Faculty Colloquia and Events

Joseph Fishkin Rucho v. Common Cause

Mechele Dickerson Lamps Plus Inc. v. Varela

Jeffrey Abramson Flowers v. Mississippi

Elizabeth Sepper American Legion v. American Humanist Association

The Corruption of Libertarianism: How a Philosophy of Freedom was Betrayed by Delusion and Greed

Drawing Board Luncheon - Susan C. Morse, Robots as Lawmakers, Robots as Lawbreakers (featuring TurboTax)

Andrew Young is the director of graduate students and a research fellow at the Free Market Institute. He is also professor of economics in the Jerry S. Rawls College of Business Administration at Texas Tech University. He is a co-editor of the journal Contemporary Economic Policy and an associate editor for the Southern Economic Journal. He earned his B.A. in economics from the College of the Holy Cross and his Ph.D. in economics from Emory University. Prior to joining Texas Tech University, he taught economics at West Virginia University, University of Mississippi and Emory University. Prof. Young is the author of more than 60 scholarly articles and book chapters. His primary fields of research are constitutional political economy, institutional economics, and economic development. His recent research focuses on the political economy of late antiquity and medieval Europe.

• What Constitutes a Constitutional Amendment Culture?

• HVLR SCT Comment -- Colloquium Version.pdf

Free Admission. Reception followed by panel on Shakespeare's "Twelfth Night" Panel members include David Kornhaber, Coordinator, AFTLS; David Kornhaber, Coordinator, AFTLS; Professors Angela Littwin, UT Law; James Loehlin, Director, Shakespeare at Winedale, and the Spirit of Shakespeare's players.

• Prisoners of Politics: Breaking the Cycle of Mass Incarceration

The Law and Philosophy Seminar Workshop surveys different topics in legal philosophy and constitutional theory. Organized around a series of workshops, each features a different leading scholar who presents and discusses their own work with UT law and philosophy faculty and the students in the seminar.

• Dworkin on Special Rights

Justin Collings is Professor of Law at the J. Reuben Clark Law School at Brigham Young University where he teaches constitutional law and torts. He is the author of Democracy’s Guardians: A History of the German Federal Constitutional Court, 1951-2001 (Oxford University Press, 2015) and Scales of Memory: Constitutional Justice and the Burdens of the Past (forthcoming, Oxford University Press, 2020). He holds doctorates in law and history from Yale and clerked for the Honorable Guido Calabresi on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit.

• Constitutional Justice and Collective Memory

"It's Good to Have the 'Haves' on Your Side: A Defense of Repeat Players in Multidistrict Litigation" (with Andrew D. Bradt) -- forthcoming Georgetown L. J. 2019

ABSTRACT

Repeat players in multidistrict litigation (MDL) get a bad rap. When thousands of cases from all over the country are consolidated for pretrial proceedings, it's no wonder that the judge assigned to manage the litigation picks experienced lawyers to lead the effort. But critics argue that the small group of elite lawyers who show up again and again in leadership positions on the plaintiffs’ side of MDLs can collude with each other and with repeat players on the defense side to restrict competition and shape the rules of the game to their advantage—all to the detriment of the one-shotter clients that they represent. Those criticisms have gotten louder as MDL has grown to make up more than one-third of the federal civil docket and encompass some of the nation’s largest controversies, such as the opioid epidemic, the BP oil spill, the NFL concussion litigation, and many defective product cases. In this Article, we challenge this narrative, drawing on Marc Galanter’s seminal explanation for why the haves” come out ahead in litigation. Although the risks they pose are real, we argue that repeat players add significant value when they represent one-shotter plaintiffs, and that value may be worth running the risks. We show how MDL’s unique structure—its formal commitment to individualism but functional operation as a tight aggregation—allows repeatplayer plaintiffs’ lawyers to “play for rules” more effectively than either the class action or traditional one-on-one litigation. And with potential reforms to MDL procedure on the agendas of both the Advisory Committee on Civil Rules and Congress, we urge policymakers and scholars not to lose sight of the significant benefits to plaintiffs of having repeat players on their side.

• It's Good to Have the "Haves" on Your Side: A Defense of Repeat Players in Multidistrict Litigation (with A. Bradt) -- forthcoming Georgetown LJ 2019

• Anticipating Venezuela’s Debt Crisis: Hidden Holdouts and the Problem of Pricing Collective Action Clauses
• Gulati_Figures for Hidden Holdouts 9-2-20191.pdf

• Shahshahani-Fact-Law Distinction.pdf

Julie Chi-hye Suk is dean for master’s programs and professor of Sociology, Political Science, and Liberal Studies at the City University of New York (CUNY) – The Graduate Center. She is a scholar of comparative law and society, with a focus on women in comparative constitutional law. Her scholarship brings a global constitutional perspective to the new efforts to ratify the Equal Rights Amendment in the United States. Her book on these themes, We the Women: The Forgotten Mothers of the Equal Rights Amendment, will be published in 2020.

Professor Suk has authored dozens of scholarly articles and book chapters in law reviews and peer-reviewed journals. Prior to joining The Graduate Center, Dr. Suk was a law professor for 13 years at Cardozo Law School in New York, with visiting professorships at the law schools of Harvard, Columbia, University of Chicago, and UCLA. She has lectured widely in the United States and Europe, and has been a visiting fellow at the European University Institute in Florence and LUISS-Guido Carli in Rome. In addition to master’s and doctoral degrees in politics from Oxford University, she holds a J.D. from Yale Law School and an A.B. in English and French Literature from Harvard University.

She has served as the section chair of the Association of American Law Schools’ sections on Employment Discrimination, Comparative Law, and European Law. She is on the Board of the National Center for Access to Justice.

• We the Women: The Forgotten Mothers of the Equal Rights Amendment

Equitable Wrongs in Modern American Law

• Equitable Wrongs in Modern American Law

"Politics, Identity, and Class Certification on the U.S. Courts of Appeals" (with Stephen B. Burbank)

ABSTRACT

This article draws on novel data and presents the results of the first empirical analysis of how potentially salient characteristics of Court of Appeals judges influence precedential lawmaking on class certification under Rule 23. We find that the partisan composition of the panel (measured by the party of the appointing president) has a very strong association with certification outcomes, with all-Democratic panels having more than double the certification rate of all-Republican panels in precedential cases. We also find that the presence of one African American on a panel, and the presence of two females (but not one), is associated with pro-certification outcomes. Contrary to conventional wisdom in the scholarship on diversity on the bench, such diversity may be consequential to lawmaking beyond policy areas conventionally thought to be of particular concern to women and racial minorities.

Class action doctrine is a form of trans-substantive procedural law that traverses many policy areas. The effects of gender and racial diversity on the bench, through making more procertification law, radiate widely across the legal landscape, influencing implementation of consumer, securities, labor and employment, antitrust, prisoner’s rights, public benefits, and many other areas of law. The results highlight how the consequences of diversity extend beyond conceptions of “women’s issues” or “minority issues.” The results also suggest the importance of exploring the effects of diversity on trans-substantive procedural law more generally.

• "Politics, Identity, and Class Certification on the U.S. Courts of Appeals" (with Stephen B. Burbank)

The Law and Philosophy Seminar Workshop surveys different topics in legal philosophy and constitutional theory. Organized around a series of workshops, each features a different leading scholar who presents and discusses their own work with UT law and philosophy faculty and the students in the seminar.

• Nonlegislative Justification -Against Legalist Moral Theory.pdf

Making Sense of Batterton

• Making Sense of Batterton

Human Rights and Global Inequality: Law, History, Politics

Drawing Board Luncheon - Abigail Moncrieff

• Why Does it Matter Who Remits? Evidence from a Natural Experiment Involving Airbnb and Hotel Taxes

Michael Pal is an Associate Professor in the Faculty of Law at the University of Ottawa and one of Canada’s leading experts on the law of democracy and comparative constitutional law. He has a J.D. and a doctorate from the University of Toronto Faculty of Law, where he was a Trudeau Foundation Scholar, and an LL.M in Legal Theory from NYU. He is currently at work on a manuscript on the comparative constitutional politics of election commissions. He was the constitutional advisor for Ontario’s recent campaign finance reforms and is active advising election commissions and constitutional drafters in Asia and Africa.

• Constitutional Design of Political Rights

• Pay to Play? Campaign Finance and the Incentive Gap in the Right to Cousel

Colloquium for the Current Issues in Complex Litigation course with guest speaker Brian Fitzpatrick.

• Incentivizing Lawyers as Teams

Public Rights and Non-Article III Adjudication

• Public Rights and Non-Article III Adjudication

The Law and Philosophy Seminar Workshop surveys different topics in legal philosophy and constitutional theory. Organized around a series of workshops, each features a different leading scholar who presents and discusses their own work with UT law and philosophy faculty and the students in the seminar.

• Artificial Normativity - Early Draft.pdf

The Department of Government at the University of Texas at Austin will hold the sixth annual Graduate Conference in Public Law on October 24-25, 2019. Reflecting the growing prominence of public law in political science, the conference will provide a forum to engage with common questions in the field.

The conference will consist of thematic panels, each featuring 4 papers and comments by a faculty discussant. Julie Novkov, Professor and Chair of Political Science and Professor of Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at the University at Albany, SUNY, will deliver the keynote address the evening of October 24 in the School of Law.

Human Rights and Global Inequality: Law, History, Politics

Breakfast with BG Susan Escallier.

• Informed Consent and Medical Artificial Intelligence Oct 12.pdf
• Informed Consent and Medical Artificial Intelligence Oct 12.pdf

• Selective Incentives

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• Erichson -- Aggregation as Disempowerment_ Red Flags in Class Action Settlements -- no cover sheet.pdf

Professor Yvonne Tew writes and teaches in the areas of constitutional law, comparative constitutional law, and religion and law. Prior to joining the Georgetown Law faculty, she taught at Columbia Law School as an Associate-in-Law and was a Hauser Global Research Fellow at the New York University School of Law. She completed her Ph.D. at the University of Cambridge as a Gates Cambridge Scholar. Professor Tew received her first law degree from the University of Cambridge graduating with Double First Class Honors in 2007 and completed her Master of Laws (LL.M.) from Harvard Law School. Her scholarship has been published or is forthcoming in the Virginia Journal of International Law, Columbia Journal of Transnational Law, Washington International Law Journal, American Journal of Comparative Law, Cambridge Law Journal, and in several book collections published by Oxford University Press, Cambridge University Press and Edward Elgar Publishing.

• Constitutional Statecraft in Asian Courts

The Law and Philosophy Seminar Workshop surveys different topics in legal philosophy and constitutional theory. Organized around a series of workshops, each features a different leading scholar who presents and discusses their own work with UT law and philosophy faculty and the students in the seminar.

• The Relevance of Deliberative Freedom

RETHINKING JUSTICE IN EDUCATION: FROM EQUALITY OF OPPORTUNITY TO DISTRIBUTIVE EQUITY

• RETHINKING JUSTICE IN EDUCATION: FROM EQUALITY OF OPPORTUNITY TO DISTRIBUTIVE EQUITY

Human Rights and Global Inequality: Law, History, Politics

Drawing Board Luncheon - Abe Wickelgren, Contractual Conditions (co-author Ian Ayres)

• Discovery and Settlement When Evidence Falsication is Possible

Professor David Landau is the Mason Ladd Professor and Associate Dean for International Programs at Florida State University College of Law. He is the co-author, with Manuel Jose Cepeda Espinosa, of Colombian Constitutional Law, co-editor, with David Bilchitz, of The Evolution of the Separation of Powers, and co-editor with Hanna Lerner of Comparative Constitution-Making. He has published in various journals including the University of Chicago Law Review, the Iowa Law Review, and the Harvard Journal of International Law. Since 2012, he has been a founding editor of IConnect, the blog of the International Journal of Constitutional Law.

• Abusive Judicial Review: Courts Against Democracy

• Are women people? No, my son, criminals, lunatics and women are not people Alice Duer Miller, A Book of Rhymes for Suffrage Times

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• Carroll - Compensation for Risk draft - 2019-10-15.pdf

Professor Rivka Weill of the Harry Radzyner Law School, IDC, was a Visiting Law Professor at Cardozo Law School (2016-2017), David R. Greenbaum and Laureine Knight Greenbaum Distinguished Visiting Professor of Law at University of Chicago Law School (Fall 2017) and Visiting Law Professor at Yale Law School (Spring 2018). In recent years, she received three times the IDC’s “Best Researcher in Law School” award (2012, 2015, 2017) as well as the IDC’s “Best Lecturer in Law School” award (2010). Her work focuses on constitutional law as well as administrative law with a focus on theoretical and comparative dimensions.

• From Earl Grey to Boris Johnson: Brexit and the Anglo-American Constitutional Model

• Civil Servant Disobedience

The Law and Philosophy Seminar Workshop surveys different topics in legal philosophy and constitutional theory. Organized around a series of workshops, each features a different leading scholar who presents and discusses their own work with UT law and philosophy faculty and the students in the seminar.

• Normative Uncertainty and Normative Powers - Working Draft.pdf

Human Rights and Global Inequality: Law, History, Politics

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The Law and Philosophy Seminar Workshop surveys different topics in legal philosophy and constitutional theory. Organized around a series of workshops, each features a different leading scholar who presents and discusses their own work with UT law and philosophy faculty and the students in the seminar.

• Beyond Textualism - Austin draft.pdf