A Core of Agreement
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We are deeply gratified by this exchange with Professors John Darley, Paul Robinson, Owen Jones, and Robert Kurzban. We have benefited a great deal from their research, and this encounter only adds to our appreciation. Their work has always been exceptional in its devotion to empirical exploration and experimentation. We are grateful to them for taking the time to share their thoughts with us and with the readers of this journal. In responding, we are unsurprised to find that we are in agreement with quite a bit of what they have to say.
I would like to thank Professor Adam Davidson for his thoughtful advice and insight; the staff and editors of The University of Chicago Law Review, especially Ryan Jain-Liu, Devika Albert, Zoë Ewing, and Shruti Baxi, for their invaluable feedback; the clients of the Philadelphia Capital Habeas Unit for inspiring this argument; and Jonathan Hess, for everything else.
The Eighth Amendment has long been understood to bar state-inflicted torture. Yet a fundamental paradox persists: The same circumstances that constitute torture sufficient to authorize an individual's capital sentence are routinely present on death row. Drawing on a systematic analysis of state definitions of torture utilized in capital proceedings, this Comment proposes a resolution to this paradox, arguing for the creation of a new, state-informed torture standard consistent with the Supreme Court’s evolving standards of decency framework and better suited to address the diffuse, structural nature of death row conditions than the Court’s existing Eighth Amendment criteria.
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.
All coauthors contributed equally. We thank The University of Chicago Law Review for this Symposium on “Law and Economics vs. Law and Political Economy” and John Cooper for excellent research support, and we are grateful to participants in the 2025 University of Chicago Law Review Symposium for thoughtful comments and suggestions.
All coauthors contributed equally. We thank The University of Chicago Law Review for this Symposium on “Law and Economics vs. Law and Political Economy” and John Cooper for excellent research support, and we are grateful to participants in the 2025 University of Chicago Law Review Symposium for thoughtful comments and suggestions.
All coauthors contributed equally. We thank The University of Chicago Law Review for this Symposium on “Law and Economics vs. Law and Political Economy” and John Cooper for excellent research support, and we are grateful to participants in the 2025 University of Chicago Law Review Symposium for thoughtful comments and suggestions.
Experiments sometimes get a bad rap. Critics allege that they don’t illuminate how the real world works, are subject to p-hacking and manipulation, and often don’t study the most important populations of interest. This Essay examines historical uses of experiments to generate knowledge for legal academia. Recently, experiments have become associated with law and economics as part of a broader coupling of quantitative empirical work with law and economics. But experimentation is a highly adaptable, if imperfect, research method that can support causal claims and test assumptions that are useful across many legal theories, including law and political economy. The Essay discusses the strengths, limits, and future directions of experiments as a mode of legal research.