Scholarship

| Issue 87

David Freeman Engstrom on Qui tam

Qui tam—It’s not a term that many people can confidently pronounce, let alone define. But if Associate Professor David Freeman Engstrom, JD ’02, has his way, the qui tam lawsuit, which has enjoyed a recent renaissance, will soon be a 
serious topic of academic and policy debate. Engstrom has 
undertaken [...]

| Issue 87

Pamela S. Karlan and the Law of Democracy

“We took a bunch of areas of law that people had thought of as separate silos. We showed that there are important relationships between them and that you can gain a vantage point to critically view one from looking at another; there’s an ecosystem. There are political scientists, sociologists, historians, computer scientists, and people who study the actual physical process of voting, ballot design, and voting machines. Campaign finance and political structure. Super PACs. It’s all part of our democracy.”

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| Issue 86

Civil Rights 
in a New Light

Richard Thompson Ford’s opinion piece in The New York Times last fall was something of a cat among the pigeons. In the essay, based on his book Rights Gone Wrong: How Law Corrupts the Struggle for Equality, Ford suggested that civil rights litigation was hurting the cause. “But civil rights [...]

| Issue 86

The Death Penalty 
in the Hot Seat


John J. Donohue III, C. Wendell and Edith M. Carlsmith Professor of Law, has brought his economic expertise and empirical techniques to bear on a number of cutting-edge social issues. In stark contrast to many legal academics, whose work deals largely with the historical or theoretical, Donohue is renowned for [...]

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| Issue 85

Ralph Richard Banks

Should black women be held hostage to the failings of black men? That’s the provocative question at the heart of a new book by
 Ralph Richard Banks (BA ’87, MA ’87), the Jackson Eli Reynolds Professor of Law. His book—Is Marriage for White People?: How the African American Marriage Decline [...]

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| Issue 85

Alison D. Morantz

Alison D. Morantz has an orange hardhat and a block of bituminous coal 
in her office—keepsakes from visits she made to a gold mine and a coal mine several years ago. 
“I found it interesting,” she says, responding to a question about whether she was scared. The underground worlds were, [...]

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| Issue 84

Mark G. Kelman Views Heuristic Reasoning Through the Legal Lens

New York City’s Special Services for Children agency was in the midst of a severe financial crisis in 1976, with shrinking resources and rising need. Mark Kelman, fresh out of law school, was the director of criminal justice projects for the Fund for the City of New York. One of [...]

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| Issue 84

Barbara Babcock and Clara Foltz: First Women

Barbara Babcock feels very close to Clara Foltz, though the two have never met. Foltz was famous in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century as a jury lawyer, public intellectual, leader of the women’s movement, inventor of the role of public defender, and legal reformer. But her story was [...]

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| Issue 83

Linking Internet Architecture to Innovation

Barbara van Schewick’s recently published book Internet Architecture and Innovation is a modern-day Christmas Carol, with the ghost of the Internet past meeting a present and future much constrained by tinkering. Written for a broad, interdisciplinary audience, this is not an overly technical text. It is, rather, a guide through the [...]

| Issue 83

Deborah L. Rhode Tackles the Beauty Bias

Uncomfortable shoes trouble Deborah Rhode. And not only because they hurt. She’s concerned that ninety years after women got the vote and almost five decades after The Feminine Mystique was published—in a time dubbed “post-feminist” when women are now in the majority at universities and in the workforce (if not the [...]