The past few decades have witnessed an explosion in the size of the largest US law firms, and a widely accepted narrative holds that this has had a negative effect on the well-being and professional satisfaction of lawyers practicing at these firms. In an important exploratory study and new paper, When Does Big Law Work?,… Continue reading →
Must the federal government turn over federal public lands to the states? Several years ago, the Utah Legislature appropriated several hundred thousand dollars to study this very question. Not surprisingly, since the study was written by attorneys who hoped to litigate these same claims, the answer was “yes.” This was not exactly a new position.… Continue reading →
Soaring healthcare prices currently threaten the viability of our healthcare system and the overall economy. U.S. healthcare spending, both per capita and as a percentage of GDP, far outpaces spending by any other high-income country, without corresponding increases in quality or access to care. Pharmaceutical drug prices, a component of overall healthcare spending, have dramatically… Continue reading →
“Are Koalas Fungible? Biodiversity Offsetting and the Law,” recently published in NYU Environmental Law Journal, is the latest product of Professor David Takacs’s more than two-decade-old exploration of humankind’s efforts to protect the earth’s dwindling biodiversity. So far, his project has produced a book on the concept of biodiversity and numerous articles. This paper is the… Continue reading →
In his new article titled “The Conservative Turn Against Compensatory Migration,” published earlier this year in Environmental Law, Professor Dave Owen starts with a question that has puzzled more than a few observers of environmental regulation over the past year or so; namely, why has the Trump Administration (through Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke) denounced, and appeared to abandon, an idea long embraced by many conservatives, of permitting resource… Continue reading →
In a new Northwestern University Law Review article titled “Personal Jurisdiction and Aggregation,” my colleague Scott Dodson unpacks how jurisdiction, preclusion, and joinder doctrines together enable aggregation, and highlights the increasing role played by personal-jurisdiction doctrine as a constraint. This article is a welcome addition to the literature that highlights and ties together Professor Dodson’s… Continue reading →
How does one define effective leadership? And what does progressive leadership look like in the legal academy? These questions are rarely asked and answered in legal scholarship. In her article, Rebellious Deaning: One African American Woman’s Vision of a Progressive Law School, Dean Shauna Marshall tackles these questions head-on while taking the reader on a… Continue reading →
Global Programs Advisor and UC Hastings Lecturer Jessica Vapnek has spent almost 30 years working in international development, starting with two years in the Peace Corps in a village in the former Zaire. More recently, she has done extensive work in post-conflict West Africa, including Ivory Coast and Liberia. Drawing on her experience, she and… Continue reading →
Employment and economic growth in the United States have always relied, in part, on the steady creation of small businesses. Start-ups, small restaurants, innovative mom and pop stores, and non-profits are all needed for a healthy economy. Yet, as Professor Alina Ball points out so ably in her article, Primary Care Lawyers: A Holistic Approach… Continue reading →
Law school clinics have long served students interested in litigation. And the past decade has brought a dramatic increase in the number of transactional-law clinics at law schools across the country, which is clearly a positive development for the many law students who are interested in business/transactional work. But what about students interested in transactional… Continue reading →
