U.S. privacy law is under attack. Scholars and advocates criticize it as weak, incomplete, and confusing, and argue that it fails to empower individuals to control the use of their personal information. These critiques present a largely accurate description of the law “on the books.” But the debate has strangely ignored privacy “on the ground”—since…
Studying the legal profession poses several challenges. The evolution of law has moved lawyers away from a generalist practice towards increased specialization. This makes it difficult to compare lawyers across different practice areas meaningfully and to provide a comprehensive assessment of the legal profession. Judges are well situated to provide such an evaluation, given their…
In many areas of regulation, mandating disclosure of information about a firm’s products, services, production processes, or governance is said to improve the efficiency and rationality of market decisions, avoid fraud, and advance public regulatory goals, all without intruding significantly upon the autonomy of market actors. Yet the idea of regulating through information disclosure has…
This Essay challenges the conventional wisdom that political accountability is sufficient to check abuse of power and lawlessness in the executive branch in the vast areas of executive action that are not regularly subject to judicial review. The Essay studies two examples in the long history of partisan appointment of high-ranking government lawyers (Roger Taney’s…
