U.S. News ranks law school specialty programs solely on reputation. A faculty member teaching in a specialty area at each school is asked to assess their area at other ABA accredited schools. In 2021, U.S. News added four more specialty programs: business/corporate law; constitutional law;...

Fundamentally, law is to society as gravity is to the solar system, it is the invisible force that holds it together and keeps it operating smoothly and productively. Law enhances social cooperation, facilitates trade, and extends the market. In these ways, law functions like Adams Smith’s...

This paper defends (a moderate form of) formalism as opposed to empiricism and theory. It defends the value of doctrinal scholarship, understood as arguments structured by the language and logic of the law. The paper further argues that, as a legal scholar, if you want your work to be societally...

This paper exploits the diversity of panels at the court of appeals in the state of São Paulo to address the role of career backgrounds and ideology in shaping the response of judicial decisions to a major shift in jurisprudence on drug offenses. The Brazilian constitution reserves 80% of the...

U.S. News & World Report (USNWR) announced in February 2019 its intention to debut its new ranking measuring the scholarly impact of law schools’ faculty members. In producing the ranking, USNWR has collaborated with William S. Hein & Co., Inc., which specializes in distributing legal...

This symposium contribution outlines main themes of Sociological Jurisprudence: Juristic Thought and Social Inquiry (Cotterrell 2018) and answers criticisms of the book’s claims about (i) the nature of jurisprudence and legal philosophy, (ii) the role of the jurist, (iii) jurisprudence’s...

Student loan debt has reached crisis levels, topping $1.64 trillion dollars this year and surpassing credit card debt to become the second largest source of debt held by Americans. When discussing student loan debt, it is easy to fixate on the aggregate impact of the burdens this debt places on...

Benami Transactions are dealings in which consideration for the property is provided by one person and the said property is held in the name of another person i.e. Benamidar. However, there is no intention on part of the real owner (the person who provided the consideration) to transfer any kind...

The 2020 coronavirus pandemic has cast doubt on taken-for-granted economic and governance models. Against the backdrop of increasing tension between the United States and the People's Republic of China (PRC or China), China is presenting itself as an alternative center for governance. Pursuant...

Many have advocated for the expansion of peer review to improve scientific judgments in law and public policy. One such test case is the patent examination process, with numerous commentators arguing that scientific peer review can solve informational deficits in patent determinations. We...

In 2017, we published A Revealed-Preferences Ranking of Law Schools, which presented the first (intentionally) objective ranking of law schools. Other law school rankings are subjective because their purpose is to tell prospective law students where to matriculate. Our “revealed-preferences”...

Academic departments decide on tenure standards with limited evidence about their accuracy and efficacy. We study the implications of stricter tenure standards in law schools, an environment in which 95 percent of all tenure track hires receive tenure. To do so, we construct a novel dataset of...

"Law is to society as gravity is to the solar system, it is the invisible force that holds it together and keeps it operating smoothly and productively. Law enhances social cooperation, facilitates trade, and extends the market. In these ways, law functions like Adams Smith's invisible hand,...

The health emergency derived from the pandemic caused a domino effect in all aspects of human life, which has required extraordinary measures, especially at the level of laws, essential tools for the preservation of life, health and means of livelihood. According to the Scopus database, in the...

First, while intellectual histories of law and development theory are now common, no work that I am aware of employs the actual experience of Northeast Asia to interrogate these theories, yet it is in Northeast Asia where modern history's most outstanding development success stories can be...

Policies designed to increase the diversity of law review editors are being challenged in court. The lawsuits claim that, by "illegally us[ing] race and gender as criteria for selecting law students to staff their most elite academic journals," the law reviews have diminished the quality of the...

The general decline in juris doctor (“J.D.”) law school applicants and enrollment over the last decade has coincided with the rise of a new breed of law degree. Whether known as a master of jurisprudence, juris master, master of legal studies, or other names, these graduate degrees all have...

Introduction to the Jurisprudence of Property and Contract -- Mathematical Introduction to the Jurisprudence of Property and Contract -- The Property Fallacy in Capital Theory and Corporate Finance Theory -- The Arrow-Debreu Model -- Marginal Productivity Theory -- Marxism as the Ultimate...

This book is the first attempt to establish a collaborative and interdisciplinary field of economics and legal studies. It is designed to help readers – advanced undergraduate and graduate students, but also fellow scholars who are interested in interdisciplinarity - to think through the dual...

Introduction -- Chapter 1: What Is the “Right to Own Things”: Intellectual Property Law -- Chapter 2: What Are Appropriate Rules for Adjusting Interests in a Company: Corporate Law -- Chapter 3: What Are the Rules for Fair Competition: Antitrust Law -- Chapter 4: What Are the Desirable Rules...

In this article, I respond to Twining's lecture, ‘Globalisation and Legal Scholarship'. Through an overview of the effect these changes had on the WTO I will describe how a lawyer or scholar of an ‘established transnational field' experienced the phenomenon of globalisation. In the WTO, the...

This paper considers the potential and limits of quantitative approaches to labour law research. It explores the methods used to construct and validate indicators of labour regulation (‘leximetrics') and those used in the econometric analysis of the effects of labour law rules on employment,...

The U.S. News & World Report “Best Law Schools Rankings” defines the market for legal education. Law schools compete to improve their standing in the U.S. News rankings and fear any decline. But the U.S. News rankings are controversial, at least in part because they rely on factors that are...

The current structure of law reviews is deeply problematic. It does not serve students, law faculty, or legal scholarship very well. There is much to learn from the early development and changes in law reviews over the years to inform law schools as they reevaluate the role of their journals in...

Before 1804, France was strictly divided in terms of legal regimes: a part was under Roman civil law while the majority of the territory was under customary laws which, as with common law, gave more flexibility to judges and fewer rights to the state. This dichotomy offers the unique opportunity...

In 2017, we published A Revealed-Preferences Ranking of Law Schools, which presented the first (intentionally) subjective ranking of law schools based on the revealed preferences of matriculating students. We created a subjective ranking system as an alternative to other law school rankings,...

Drawing on perspectives from administrative law as well as the study of law and development, this article analyzes three important transitions in American law and society since the Chicago Haymarket Square Riot of 1886. First, between the Haymarket Square Riot and 1950, the United States made...

The practice of tuition discounting—providing institutional aid to select students to offset the price of attending a college or university—is widespread in higher education, and its use has increased over the past few decades. NACUBO annually collects tuition discount rates and other data...

My goal is to dispel a little of the confusion by giving an introduction to jurisprudence, the part of legal studies that attempts to construct a theory of law—what it is, how it functions, and what it should be. Jurisprudence deals with the history, philosophy, and sociology of the law. Legal...