No. 4

PROTECTING RELIANCE

Victor P. Goldberg*

Reliance plays a central role in contract law and scholarship. One party relies on the other’s promised performance, its statements, or its anticipated entry into a formal agreement. Saying that reliance is important, however, says nothing about what we should do about it. The focus of this Essay is on the many ways that parties choose to protect reliance. The relationship...

TORT LAW VS. PRIVACY

Eugene Volokh*

Tort law is often seen as a tool for protecting privacy. But tort law can also diminish privacy, by pressuring defendants to gather sensitive information about people, to install comprehensive surveillance, and to disclose information. And the pressure is growing, as technology makes surveillance and other information gathering more cost effective and thus more likely...

The Social Security Administration’s Disability Insurance program encompasses a mammoth adjudicatory and appellate process, rivaling in size the entire federal judiciary. The SSDI is principally governed by validly promulgated regulations, but the SSA also uses an internal manual—“HALLEX”—to provide more detailed rules and guidance to its adjudicators and...

Vouching, which developed out of the Supreme Court’s desire to protect the jury’s right to evaluate credibility, traditionally forbids prosecutorial statements designed to enhance or attest to the credibility of a government witness. This Note examines a flavor of vouching unique to cases involving cooperating witnesses. Prior to testifying, cooperating witnesses...

All theories of statutory interpretation rely on an idea of how Congress operates. A commonly held supposition among scholars is that the procedures used in the creation of legislation are unsophisticated and almost anarchic. This supposition exists because scholars generally give little consideration to the underlying actors and their evolving roles in the drafting...