Author: Matthew Lutz

Felix Mormann & Milica Mormann  Capital markets are cast as both villain and hero in the climate playbill. The trillions of dollars required to combat climate change leave ample room for heroics from the financial sector. For the time being, however, capital continues to flow readily toward fossil fuels and other carbon-intensive industries. Drawing on the results of an empirical study, this Article posits that ratings of corporate climate risk and governance can help overcome pervasive information asymmetries and nudge investors toward more climate-conscious investment choices with welfare-enhancing effects.  Full Article.

Joseph Avery  In 2018, an autonomous Uber vehicle hit and killed a pedestrian. Although  autonomous, the vehicle was not driverless: the onboard artificial intelligence (AI) had handed off control to a safety driver at the last second. “Handed off”—a just-launched National Highway Traffic Safety Administration investigation into Tesla is focusing on this very issue. After all, like many socio-technical systems, semi- and fully autonomous vehicles are designed so that decision-making can be handed off from a machine to a human operator. This is worrisome because decades of human factors research have shown that people perform poorly under such conditions. When situated in the handoff recipient role, humans suffer from a combination of four linked issues: complacency, inattention, skill atrophy, and automation bias (i.e., over-trust in the machine).  Full Article.

Alanna Ostby Since 1791, the Constitution of the United States has guarded the rights of the criminal defendant. Those rights include the right to an attorney, the right to a speedy trial, the right to confront witnesses against him—and the list continues. Perhaps most notably the Constitution provides that “no person shall be . . . deprived of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law.” The Supreme Court has interpreted “due process” to include several freestanding rights, among them the right to be presumed innocent until proven guilty, the right to an impartial tribunal, and the right to make the government prove its case beyond a reasonable doubt. Of course, all of these rights play a vital role in affording criminal defendants a fair trial and sustaining public…

Gideon Cionelo Maria stood outside her apartment, where she lived with her three youngchildren, scanning the packet of papers just handed to her by the process server. Although each page was littered with words and phrases she did not understand, the few she did comprehend made it clear that she was being sued by her credit card company. Maria had never been sued before nor had she ever heard of the Maricopa County Justice Court. But more importantly, this lawsuit was unexpected. Maria made most of her minimum payments, and she thought the credit card company had agreed to defer her missed payments when she spoke with them over the phone a few months earlier. Full Article.

Kole Lyons Consider the stories of two bakers: Bryan, a small business owner, who has developed his affinity for baking into a livelihood, and Jim, an employee working in his local grocery store’s bakery department. . . . Full Article.

Shayna Frieden On March 13, 2020, just after midnight, three plain-clothed officers broke down Breonna Taylor’s door with a battering ram to execute a search warrant. Breonna Taylor was in bed with her boyfriend, Kenneth Walker. Believing someone had broken in, Walker fired one shot from his licensed handgun, hitting an officer in the leg. The three officers immediately discharged thirty-two rounds, killing Breonna Taylor with six of those shots. Full Article.

John M. Yun App stores have become the subject of controversy and criticism within antitrust. For instance, app developers such as Spotify and Epic Games (creator of Fortnite) allege that Apple’s 30% cut of all sales in the App Store violates the antitrust laws and is indicative of monopoly power. The claim is that iPhone users are locked into Apple’s walled garden iOS platform, which frees Apple to engage in misconduct in the App Store “aftermarket” to the detriment of users and app developers. Full Article.

Felipe Jiménez This Article offers a theoretical framework for thinking about contract remedies. The argument starts from the distinction between rights and remedies in contract law. The distinction is consistent with the doctrinal structure of contract law in Western legal systems and with the available empirical evidence regarding contractual parties’ expectations. An adequate theory of contract remedies must start by taking this distinction seriously. The Article illustrates this point through an analysis of two influential views in the American law of contract remedies: Shiffrin’s analysis of the divergence between contract and promise, and Markovits and Schwartz’s defense of expectation damages. On the basis of the right-remedy distinction, the Article argues that contract remedies have two central roles: protecting both the integrity of the practice of contracting and the individuals who…

Derek E. Bambauer & Michael Risch The rise of algorithm-driven decision making enabled by Big Data has generated widespread concern among legal scholars. However, few critics have considered data on people’s existing preferences about the role of algorithms in decision systems. This Article uses empirical analysis of a novel, large dataset of consumer  surveys to elucidate those preferences. The surveys explore whether people prefer to have an algorithm or a human determine an outcome affecting their welfare in a range of representative scenarios with varying stakes. The Article examines how preferences change when one type of decisionmaker produces results that are more accurate, faster, cheaper, or that incorporate private personal information. And it analyzes anchoring effects from the initial assignment of a decisionmaker, along with interactions among these variables, to test how malleable views about…