In conventional transactions, written contracts usually memorialize the terms of the commercial exchange. For deals in which some of the goods being transferred and the forum for the trade are digitized — as in the case of cryptocurrencies — parties may use computer code rather than a...

How and when do courts determine that corporate disclosures are actionable under the federal securities laws? The applicable standard is materiality: would a (mythical) reasonable investor have considered a given disclosure important. As I establish through empirical and statistical testing of...

Over the last thirty years, legal scholars have increasingly deployed experimental studies, particularly hypothetical scenarios, to test intuitions about legal reasoning and behavior. That movement has accelerated in the last decade, facilitated in large part by cheap and convenient Internet...

When filing a civil case in a federal district court, attorneys must identify one, and only one, of ninety issue area nature of suit (NOS) codes that best describes their case. While this may seem like a trivial moment in litigation, the selection of this single descriptor has significant...

The speed at which money moves between people and businesses in the United States lags well behind international standards. Far from being a mere inconvenience, slow payment speeds create needless financial uncertainty, lead to inefficiencies across the economy, and drive demand for high-cost...

The Federal Reserve (Fed) regularly faces novel challenges to its broad statutory mandates. Often, these challenges—from financial crises to pandemics to climate change—raise a critical question. When should the Fed act beyond the boundaries of its core institutional identity and expertise?...

The growing economic importance of technical standards has heightened the need for a better understanding of why they succeed or fail. While existing literature has scrutinized the role of public governance, particularly in the realms of regulation, antitrust, and intellectual property, to date...