The text of the Constitution nowhere mentions God; the document is, as some scholars put it, quot;godless.quot; What is the significance of that silence? This brief essay, written for a discussion conference on religion, multiculturalism, and citizenship, considers and criticizes two possible...

The presence of Mexican law - as the applicable foreign law - continues to grow considerably in American courts. This phenomenon is significant in California and the southwestern states, as well as in Illinois, New York and Washington, D.C. It is unquestionable that deciding cases based on...

For purposes of acquisition of real estate by foreigners and foreign legal entities, the Republic of Mexico is divided into two large areas: a) the Restricted Zone; and, b) the Permitted Zone. The Restricted Zone is the real estate located in a strip of 64 miles along Mexico's border with the...

Conventional delegations - statutes delegating Article I, section 8 authority - are familiar enough and have spawned a large literature regarding their constitutionality. Rather than discussing whether Congress may delegate these powers, we wish to shift the focus to delegation of other powers....

The Supreme Court's recent landmark decisions interpreting the Sixth Amendment confrontation clause have taken an originalist turn, by treating common-law procedure contemporaneous with the founding as illustrations of the constitutional text. The Crawford trilogy holds that trial courts should...

This is a draft. The final version is forthcoming in the New York University Journal of Law and Liberty.In Griggs v. Duke Power Co. (1971), the Supreme Court held that Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 went far beyond prohibiting intentional discrimination on the basis of race, color,...

A recent and widely received study by Lauren Cohen, Umit G. Gurun, and Scott Duke Kominers finds that non-practicing entities (NPEs) — pejoratively known as “patent trolls” — are “opportunistic” because they target defendants that (1) are cash-rich (particularly compared to...

This Article considers the role that the reputation of lawyers and signaling between lawyers and clients plays in determining the impact of the professional rules. Academics who have written about the relationships between lawyers and clients and the ways lawyers typically act have not...

The Coase Theorem predicts that, if there are no transaction costs, parties will always contract their way to an efficient outcome. Thus, no matter which legal rules society chooses, "Coasean bargains" will lead to efficient results. There are always some transaction costs. However, transaction...

This study examines determinants of cohesion in the Supreme Court's reliance on precedent in the network of U.S. Supreme Court precedents. We use a database of all Supreme Court Citations and test several measures of annualized Court action as independent variables in a regression on several...