This article proposes an explanation for the pervasiveness of convertible preferred stock as the security of choice for venture capital funds when investing in entrepreneurial ventures.

In the decade or so following World War II, employer-provided pension plans became common in private-sector employment in the United States. The prevalent type was the defined benefit (DB) plan, which typically provides the employee and his or her spouse with a lifetime retirement income, paid monthly, based upon a formula that commonly takes account of the employee's compensation and length of service with the employer. Another type, the defined contribution (DC) plan, was also in use, mostly as a second and supplementary plan for highly compensated employees. A DC plan is a savings program, often tax-favored, which provides an account for each participating employee, funded mainly by salary reduction contributions that the employee authorizes together with contributions from the employer and the investment experience on the account. Subject to age and other criteria required under the Internal Revenue Code and the plan's terms, the employee and spouse decide when and in what amounts to draw down on the account in retirement. If at the death of the survivor of them the DC account contains undistributed funds, that balance will pass to heirs or other beneficiaries. Into the early 1980s, DB plans covered about 85 percent of private-sector employees who had any pension coverage. In the years since, employers have retreated from offering DB plans, by terminating existing plans or closing ("freezing") them to new participants, while also ceasing to establish new DB plans. By 2003, only 33 percent of large employers provided DB plans. By 2015, only 3 percent of Fortune 500 employers offered traditional DB plans to newly hired employees. The "de-risking" wave, discussed below in Part III, is further diminishing the extent of the DB system. This article explores the question of what has caused this spectacular abandonment. The conventional understanding, summarized in Part II, attributes the demise of the DB system to large changes in economic conditions and employment patterns, together with the emergence of a viable DC alternative, the 401(k) plan. This article contends that the conventional account is incomplete, because it neglects the role of ERISA, the 1974 federal pension regulatory statute, in making DB plans too burdensome for employers to sustain. Part III discusses features of ERISA that have deterred employers from establishing or maintaining DB plans. Together with the changes reviewed in Part II, ERISA--although meant to promote DB plans--has had the effect of destroying the DB system in the United States.

One of the oldest debates in American jurisprudence concerns the concept of "proximate cause." According to so-called formalists, the legal concept of proximate cause is the same as the ordinary concept of "cause." The legal question of whether a cause is proximate for the purposes of establishing tort liability, therefore, is an objective matter about the external world determinable by familiar descriptive inquiry. By contrast, legal realists think that issues of proximate causation are disguised normative questions about responsibility. As the realists William Prosser and W. Page Keeton put it, proximate cause is better called "responsible cause." Recent work in cognitive science has afforded us new insights into the way people make causal judgments that were unavailable at the time of the original debate between formalists and realists. We now have access to the results of systematic experimental studies that examine the way people ordinarily think about causation and morality. This work opens up the possibility of a very different approach to understanding the role of causation in the law--one which combines the attractive features of both formalism and realism without accepting their implausible consequences. In addition to providing a model for interpreting the case law of proximate cause, this Article also introduces a new way of doing legal theory--a method we call "experimental jurisprudence." Experimental jurisprudence is the study of jurisprudential questions using empirical methods. Jurisprudential disputes about proximate cause are especially ripe for empirical analysis because the debate revolves around whether the legal concept of proximate cause is the same as the ordinary concept of causation. Interrogating the ordinary concept of causation, therefore, should shed light on this question.

In 1935, when the U.S. Supreme Court's new building opened and displayed the phrase "Equal Justice Under Law," racial segregation was commonplace, as were barriers limiting opportunities for men and women of all colors to participate in economic and political life. The justices on the Court and the lawyers appearing before them reflected those facts; almost all were white men. Today, the Supreme Court's inscription has become its motto, read as if it always referenced an understanding of equality that has become central to the identity and the legitimacy of courts. The judiciary "looks" somewhat different than it did and, in a sense, has become more "representative" of the range of people appearing in courts. Given the role that courts had played in sustaining discrimination, the impression that courts ought to welcome everyone is a major achievement. Yet, to assess the impact of new judicial demographics requires analysis of other major alterations in U.S. courts—the influx of diverse litigants newly entitled to pursue legal claims; the economic barriers facing many claimants; the emergence of judiciaries as agency-like promoters of agendas; and the displacement of public adjudication through the privatization of dispute resolution. Studies of women as judges focus mostly on their rulings, but probing the "difference that difference makes" requires looking beyond judicial opinions. Courts in the United States have developed structural capacities to propose rules and legislation, create education programs, commission research and task forces, and lobby for resources. When women of all colors and men of color became lawyers and judges, they created affinity organizations and pressed courts to research court-based bias and to revise rules of ethics, doctrine, and practice. Those changes are part of the impact of diversification within the legal profession, as is the backlash against affirmative efforts to reform practices. Another difference of the last decades is that new rights have brought into court many claimants with limited means. Participatory participation ("equal justice under law") remains elusive, while the "justice gap" (shorthand for the lack of sufficient governmental help for under-resourced litigants) is pervasive. Worse yet, in some jurisdictions, courts have served as "revenue centers," using court-imposed assessments as income. Failure to pay "legal financial obligations" can result in suspension of driver's licenses, the loss of voting rights, and other sanctions levied disproportionately on people who are poor and of color. Instead of being seen as fonts of fairness, courts are coming to be identified as sites of inequality. In addition, many courts have embraced alternative forms of dispute resolution that make both processes and outcomes less visible to the public. Through doctrine and rules, U.S. courts have shifted their own practices as well as enforced mandates imposed on consumers and employers that push them out of court and out of class or joint actions. In sum, the new faces on the bench ought not to obscure that the project of representation, inclusion, and equality is far from complete. The vivid inequalities in courts are problems for courts because such disparities undermine their ability to be places of justice.

This Essay discusses the regulation of fraud in a developed economy and offers some explanations for why fraud appears to be on the increase. Ironically, regulation designed to combat fraud can actually increase fraud by attracting economic activity to fraud-ridden industries. In other words, regulation can create problems of its own by fostering the false perception that fraud is being addressed even when it is not. This analysis is relevant in the context of the current surge in sentiment to regulate cryptocurrencies in the wake of the FTX and Sam Bankman-Fried debacle. Such regulation threatens to attract more resources to cryptocurrency trading, which is a dubious proposition in light of the fact that cryptocurrencies produce little social value and merely transfer wealth rather than create it. The Essay discusses some of the reasons why fraud may be on the increase. First, strong market forces aimed at reducing managerial agency costs have had the unintended consequence of increasing the incentives of top corporate managers to commit fraud. The market forces both richly reward managers for generating strong returns for shareholders and severely punish managers for failing to reach investors' expectations regarding corporate performance. While these rich rewards and strong punishments serve the interests of shareholders and society, they also enhance executives' incentives to commit fraud. Another factor in the increase in fraud in financial markets has been the expansion of the concept of fraud. Historically, the term fraud was used to describe conduct that was truly egregious and involved purposeful deceit designed to provide the perpetrator with unlawful gains. As shown here, however, in the financial context the concept of fraud has been expanded to include behavior that is entirely inadvertent and benign. The expansion of the concept of fraud threatens to increase the incidence of traditional fraud by depriving the term "fraud" of its historic capacity for shaming because the prospect of being shamed is a significant deterrent to committing fraud.

The treaty process specified in Article II of the Constitution has been dying a slow death for decades, replaced by various forms of "executive agreements." What is only beginning to be appreciated is the extent to which both treaties and executive agreements are increasingly being overshadowed by another form of international cooperation: nonbinding international agreements. Not only have nonbinding agreements become more prevalent, but many of the most consequential (and often controversial) U.S. international agreements in recent years have been concluded in whole or in significant part as nonbinding agreements. Despite their prevalence and importance, nonbinding agreements have not traditionally been subject to any of the domestic statutory or regulatory requirements that apply to binding agreements. As a result, they have not been centrally monitored or collected within the executive branch, and they have not been systematically reported to Congress or disclosed to the public. Recent legislation addresses this transparency gap to a degree, but substantial gaps remain. This Article focuses on the two most significant forms of nonbinding agreements between U.S. government representatives and their foreign counterparts: (1) joint statements and communiques; and (2) formal nonbinding agreements. After describing these categories and the history of nonbinding agreements and their domestic legal basis, the Article presents the first empirical study of U.S. nonbinding agreements, drawing on two new databases that together include more than three thousand of these agreements. Based on this study, and on a comparative assessment of the practices and reform discussions taking place in other countries, the Article considers the case for additional legal reforms.

Laws and regulations designed for robust economies often perform miserably in deep recessions. In a healthy economy, the best legal rule from an economic perspective maximizes productive capacity. In a recession, however, spending, not productive capacity, limits the size of the economy. Recessions also shift incentives, meaning that inputs to an efficient legal rule change with the business cycle for microeconomic as well as macroeconomic reasons. As a result, legal rules that are efficient in a growing economy often waste resources in recessions. Unemployment insurance (" UT") eligibility rules illustrate the business cycle variability of the efficient legal rule. In robust economies, tight unemployment eligibility rules maximize capacity by encouraging greater labor supply and consequently higher output. In recessions, by contrast, labor supply does not, constrain output. Boosting incentives to find work does not increase employment when jobs, rather than workers, are scarce. Instead, spending (" aggregate demand") is the economy's limiting factor. In recessions, lax unemployment eligibility rules reduce inequality and enhance spending and demand for labor, resulting in higher output. Previous writing in law and macroeconomics prescribes a" countercyclical legal policy" response to variability in the efficient legal rule over the business cycle.'If strict legal rules raise output in ordinary times but permissive rules raise output in recessions, then legal rules should be tight in the growth phase of the business cycle but lax in recessions.'And UT policy sometimes strives for this countercyclical variation. In the CARES Act passed in March 2020 to mitigate COVIID-19's devastating impacts on the economy,

The author argues that framing the tension in American law schools as a freedom of expression issue is unhelpful and inaccurate.It suggest that the core issue lies in the pedagogical question of how best to achieve the educational mission of law schools. It also mentions that the principles of free speech, which are essential for democratic self-governance. The author emphasizes the importance of empathy, and creative educational interventions in navigating the challenges faced by law schools.

In this Commentary, I show how the tradition-entrenching methods the Court employed to decide New York State Rifle & Pistol Ass'n, Inc. v. Bruen and Dobbs v. Jackson Women's Health Organization intensify the gender biases of a constitutional order that for the majority of its existence denied women a voice in lawmaking and restricted women's roles. The tradition-entrenching methods the Court employed to decide Bruen and Dobbs elevate the significance of laws adopted at a time when women and people of color were judged unfit to participate and treated accordingly by constitutional law, common law, and positive law. The methods the Court employs are gendered in the simple sense that they tie the Constitution's meaning to lawmaking from which women were excluded and in the deeper sense that the turn to the past provides the Court resources for expressing identity and value drawn from a culture whose laws and mores were more hierarchical than our own. Sampling their recent opinions, Part II of this Commentary shows that the conservative Justices have repudiated past practices when those practices expressed racism or nativism to which the Justices objected. Yet, Part III of this Commentary shows that in Dobbs the conservative Justices embraced past practices as the nation's history and tradition, counting abortion bans enacted with the support of the nineteenth-century antiabortion campaign without scrutinizing evidence that the campaign mixed arguments for protecting unborn life with arguments that banning abortion would prevent ethnic replacement and would enforce wives' marital and maternal roles. In Part IV, I suggest that Justice Alito might have refused to defer to prejudice of the past as he did in Espinoza v. Montana Department of Revenue if he saw religious liberty, rather than abortion rights, at stake. There are several reasons for revisiting the claims about abortion, history, and tradition on which the Dobbs decision rests. Even if the Supreme Court itself never acknowledges Dobbs's selective and inaccurate account of the historical record, as it acknowledged historical errors of Bowers v. Hardwick in Lawrence v. Texas, there is value in recognizing that the Court's claims about the past have a politics. In demonstrating that the Court selectively defers to the past, this Commentary shows how the Court's history-and-traditions method provides new justifications for enforcing old forms of status inequality. This Commentary builds the historical record critical to debates over the criminalization of abortion in state courts and legislatures. And it contributes to Professor Melissa Murray's remarkable and wide-ranging account of how the jurisprudence of Bruen and Dobbs is gendered: Children of Men: The Roberts Court's Jurisprudence of Masculinity.