Past Issues

By Kara Bruce, Christopher K. Odinet & Andrea Tosato.  Stablecoins are one of the cornerstones of the crypto world. They’ve attracted significant attention from major players over the past few years, ranging from Wall Street to kitchen-table investors, and even the White House. As a less volatile alternative to crypto-assets like bitcoin, stablecoins have the potential to change the way we make payments, unlock the groundwork needed for more blockchain-based applications, and even reorient the economy toward private money. But how stable are these atablecoins, really? Can they be relied upon in the way their many proponents claim? And how much of the popular beliefs about stablecoins match their realities? That’s where we come in. In this Article, we show, for the first time, just how unreliable and unstable this…

By Nikita Aggarwal, D. Bondy Valdovinos Kaye & Christopher Odinet. Social media platforms are becoming an increasingly important site for consumer finance. This phenomenon is referred to as “FinTok,” a reference to the “#fintok” hashtag that often identifies financial content on TikTok, a popular social media platform. This Essay examines the new methodological possibilities for consumer financial regulation due to FinTok. It argues that FinTok content offers a novel and valuable source of data for identifying emerging fintech trends and associated consumer risks. As such, financial regulators should use FinTok content analysis—and social media content analysis more broadly—as an additional method for the supervision and regulation of consumer financial markets. This Essay test-drives this method using audiovisual content from TikTok in which consumers discuss their experience with “buy now, pay…

By Dewey Warner.  “Our planet is a lonely speck in the great enveloping cosmic dark. In our obscurity, in all this vastness, there is no hint that help will come from elsewhere to save us from ourselves.” Less than three decades after Carl Sagan penned this warning, the responsibility “to preserve and cherish . . . the only home we’ve ever known” is illuminated in stark and tragic fashion by the effects of a rapidly changing climate. Extreme weather events are more frequent and severe. A mass extinction is underway. Tens of millions face famine. A heightened risk of disease threatens the entire human population. The phrase “climate refugees” has entered the popular lexicon. Full Article.

By Arden Rowell and Kenworthey Bilz. Pollution control is fundamentally affected by how people evaluate the harm of pollution. In many legal contexts, psychological processes contribute to an intuitive undervaluation of the harms of pollution, particularly where those harms are diffuse in space and time, complex in character, and/or accrue to nonhuman stakeholders. Psychological processes that impact people’s perception, understanding, and response to pollution can therefore affect how—and how effectively—pollution is controlled. Understanding those psychological processes can thus pay explanatory and prescriptive dividends, including by informing how pollutants are defined, when pollution is tolerated, and how pollution control instruments operate.Full Article. 

By Rhett Larson & Dylan Hendel. Colonias are small, generally unincorporated communities of predominantly Hispanic residents located near the U.S./Mexico border that suffer disproportionately from water insecurity associated with inadequate drinking water quality and reliability and flooding risks. Many of the water insecurity challenges facing colonias’ residents stem from inadequacies in water law and environmental law. However, many legal obstacles to achieving water security in colonias stem from seemingly unrelated legal challenges, including voting rights, land title and land use issues, and lack of access to effective legal assistance, particularly in securing support from existing federal programs. Each of the four border states–Texas, New Mexico, Arizona, and California–have dealt with water insecurity challenges facing colonias in a variety of ways. In this article, we explore those challenges facing colonias’ residents in…

By Sean Krieg.   On April 1, 2021, the Second Circuit Court of Appeals told taxpayers to “shoulder[] the burden” of New York City’s climate mitigation expenses without any help from major fossil-fuel producers, marketers, or distributors. The court made this unfortunate assessment while affirming the dismissal of the City’s claims against oil and gas companies responsible for over eleven percent of all industrial methane and carbon pollution since the industrial revolution. The City had sued for financial assistance with the costs of protecting its residents from the impacts of the climate crisis—a crisis these companies played a major role in creating and aggravating. In its complaint, the City emphasized how these particular defendants deliberately obfuscated climate science to promote their products, despite their advanced understanding of the global harms resulting…

By Steven Ferrey. The much-lauded advantage of the U.S. federalist legal system of separation of legal powers among separate levels of federal, state, and local government is credited with seeding innovation, experimentation, and diversity as a positive variable in the resilient American legal system. Now, U.S. separation of power within the U.S. system of law poses a legal barrier to addressing climate change or rapidly transitioning to sustainable infrastructure. Inferior levels of state and local government now are placing their legal ‘thumb’ on and are legally blocking implementation of the recently enacted Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act (2021 Infrastructure Law) and the 2022 Inflation Reduction Act. This article analyzes elements supporting these legal barriers and relevant precedent. Concerning this most important sustainability legislation in a generation, successful implementation matters for the…

By John C. Dernbach and Scott E. Schang. In his enormously influential writings on the public trust doctrine, Professor Joe Sax argued that its core idea could, and should, be expanded beyond the natural resources to which it had been historically subject. He made that point forcefully in an essay entitled Liberating the Public Trust Doctrine from Its Historical Shackles. “At its heart,” he wrote, “the public trust doctrine is not just a set of rules about tidelands, a restraint on alienation by the government or an historical inquiry into the circumstances of long forgotten grants.” Rather, he said, courts should resolve competing claims of public use and private ownership by examining expectations concerning the use of particular resources. “The central idea of the public trust is preventing the destabilizing disappointment of…

By Keith H. Hirokawa, Cinnamon P. Carlarne, Karrigan S. Börk, & Sonya Ziaja. Although the needs of the public health, safety, and welfare vary across time and space, human survival requires functioning natural systems. It is no exaggeration to say that, either cumulatively or individually at a relevant scale, interruptions to ecosystems, atmospheric systems, the geosystem, or the hydrological cycle cause major disruptions in the ability of such systems to maintain the planet as a habitable place. Ensuring that natural systems are functional, limiting actions that disturb those systems, and maintaining important aspects of ecosystems as they respond to climate change, all seem appropriate targets for regulation and community empowerment. At this point in time, “[h]uman society has never had a more pressing need to understand its dependence on nature” and maintain…

Gregory C. Sisk & Michael Heise In our ongoing empirical examination of religious liberty decisions in the federal courts, extended now into a third decade, we find the persistence of ideological influence in Establishment Clause decisions for the period of 2006–2015. Because a non-partisan judiciary is essential to preserve the rule of law, we should sound the alarm when partisan influences appear to be weighting the outcome.At the same time, one might take comfort in a systematic narrowing of the partisan gap in this most recent ten-year period for our study. For 1996–2005, we had found an Establishment Clause claimant’s chances for success were approximately 2.25 times higher before a judge appointed by a Democratic President than one appointed by a Republican President. By this 2006–2015 period, the Establishment Clause claimant…