Download of the Week
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The Download of the Week is Managing Legal Concepts: Maintenance, Modulation, Modification by Andrew S. Gold & Henry E. Smith. Here is the abstract: Functionalists, especially those inspired by American Legal Realism, downplay the importance of abstract concepts and their interrelations as playing a role in legal reasoning. Hence, they stress shallow, narrow, and isolated concepts in order…
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The Download of the Week is The Appellate Void by Andrew Coan. Here is the abstract: What would it actually look like for the executive branch to defy a court order? The standard picture involves a dramatic confrontation between the President and the Supreme Court. But recent events suggest a more mundane possibility that has been largely overlooked:…
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The Download of the Week is The Two Faces of Representation by Ashraf Ahmed. Here is the abstract: In pluralistic democracies, representation is the process that mediates difference and translates the preferences of free and equal citizens into political will. Despite broad judicial and scholarly agreement that representation is central to election law, the Supreme Court…
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The Download of the Week is Remedies in the Officer Removal Cases by Samuel L. Bray. Here is the abstract: When a federal officer challenges her removal by the president, what forms of interim relief and what final remedies are available? This Article considers those questions. It shows that the appropriate remedy for a prevailing officer will typically…
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The Download of the Week is Originalist Framing Of Free Speech Doctrine by Alexander Tsesis. Here is the abstract: The Supreme Court has increasingly signaled the importance of history and tradition to constitutional interpretation. Reliance on original meaning and understanding appears in a broad array of cases that stretch the gamut from abortion and gun rights. Often those…
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The Download of the Week is The Amended Statute by Jesse Cross. Here is the abstract: We live in a republic of amended statutes. In each Congress, our laws are amended tens of thousands of times. Individual statutes make amendments that number in the thousands. As a result, the amended statute has become the central democratic text of…
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The Download of the Week is Deepfake Torts: Emerging Tort Frameworks in U.S. Deepfake Regulation by Thomas Kadri & Sonja West . Here is the abstract: As deepfake technology becomes increasingly sophisticated and accessible, American lawmakers are responding with a flurry of urgent legislative action to addresses its potential harms. Our 50-state survey of proposed and…
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The Download of the Week is System and Tradition by Emily L. Sherwin. Here is the abstract: At least in the area of private law, most theoretical arguments in twentieth century American legal scholarship can be traced back in one way or another to the division between Formalists and Realists. Described very broadly, Realists located the essence…
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Justin Murray (New York Law School) has posted Brady's Shadow on SSRN. Here is the abstract: Scholars have spent sixty years documenting Brady v. Maryland’s failures—its materiality standard that licenses suppression of exculpatory evidence, its abandonment of defendants who plead guilty, its toothless enforcement. Yet these same critics celebrate Brady’s supposed grand promise, treating the decision’s…
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The Download of the Week is The Ordinary Meaning Bot: Simulating Human Surveys with LLMs by Johannes Kruse. Here is the abstract: This Comment shows how large language models (LLMs) can help courts discern the "ordinary meaning" of statutory terms. Instead of relying on expert-heavy corpus-linguistic techniques (Gries 2025), the author simulates a human survey with GPT-4o. Demographically…