CLR Forum

Introduction President Donald Trump has quickly marshalled the powers of the presidency to challenge President Barack Obama’s environmental legacy. Facing an increasingly intransigent Congress, the Obama Administration placed significant emphasis on rulemaking and other administrative actions to push its progressive agenda. Whatever the merits of this approach, many of these actions are not safe from […]

Introduction The concept of reproductive negligence is probably not unfamiliar to men and women of child-bearing or child-begetting age. Many a restless hour has been spent worrying about the consequences of a skipped pill, an abandoned condom, or some other form of contraceptive carelessness. The general rule in such circumstances is that the injured party […]

Introduction In the years since Citizens United v. FEC, corporate-political-spending disclosure has become an increasingly heated public policy issue. The portion of the Court’s opinion that championed shareholder rights to make decisions about corporate political speech generated a substantial, interdisciplinary literature, and shareholders responded by demanding political-spending disclosure through a bevy of shareholder proposals. However, […]

Introduction Policymakers and administrators periodically revise or jettison rules, enforcement priorities, and agency structures for a variety of reasons, from resource constraints to changes in administration. This is particularly the case when presidential administrations change, as evidenced, for example, by the transition from President Carter to President Reagan. As the current U.S. presidency undergoes one […]

Introduction Just Relationships develops a novel theory of private law for a liberal legal order. It argues that private law assumes the moral responsibility to determine just terms of interactions among private persons. Its most basic organizing ideas are substantive freedom and equality. We are grateful to Professors John Gardner, Robin West, and Benjamin Zipursky […]

Introduction The best laid plans of mice and men go oft astray. For many years, John and Mary have carefully used birth control in order to pursue their joint careers as rising academics, and at the same time, realize (in summertime getaways) their major passions for explor­ing ancient civilizations and sites of Renaissance art and […]

Introduction Professor Dov Fox’s comprehensive, deeply meditated essay, Reproductive Negligence, argues convincingly that the laws of tort, contract, and property severally and jointly fail to govern the promises and perils of modern reproductive technologies in an acceptable way. Our “legal system . . . treats heedlessly switched sperm, lost embryos, and misdiag­nosed fetuses not as misconduct that it […]

Introduction Hanoch Dagan and Avihay Dorfman believe that theoretical work on private law has become too polarized. Ranged on one side, there are those who “conceptualize private law as a set of regulatory strategies with no . . . unique moral significance.” On the other side are those who associate private law with “values that dissociate it entirely […]

Introduction Emerging technologies promise to expedite administrative rulemaking by analyzing public input through computerized natural lan­guage rather than clunky, old human brains. Moving far beyond software that keyword searches and deduplicates content, natural language pro­cessing (as a type of predictive coding) employs artificial intelligence that adapts and modulates depending on inputs, rendering it fluid and […]

Introduction Professors Hanoch Dagan and Avihay Dorfman’s article Just Relationships is a fundamental reinterpretation of the moral ideals of large swaths of private law. Its significance, however, may go beyond even that broad ambition. In this Response, I suggest that Just Relationships is also an exemplar—perhaps par excellence—of an emergent form of critical discourse, which […]