The University of Chicago Legal Forum

List of Papers (Total 1,280)

International Borders: Yours, Mine, and Ours

International borders have become divisive issues in international and domestic politics. They have also become sites where the human rights of vulnerable persons have increasingly been documented as at risk. Policies of border hardening in the face of growing human mobility and other external threats—real and imagined—have made international borders focal sites of conflict at...

Borders and Boundaries in Markets: A Sociocognitive Approach for Market Definition and Implications for Antitrust

Categorical distinctions are foundational to firm competition and regulation. Yet, market categories are notoriously difficult to define. The question of how to delineate markets is well-worn in the antitrust literature but is now the focus of a growing sociocognitive literature in strategy and organizational sociology.1 Historically, there has been little cross-pollination...

The Neglected Value of Effective Government

Democratic systems inevitably seek to reflect and realize a range of values. But democratic and legal theory in recent decades have given too little attention and weight to the value and importance of delivering effective government. Much of democratic theory and legal scholarship on democracy focuses on values such as political equality, fair representation, democratic...

Cross-Border Influencers: Democracy and Externalities

This Article explores the fact that United States law permits domestic crossborder political influences while restricting foreign interference in elections. It tries to show that the law is inconsistent in trying to balance its faith in democracy (in a given jurisdiction) with its concern for externalities. Laws forbidding all cross-border attempts to influence politics would...

The Border’s Migration

The border has never played a larger role in the American psyche than it does today, and yet it has never been less legally significant. Today, a noncitizen’s place of residence tells you less about what rights and privileges they enjoy than it ever has in the past. The border has migrated inward, affecting many aspects of non-citizens’ lives in the United States. The divergence...

Borders that Bend

Borders do not exist. They are made and remade. At every step, the law creates, moves, reforms, reproduces, and reinforces the border. Focusing on the boundary that México and the United States share, this essay critiques the U.S. Supreme Court’s privileging of the sovereign prerogative to control access to the nation’s territory. In their efforts to control movement across and...

Deploying Trustworthy AI in the Courtroom: Lessons from Examining Algorithm Bias in Redistricting AI

Deploying trustworthy AI is an increasingly pressing and common concern. In a court of law, the challenges are exacerbated by the confluence of a general lack of expertise in the judiciary and the rapid speed of technological advancement. We discuss the obstacles to trustworthy AI in the courtroom through a discussion that focuses on the legal landscape surrounding electoral...

A New Global Corporate Regulatory Power?: Market Entry as the Basis for Prescriptive Jurisdiction

The rules of international economic law are changing. In a range of areas, governments are asserting that if a multinational firm touches the state’s market, the state can claim the authority to regulate the firm everywhere. This departure from multilateral economic coordination and towards more unilateral regulatory power over firms’ global operations represents an important...

The Gravity of Legal Diffusion

A persistent empirical finding is that bilateral trade between two countries is proportional to the size of their economies and inversely proportional to their geographic distance. We hypothesize that a similar pattern is likely to hold for the diffusion of laws. We specifically argue that countries’ propensity to update their laws to converge with the leading regulator in a...

Dividing the Body Politic

It has long been assumed in large, modern, democratic states that the successful practice of democratic politics requires some kind of internal division of the polity into subunits. In the United States, the appropriate methods and justifications for doing so have long been deeply and inconclusively contested. One reason for the intractability of these disputes is that American...

The Case Against Reason-Based Abortion Bans

By Gray Sutton, Published on 04/21/23

No Money Allowed

By Kimberly D. Krawiec, Published on 04/21/23

Donorsexuality After Dobbs

For the better part of a century, the United States Supreme Court has issued a series of decisions, “the underlying premise of [which is] that the Constitution protects ‘the right of the individual . . . to be free from unwarranted governmental intrusion into . . . the decision whether to bear or beget a child.’”1 The most controversial line of such decisions, protecting from...

Bringing Up the Bodies

Allow me to begin with a scene from one of my favorite novels of the last twenty years. The novel is Hilary Mantel’s Bring Up the Bodies, 1 the second in her award-winning trilogy of historical novels about Thomas Cromwell and King Henry VIII.2 By the start of Bring Up the Bodies, King Henry VIII has had his first marriage annulled and is now married to Anne Boleyn. Indeed, Anne...

Managing and Monitoring the Menopausal Body

This Essay explores how menopausal bodies are managed and monitored in contemporary U.S. culture. The focus is on two distinct aspects of that management and monitoring: menopausal hormone therapy (MHT) and the burgeoning market for technology-driven menopause products and services. While each of these allegedly improves the menopause experience, a closer investigation reveals a...

Black Masculinity and the Government

By Paul Butler, Published on 04/21/23