Between 1950 and 2005, the composition of large public company boards dramatically shifted towards independent directors, from approximately 20% independents to 75% independents. The standards for independence also became increasingly rigorous over the period. The available empirical evidence provides no convincing explanation for this change. This Article explains the trend in terms of two interrelated developments in U.S. political economy: first, the shift to shareholder value as the primary corporate objective; second, the greater informativeness of stock market prices. [...]

By "lay Justices" I mean Justices of the Supreme Court of the United States who are not accredited lawyers. Currently the number of lay Justices is zero, although there is no constitutional or statutory rule that requires this. Commentators who urge that the Supreme Court should be diverse on all sorts of margins—methodological diversity, ideological diversity, and racial or ethnic or gender diversity—say little or nothing about professional diversity on the Court. [...]

It seems improbable that the theoretical and doctrinal framework of criminal procedure, developed mostly through a binary model of the individual and the state, would fit without modification in the tripartite model of the state, the firm, and the individual that characterizes the investigation and sanctioning of criminal conduct within legal entities. This intuition—which has been underexplored in spite of heated public debate about the state's practices in this area—proves correct. [...]

Emerging genetic and molecular technologies are revolutionizing our understanding of the relationship between genes and the environment. This Article develops an innovative framework for understanding the implications of the genomic revolution for the law of toxic torts. Professor Grodsky demonstrates how new technologies are poised to challenge longstanding distinctions between legally inconsequential "risk" and remediable "injury," and how the U.S. legal system will need to adapt to this emerging reality. [...]

Precommitments are most essential when we feel most compelled to break them. Constitutional law, our collective pact of precommitments, is never more important than in periods of crisis. History suggests that when democracies are captured by fear, they react in predictably troubling ways, in particular by targeting the most vulnerable for selective sacrifices that the majority would not likely be willing to endure if the sacrifices were evenly distributed. [...]

The September 11, 2001 attacks forced the United States to reassess the possibility of a mass-casualty bioterror event. If terrorists could coordinate the destruction of four large commercial aircraft, two of the tallest skyscrapers in the country, and an entire section of the Pentagon in a single day, killing thousands of people, then they might eventually release a catastrophically lethal biological agent. [...]