the EFAA applies. This Essay argues that courts should adopt the “nonfrivolous” pleading standard because it better ensures access to justice for victims of sexual misconduct.
In the Supreme Court’s recent United States v. Skrmetti (2025) decision, Justice Amy Coney Barrett raised the novel question: Does the United States have a long-standing history of de jure discrimination against transgender people, perpetrated by state actors through the force of law?
This Essay provides the beginnings of an answer to Justice Barrett’s inquiry, demonstrating that throughout the history and geography of the United States, government actors have used the law to discriminate against people who deviate from narrow, essentialist notions of sex and gender.