It's also an open debate whether blind is better than unblind. There are real pros and real cons for both. Blind peer review can sink good work because of petty opinions, dogmatism, jealousy, etc. In unblinded review, people will at least take a beat to think before saying anything unfair.
A platform with a price of admission: for every paper you submit you are required to peer-review three others. Every journal on the platform has access to all the peer reviews. Ideally fully unblinded.
Congratulations! Looks like an interesting paper!
I am thrilled that my latest article, The Dirty Work of Executioners is forthcoming in the UC Irvine Law Review! The acknowledgment footnote here is long—so many people encouraged and inspired me, and asked me hard questions that made my work better. Draft coming soon to SSRN…
The other day, a friend sent a five-line text (about 50 words). An AI bubble popped up to ask if I wanted the text summarized. Who asked for this?
This is only half on-topic, but does anyone know why law reviews tend to be coy about how many submissions they receive? It's rare to find an editor who's willing to say whether it's 2,000 or 4,000 or what. Is there an upside to treating the number as a state secret?
very aspect of life in this country is designed so that people do not form bonds or relationships with other people, it's wild to watch in action. Never seen divide and conquer applied this rigorously to a domestic population that is not under foreign occupation
Excited to share two projects, forthcoming in the Minnesota Law Review and the Notre Dame Law Review, about federal courts’ increasing reliance on “external” factfinding of epistemically dubious provenance. (1/4)
Congratulations! Looks like 2027 will be the year of reading all my friends' books :) Seriously, though, this sounds incredible and I look forward to reading it.
Wow, these looks fascinating and I look forward to reading them! Was this the proverbial paper that turned out to be two papers? Congrats on two great placements!
Happy to share that Developmental Evidence Rules is forthcoming in the California Law Review! What would it mean to take childhood seriously in evidence law? This article takes up that question.
Well, strike that - this issue seems to be fixed! Thank you, @ssrn.bsky.social.
I've been wondering if the Google Scholar issue has to do with the missing metadata on SSRN's end. SSRN no longer shows where a paper is published, so what is Google supposed to do with that? @ssrn.bsky.social, any update on whether/when it's going to be fixed?
Great photo! Stay warm.
Judicial meekness? Judicial apathy?
Working on Restoring Justice kept me grounded this past year, so I share it w/ excitement & some nervousness.
Written w/ Meredith Elizalde, whose son Nick was killed in a shooting at his high school, we argue for a right to restorative justice.
papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers....
Thank you! This was such a diverse and multi-interested crowd. I really enjoyed your talk, too. What a great conference.
Screenshot of pearlmania's post, showing up in the "Quiet Posters" feed
I wonder if this was what the makers of Quiet Posters had in mind ;-)
First time presenting this work to a room of scientists. General reaction to learning about how science is evaluated for use in court: 🤯
This was a banger of a talk.
Everything is ready for the Perspectives on Scientific Error conference that starts tomorrow in Leiden! I look forward to hanging out with the mix of metascientists, philosophers of science, and statisticians! So many old friends will be there (and hopefully some new ones)! #PSE8
My latest article with the one and only @spenceroverton.bsky.social called “Digital Ethnonationalism” forthcoming in University of Pennsylvania Law Review. Here is the papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers....
Wow, congratulations!!
Thrilled to share that 𝐺𝑢𝑖𝑙𝑡 𝑏𝑦 𝑃𝑎𝑟𝑒𝑛𝑡ℎ𝑜𝑜𝑑 has found a home with the Yale Law Journal. This piece examines parental liability regimes and parental rights, and how they are connected by a shared logic that harms children and families. Thank you to all those who read drafts and offered feedback!
This paper came from a fascination with how lawyers try to game the system in litigation and how judges sometimes accept it and sometimes do not. This paper examines the concept of gamesmanship and how courts use it to shape litigants' strategic maneuvering room.
In civil litigation, strategy is everywhere. Some of it is explicitly envisioned by rules of procedure, but other forms of strategy rely more on clever exploitation of gaps in the rules, sometimes through trickery, surprise, or psychological mind games. The role strategy plays in civil litigation is underexamined, which raises two concerns: first, this lack of attention entrenches strategy by default as a procedural value in competition with accuracy, efficiency, and other procedural values. Second, it amplifies the disadvantages experienced by unrepresented litigants. This Article builds on earlier work to examine how courts shape the space that litigants have for strategic behavior, in service of an inquiry into how that space ought to be shaped. Battles over the meaning and rightful place of strategy in civil litigation tend to play out in the arena of “gamesmanship,” a term courts use with increasing frequency to refer to behavior in the gray zone between the clearly allowed and the clearly disallowed. Strategic behavior in this realm is often unregulated by rules, only weakly governed by norms, and subject to significant judicial discretion. Judicial decisions in cases involving gamesmanship frequently expose tensions between respect for zealous advocacy and concerns about fairness and accuracy. This Article makes two contributions to our understanding of the role of strategic behavior in civil litigation. First, it examines the meaning of “gamesmanship” in a litigation context and proposes a categorization of gamesmanlike litigation behavior. Second, it applies this categorization in describing how courts use the term “gamesmanship” and surveys and theorizes how they treat behavior they have thus labeled. I argue that the concept functions as three distinct analytical tools: (1) as an aspect of purposive statutory analysis; (2) as a canon of construction; and (3) as an implied mental-state element. The Article concludes by imagining a different approach.
NOT a recent acceptance but last Feb's paper now on SSRN, w/ many thanks to the excellent editors at Georgia L. Rev. Full paper: papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers....
(Newer paper still in the cycle & on a very different topic! Sci. ev., skeptics, democracy. On SSRN soon, but lmk if you want to read.)
Another new article of mine is officially out: “(Re)Individualizing Criminal Law,” (67 B.C L. Rev. 255 (2026): lnkd.in/eR9eF7Fv Abstract 👇 & v. short 🧵
1/6
Nobody asked for this!
Thermophilic bacterium at the bottom of a smoldering compost heap.
Screenshot of gmail settings for autocorrect: "Turn on smart features and personalization in Gmail, Chat, and Meet to use autocorrect"
How manipulative is this? If you turn off gmail's AI summaries (that nobody asked for), no autocorrect for you.
