On the first Monday in October, the Supreme Court session opens. Each fall, the University of Chicago Law School invites faculty members to offer insight into some of the issues the Court will hear in the upcoming year. This event was recorded on September 15, 2020, and features Aziz Huq, Frank and Bernice J. Greenberg Professor of Law, and Jennifer Nou, Professor of Law.

"The Trust Revolution: How the Digitization of Trust Will Revolutionize Business & Government" In this CBI, Professor Henderson will examine how Internet platforms--eBay, Uber, AirBnB--relate to the Code of Hammurabi, Medieval guilds, the New York Stock Exchange, and corporate brands. All of these institutions, along with religions and governments and families, are in large part about providing trust to enable human cooperation. By undertaking a genealogy of trust, we can illuminate...

The 1951 Refugee Convention and its 1967 Protocol are among the most important human rights documents of the post-WW II period. Yet the universalization of the refugee status after the 1967 Protocol has given rise to a series of discrepancies between the letter of the Convention and the purposes it is being asked to serve. In particular, the five-protected categories specified by the Convention have come under criticism. There are also tensions between the Eurocentric discourse and...

"Chief Justice John Roberts: Defining the Supreme Court as its Leader and at the Center" Joan Biskupic is a full-time CNN legal analyst and author of a 2019 biography of Chief Justice John Roberts. Before joining CNN in 2017, Biskupic was an editor-in-charge for Legal Affairs at Reuters and, previously, the Supreme Court correspondent for the Washington Post and for USA Today. This Ulysses and Marguerite Schwartz Memorial Lecture was presented on November 19, 2019.

One of Chicago’s Best Ideas was the Coase Theorem, which reminds us daily that people can bargain around law or even before legal intervention is sought. But do we have too much law and too little bargaining around it? The number of cases and judges has grown dramatically over time and many problems are outsourced to the legal system, rather than being handled person-to-person. In this talk, I will consider conventional explanations for the astonishing growth of the legal system, and then...

On the first Monday in October, the Supreme Court session opens. Each fall, the University of Chicago Law School invites faculty members to offer insight into some of the issues the Court will hear in the upcoming year. This year we heard from William Baude, Professor of Law and Aaron Director Research Scholar, and Anthony J. Casey, Professor of Law. Recorded on October 15, 2019, at The Standard Club in Chicago.

This keynote for the 2018 Legal Forum Symposium was recorded on November 2, 2018. Valerie B. Jarrett is a Distinguished Senior Fellow at the Law School and former senior advisor to President Barack Obama. Emily Buss is the Mark and Barbara Fried Professor of Law at the Law School.

One of the University of Chicago Law School’s best known ideas or outputs over the last fifty years is that the common law (made by judges and often passed down and adapted over many years) is efficient. It was an idea advanced by Richard Posner, with respect to tort law, in his time as a professor here, but it is also reflected in his and other judicial opinions which students across the country meet in almost every non-constitutional course. What does this idea really mean, and is it...

Supreme Court decisions affecting the constitutional rights of students in the nation's public schools have consistently generated bitter controversy. From racial segregation to unauthorized immigration, from antiwar protests to compulsory flag salutes, from economic inequality to teacher-led prayer: these are among the defining cultural issues that the Court has addressed in elementary and secondary schools. Drawing from his provocative new book, The Schoolhouse Gate, Justin Driver discusses...

Does legal education matter? In this lecture, Professor Todd Henderson presents some data on this question, using the behavior of corporate executives as an instrument. Looking at the 10% of large, public company CEOs who are lawyers, the talk tries to determine whether CEOs trained as lawyers act differently than CEOs trained in other ways. Do lawyer CEO firms get sued more or less or the same as other firms? Do they manage litigation differently? And, if they do, what is the impact on the...

The choice of new benchmark interest rate should be of special importance to practitioners as well as academics that study law and economics. As new alternative rates are being considered in the United States, this half day conference, co-sponsored by the University of Chicago Law School, brought together leading academics, as well as representatives from banks, law firms, swap dealers, regulators and others to share their views on design and implementation of new indexes in loan documents,...

With commentary by Professor Jonathan Masur John G. Malcolm oversees The Heritage Foundation’s work to increase understanding of the Constitution and the rule of law as director of the think tank’s Edwin Meese III Center for Legal and Judicial Studies. In addition to his duties at Heritage, Malcolm is chairman of the Criminal Law Practice Group of the Federalist Society. Malcolm has previously served in both the public and private sectors. Among other positions, he has worked as general...

The idea that workplaces could benefit from an incest taboo is not one of Chicago’s best, but one of Margaret Mead’s. Professor Mary Anne Case has been promoting it and explaining its relevance to Title VII enforcement long before Harvey Weinstein and the #MeToo movement gave it new relevance and visibility. Mary Anne Case is the Arnold I. Shure Professor of Law. This Chicago's Best Ideas lecture was presented on February 21, 2018.

A central question in law and economics is how people will behave in the presence of legal rules. An essential part of that inquiry is what makes people happy or unhappy – what increases or decreases their “subjective well-being.” There is ample evidence that individuals make decisions based in part on what they believe will improve their well-being. In order to understand how legal rules will influence behavior, it is thus vital to understand how those rules will affect happiness. More...

Interpreting the language of contracts is the most common and least satisfactory task courts perform in contract disputes. In this Chicago’s Best Ideas lecture Professor Strahilevitz proposes to take much of this task out of the hands of lawyers and judges, entrusting it instead to the public. Strahilevitz’s research (written jointly with Professor Ben-Shahar) develops and tests a novel regime — the “survey interpretation method” — in which interpretation disputes are resolved though large...

This lecture defends three main theses: (I) that all decisions about the degree of ambition for emissions mitigation are unavoidably also decisions about how to distribute risk across generations and, more specifically, (II) that the less ambitious the mitigation is, the more inherently objectionable the resulting inter-generational risk distribution is, and (III) that mitigation that is so lacking in ambition that it bequeaths risks that remain unlimited, when the risks could have been...

On the first Monday in October, the Supreme Court session opens. Professors Adam Chilton, Aziz Huq, and Daniel Hemel offer insight into some of the issues the Court will hear in the upcoming year. Recorded on September 18, 2017, in Washington, DC.

With commentary by Professor Daniel Hemel Professor Nielson is a law professor at Brigham Young University and teaches/writes in the areas of administrative law, civil procedure, federal courts, and antitrust. Before joining the faculty, Professor Nielson was a partner in the Washington, D.C. office of Kirkland & Ellis LLP. He also has served as a law clerk to Justice Samuel A. Alito, Jr. of the U.S. Supreme Court, Judge Janice Rogers Brown of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C....

Featuring Professors Nancy Chi Cantalupo, Katharine Baker, Daniel Hemel, and Richard Epstein. Moderated by Professor Emily Buss. Presented by the Domestic and Sexual Violence Project, Defenders, Law Women's Caucus, Education and Child Advocacy Society, and UChicago Assault Awareness and Prevention Committee, and funded in part by Student Government.

Gillian Thomas, staff attorney at the ACLU Women's Rights Project, will discuss issues in her recently-published book, Because of Sex: One Law, Ten Cases, and Fifty Years about Title VII and its effects for women in the workplace. The book details ten important Supreme Court cases for women's equality, and spends as much time on the personal details as the legal ones for an extremely compelling read. As Title VII is one of the most important safeguards for women and helps ensure gender...

The choice between rules and standards in lawmaking is a central question. But the line between the two forms is not as clear as most scholars presume. This talk argues that the lack of a coherent unifying principle in the rules-and-standards distinction is becoming more evident as technologies behind lawmaking evolve. It will explore the leading accounts of rules and standards, the insights they have provided into the process and meaning of law, and why the distinction may be reaching the...

Professor Lash graduated from Yale Law School and served as law clerk to the Honorable Robert R. Beezer of the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit. Afterward, he joined the University of Illinois from Loyola Law School Los Angeles, where he served as the James P. Bradley Chair of Constitutional Law. His recent book, The Lost History of the Ninth Amendment, was published in 2009 by Oxford University Press. Cambridge University Press will publish his second book, American...

"A Different Kind of Supreme Court? Empirical Study of the Supreme Court of India" Part of Chicago's intellectual tradition is a willingness to take nothing for granted. Comparative study of legal institutions often reveals to us exactly how much we take for granted in the design of our legal institutions. Take the US Supreme Court: Why nine justices? Why does the president, and not the current justices, appoint new justices? Why do they sit en banc in every case, rather than sitting in...

One of the great Chicago Ideas is the equivalence of positive and negative incentives. The government can motivate you by rewarding some behavior or by penalizing your failure to behave in the preferred manner. Private parties rarely have the authority to hit you with sticks, so they must usually begin with carrots, or positive inducements, unless law offers torts or other negative inducements in the background. But things quickly get more complicated. Rewards might draw people to an...