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I thank Vicki Been for substantial support in designing the study that is the subject of this paper and for insightful comments at all stages of the writing process. For very helpful feedback on prior drafts of this piece, I am grateful to Yun-chien Chang, Russell Engler, Renagh O’Leary, Cristina Rodrigues, Jessica Steinberg, Paul Tremblay, and the participants in the NYU Colloquium on the Law, Economics, and Politics of Urban Affairs, the Harvard Law School Clinical Scholar- ship Workshop, and the Works in Progress Session at the American Association of Law Schools Conference on Clinical Legal Education. I am indebted to Maxwell Austensen, Maria (Mili) Chapado, and Xingzhi Wang for performing the data analyses used in the study. I also thank Rob Collinson and Luis Herskovic for providing additional data sup- port, and Alisa Numansyah for heroically collecting and scanning over one thousand case files across all five boroughs of New York City. Scott Davis, Ethan Fitzgerald, Andrew Gerst, and Alex Wilson provided excellent research assistance. Finally, I thank the Office of Court Administration and the New York City Department of Housing Preserva- tion and Development for providing data used in the study.

For their helpful comments, we thank Christopher Kutz, Meirav Furth-Matzkin, Lee Fennell, Daniel Hemel, Saul Levmore, Barak Medina, Jonathan Masur, Mitchell Polinsky, Yuval Procaccia, Weijia Rao, Re’em Segev, Stephen Sugarman, George Triantis, Eyal Zamir, and participants in the Annual Meeting of the American Law and Economics Association and in faculty workshops at the University of California, Berkeley, the University of Chicago, the Interdisciplinary Center Herzliya, the University of Haifa, the University of Southern California, Stanford University, and Tel Aviv University. For superb research assistance, we thank Bar Dor and Niva Orion.

For thoughtful comments and conversations, I thank Greg Ablavsky, Robert Bone, Adam Chilton, Mariano-Florentino Cuellar, David Freeman Engstrom, Richard Epstein, Eric Fish, Nora Freeman Engstrom, Jacob Goldin, Alexandra Lahav, Hiba Hafiz, Deborah Hensler, Daniel E. Ho, David Hoffman, William Hubbard, Samuel Issacharoff, Emma Kaufman, Amalia Kessler, Dan Klerman, Jonathan Masur, Michael McConnell, Lisa Larrimore Ouellette, Saul Levmore, Jim Pfander, Bill Rubenstein, Joanna Schwartz, Catherine M. Sharkey, Shirin Sinnar, Norm Spaulding, Alan Trammell, Adam Zimmerman, and the editors of The University of Chicago Law Review. I also thank participants at the Annual Civil Procedure Workshop and the Clifford Symposium.

For their feedback, I thank Professors Ian Ayres, Rishi Batra, Glenn Cohen, Noam Ebner, Deborah Eisenberg, John Goldberg, David Hoffman, Louis Kaplow, Andy Kaufman, Andrew Mamo, John Manning, Martha Minow, Bob Mnookin, Scott Peppet, Jeff Seul, Jean Sternlight, Andrea Schneider, Guhan Subramanian, Cass Sunstein, and Rachel Viscomi. I benefited enormously from feedback at faculty colloquia at Harvard, Maryland, and UNLV. And I thank my research assistants Haley Banks, Christopher Dotson, Juhi Gupta, Ayoung Kim, Ben Pincus, Jordan Shapiro, Austin Smith, and Elise Williard, without whose careful work this research would have been impossible.

Many thanks to Will Baude, Pamela Bookman, Dan Epps, Barry Friedman, Mark Greenberg, Josia Klein, Anita Krishnakumar, Maggie Lemos, Marin Levy, Leah Litman, Michael Morley, Anne Joseph O’Connell, Larry Rosenthal, Steve Sachs, Joanna Schwartz, Dan Schweitzer, Mila Sohoni, and participants in the St. John’s Faculty Workshop and the Duke Law School Judicial Administration/Judicial Process Roundtable. I am also grateful to Caleb Peiffer and Taylor Pitz for excellent research assistance, and to the superb editors of The University of Chicago Law Review.

Support from the Stanford Center for Law and History and especially faculty director Amalia Kessler was invaluable as I completed this Article. For helpful comments and conversations, I thank Gregory Ablavsky, Kerry Abrams, Monique Abrishami, Susan Appleton, Ralph Richard Banks, Tomiko Brown-Nagin, Katie Cole, Beth Colgan, Nancy F. Cott, Samuel Ennis, George Fisher, Barbara Fried, Lawrence Friedman, Robert W. Gordon, Howard Kaufman, Zachary D. Kaufman, Adriaan Lanni, Jessica Lowe, Kenneth W. Mack, Bernadette Meyler, Melissa Murray, Kelly Phipps, Eli Russell, Christopher Schmidt, Sarah Seo, David Sklansky, Ji Seon Song, Norman Spaulding, Emily Stolzenberg, Mark Storslee, Charles Tyler, Lael Weinberger, Robert Weisberg, John Wertheimer, and participants in the Stanford Law School Fellows Workshop, the Stanford Legal Studies Workshop, and the Family Law Scholars and Teachers Conference. Librarians at Harvard University and Stanford Law School and archivists at the Columbia University Rare Book & Manuscript Library provided excellent assistance. Research for this Article was generously supported by the American Historical Association’s Albert J. Beveridge Grant; the American Society for Legal History’s William Nelson Cromwell Foundation Fellowship; Harvard’s Center for American Political Studies Dissertation Fellowship and Seed Grant; and Harvard Kennedy School of Government’s History and Public Policy Initiative in the Ash Center for Democratic Governance.