The rationale behind state support for, and obedience to, normative rules and obligations has long been a topic of international law scholarship discourse. What has yet to be fully established, however, is why virtually all states have agreed to adhere to a seemingly novel global paradigm with ambitious yet non-binding objectives – the United Nations 2030 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). This

The Recovery and Resilience Facility (RRF) adopted in response to the COVID‐19 pandemic marks an important departure in European Union (EU) governance, as it introduces an innovative “demand‐driven, performance‐based” model aimed at overcoming the limitations of past policies seeking to promote national reforms. In this study, we set out the theoretical assumptions underlying the RRF governance model

OBJECTIVE Algorithmic decision making (ADM) takes on increasingly complex tasks in the criminal justice system. Whereas new developments in machine learning could help to improve the quality of judicial decisions, there are legal and ethical concerns that thwart the widespread use of algorithms. Against the backdrop of current efforts to promote the digitization of the German judicial system, this

In large and complex human groups, social rules reduce individuals' uncertainty about their own choice set, including through these rules' simultaneous influence on the choice set of other individuals. But uncertainty varies as to the extent to which it is knowable and quantifiable ex ante. Therefore, different classes of social rules deal with the future uncertainty of individuals' conduct in structurally

As scholars race to address the climate crisis, they have often treated the problem as sui generis and have only rarely sought to learn from prior efforts to make industrial operations greener. In this paper, we consider what can be learned from other shifts away from polluting substances. Drawing on literatures on corporate regulatory strategies and evolving regulatory interactions, we argue for a

Scholars of the US regulatory process routinely assert that rulemaking is “ossified”—that it has become so encumbered with procedural constraints that it is difficult for agencies to issue socially desirable regulations. Yet, this claim has rarely been subject to empirical testing, and this is particularly true at the sub‐federal (i.e., US state) level. But the same factors that allegedly cause ossification

How do citizens perceive labor market risks related to digitalization and the green transition, and how do these risk perceptions translate into preferences for social policies? We address these questions in this paper by studying the policy preferences of individual workers on how governments should deal with the two labor market challenges of digitalization and the green transition. Employing novel

A regulatory sandbox is an emerging tool for addressing the challenges posed by the FinTech industry, but countries have embraced it to varying degrees. There is a need to systematically examine the question: Which factors explain the diverging trajectories in countries' decision to use (or not use) this instrument? This paper examines the adoption of regulatory sandboxes for FinTech in the Baltic

OBJECTIVE When an officer places a suspect in an identification procedure and the witness identifies the suspect, it falls on attorneys to make decisions that reflect the strength of that identification. The factor that most affects the strength of identification evidence is the likelihood that the suspect is guilty before being subjected to the procedure, which scholars refer to as the prior probability

Climate policies are often evaluated using criteria that are heterogeneous and misaligned with the stated aims of these policies. By combining legal research methods with insights from economic theory, we systematically map and analyze the legal objectives of the European Union (EU) Emissions Trading System (ETS), a key climate policy instrument. We find that the EU ETS is shaped by a nuanced internal

OBJECTIVE People who have been wrongly incarcerated report exceptionally poor mental health, and despite having been exonerated, they face discrimination similar to other formerly incarcerated people when seeking housing and employment opportunities. The current audit study was designed to test whether exonerees likewise face discrimination when seeking mental health treatment. HYPOTHESES Therapists

Since the 1990s, the EU has attempted to create a common electricity market. However, EU legislators are unsatisfied by the results. We argue that differentiated implementation of directives over time creates path dependencies that entrench national differences. The actor constellation of parties and incumbent operators at the beginning of the liberalization path determines how well countries implement

This article reviews recent insights from the blooming Comparative Political Economy (CPE) literature on climate change with the aim to demonstrate the importance of integrating climate change into the field of CPE and to highlight the contributions of CPE to our understanding of the social and political obstacles to effective climate policies. In addition, we advance two key points to bring the CPE

Citizen trust in regulatory agencies is essential for the functioning of society and markets. Trust in regulatory agencies promotes compliance and strengthens trust in regulated sectors. Despite its importance, there is no systematic study on how trust is in this context can be measured best. In response, this article presents findings of a systematic review of measures of trust in regulatory contexts

Political decisions over economic growth policies influence the degree of bureaucratic autonomy and regulatory governance dynamics. Yet, our understanding of these processes in the Global South is somewhat limited. The article studies the post‐Global Financial Crisis period and relies on elite interviews and secondary sources from Turkey. It problematizes how an economic growth model dependent on foreign

OBJECTIVE The purpose of this study was to estimate the behavioral impacts of training police officers in implicit bias awareness and management. HYPOTHESES Training police in implicit bias reduces racial and ethnic disparities in stops, arrests, summonses, frisks, searches, and/or use of force. METHOD A cluster randomized controlled trial using the stepped wedge design was applied to 14,471 officers

OBJECTIVE Native Americans are vastly overrepresented in U.S. jails and people in rural communities face unique barriers (e.g., limited public transportation and services) that may impact how well pretrial risk assessments predict outcomes. Yet, these populations are understudied in the literature examining the predictive validity and, more importantly, the potential predictive bias of pretrial risk

OBJECTIVE Field research increasingly reveals that forensic evaluators are not interchangeable. Instead, they tend to differ in their patterns of forensic opinions, in ways that likely reflect something about themselves, not just the persons evaluated. This study used data from sexually violent predator (SVP) evaluations to examine whether evaluator differences in making intermediate decisions (e.g

OBJECTIVE This survey examined current law enforcement beliefs and practices about interviewing and interrogation to gauge whether they have evolved given the research and training developed over the past 20 years. HYPOTHESES We hypothesized that police beliefs and practices would have evolved along with research findings over the past 20 years. METHOD We surveyed 526 law enforcement officers about

Decentralized governance technologies like blockchains are often proposed as substitutes for private legal arrangements like those provided by company law or organizational law more generally. In established legal systems in developed countries, the costs of implementing such algorithmic mechanisms are likely to be greater than the agency or other costs that come from selecting and trusting an existing

I develop a novel, rights-based conception of contract—the “democratic conception”—that can deliver a justification for granting a sphere of freedom to contracting parties while setting principled limits on that grant. It justifies doctrines—including the penalty doctrine, the doctrine of substantial performance, a robust doctrine of changed circumstances, and a robust doctrine of unconscionability—that

This contribution considers the revolution in the concept and practice of trust in corporate governance that first moved from trust in “people” to trust in “compliance,” setting the stage for the digitization of trust measures and the digitalization of compliance. Part One examines the fundamental challenge, one that arises from the near simultaneous shift in cultural expectations about trust from

Freedom of information (FOI) laws empower citizens to access public information from public organizations, enhancing government transparency and accountability. Previous studies have evaluated government transparency and FOI compliance based on the proactive release of information and governments' responses to citizens' requests. This study extends prior research by focusing on regulatory compliance

A considerable amount of work has focused on “regulatory innovation” in the social sciences. This scholarship has conceptually defined certain types of regulatory changes as innovations and explored how regulation, as a policy instrument, alters the pace of technological innovation. More recently, a renewed interest for policy mixes and more dynamism in industrial innovation policies around the world

A wealth of studies has discussed the impact of different regulatory regimes on firms, but have ignored the differences in citizens' attitudes toward firms in different regulatory regimes. Exploring these attitudes is crucial to understanding the micro‐effects of regulatory regimes and market developments. This study aims to investigates the impact of regulatory regimes on citizens' trust in regulated

Policy growth comes with multiple challenges for policy implementation. Congested policy portfolios increase the likelihood of interactions and contradictions between different policy objectives and instruments. Moreover, policy growth can lead to difficulties during implementation when many public and private organizations must cooperate and manage increasing complexity and overlapping responsibilities

Many are well-acquainted with Justice Brandeis’s metaphor that states serve as laboratories o…

author. Circuit Judge, United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit; Law Clerk for Just…

This Article illustrates how contracts between local governments—interlocal agreements (ILAs)—play a powerful lawmaking function yet lack democratic accountability.  It traces the problem to state statutory schemes, where checks designed to promote transparency are ignored by state officials and courts, enabling undemocratic local power by virtue of state silence.

City subunits may facilitate municipal objectives of service provision and democratic governance. Different types of subunits risk various conflicts with their constituents and the city that hosts them. This Feature analyzes sources of those conflicts and reforms to address them, and argues for city deference to subunits in limited cases.  

State-level public utility commissions regulate our energy systems. But they are often viewed as ill-equipped to address climate change. This Feature counters that conventional wisdom by uncovering a forgotten history of New York’s energy transition, revealing that public utility’s potential to facilitate a clean-energy transition is broader than we imagine.

Current law makes it easy to sue cities. Too easy. While suing federal and state governments is notoriously difficult, various doctrines open courthouse doors to taxpayers, homeowners, and politically favored groups suing local governments. These doctrines further strengthen powerful actors, weaken cities’ ability to initiate reforms, and undermine local democracy.

author. Robert R. Slaughter Professor of Law, Yale Law School; Law Clerk for Justice Sandra …

Do large language models (LLMs) know the law? LLMs are increasingly being used to augment legal practice, education, and research, yet their revolutionary potential is threatened by the presence of “hallucinations”—textual output that is not consistent with legal facts. We present the first systematic evidence of these hallucinations in public-facing LLMs, documenting trends across jurisdictions, courts

The unsettling conditions of contemporary society, marked by recurrent transboundary crises and turbulence, stimulate discussions about the resilience of different governing models. Public bureaucracy and its governing instruments are confronted with the virtues and vices of models dominated by markets and networks. We present a case study demonstrating how the governing instruments within a system

Interfirm self‐regulation through trade associations is common but its effectiveness is debated and likely varies by time, country, and industry. This study examines self‐regulation of pharmaceutical marketing, characterized by delegation of major regulatory responsibilities to trade associations' self‐regulatory bodies. In addressing critical research gaps, this study first analyzes 1,776 complaints

Worker cooperatives in the gig economy can involve large and heterogeneous memberships, which makes them vulnerable to member opportunism depleting collective resources. External shocks may present another challenge for collective resource management. This raises the question of how heterogeneous cooperatives design rules to mitigate opportunistic behavior and whether these rules evolve in the face

Ineffective policies plague democratic systems and challenge their legitimacy. While existing research highlights the importance of street-level bureaucrats (SLBs) as de facto “policymakers,” our understanding of SLBs' aggregate effects on policy outcomes remains limited. Therefore, this paper proposes a shift in perspective, redirecting attention from the micro level toward institutional structures

This article reports findings of a Q Methodology study in which we explored the opinions of employees from eight Dutch regulatory agencies on how agencies gain their reputation. This is the largest study to date examining employee's views on the relative importance of different factors in reputation acquisition by public organizations, and the first analyzing employees in regulatory agencies. Results

Bureaucratic overburdening has emerged as an important theme in public policy and administration research. The concept signifies a state where public administrators are overwhelmed with more tasks and responsibilities than they can effectively handle. Researchers attribute this phenomenon to several key factors, such as an increasing assault on the public sector, a growing volume of policies to enforce

Trust is expected to play a vital role in regulatory regimes. However, how trust affects the performance and legitimacy of these regimes is poorly understood. Our study examines how the interplay of trust and distrust relationships among and toward political, administrative, and regulatory actors shapes perceptions of performance and legitimacy. Drawing on cross-country survey data measuring trust

The glaring gap in tort theory is its failure to take adequate account of liability insurance. We explain how to begin filling the gap in tort theory that results from omitting consideration of liability insurance, showing how liability insurance can appropriately figure in both deontic and consequentialist theories of tort.

Universal vacatur is a legitimate part of administrative law’s remedial scheme, not a judicial invention. This Feature traces universal vacatur from the pre-APA period through Abbott Labs. It also juxtaposes the case against universal vacatur with the new major questions doctrine, showing that both centralize power in the Supreme Court.

Relying on insights from Critical Race Theory and feminist legal theory, this Note presents a historical account of the underexamined movement to end racialized apprenticeship laws in the post-slavery era. The Note argues that our shared constitutional memory has been artificially narrowed by underconsideration of freedpeople’s constitutional theories and claims.  

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abstract. Employment at will is legally and politically entrenched. It is the default terminat…

abstract. Critiqued as a blank check for judicial intervention, the absurdity canon has been …

OBJECTIVE The present study examined the relationship between legislative revisions regarding sexual offenses and the release decisions and recidivism rates of individuals convicted of sexual offenses. In 2008, the Austrian government passed a package of revised criminal laws aiming to decrease incarceration rates. At the same time, connecting recidivism risk to professional risk management efforts

OBJECTIVE Competence to proceed (CTP) is a constitutional protection intended to facilitate fairness and dignity of court proceedings. Researchers have estimated that between 60,000 and 94,000 defendants are evaluated for CTP each year. Yet no research has systematically identified the number of evaluations conducted each year, despite their critical role and many profound implications. We used large-scale

OBJECTIVE We conducted three preregistered studies to examine whether victims of crime are more receptive to apologies in victim-offender mediation if they feel they know the "whole" truth about a crime. HYPOTHESES We predicted that making salient the completeness (vs. incompleteness) of knowledge about a crime would lead victims to (a) have a greater sense of truth knowing and (b) view an apology

OBJECTIVE Over the past 4 decades, discrepant research findings have emerged in the juror-confession literature, prompting the need for a systematic review and meta-analysis that assesses the effect of confession evidence (coerced or noncoerced) on conviction rates and the efficacy of trial safeguards. HYPOTHESES We did not predict any directional hypotheses. Some studies show increased convictions

OBJECTIVE The presence of callous-unemotional (CU) traits in adolescence predisposes youth to negative behavioral and social outcomes and may be particularly damaging to youth involved in the justice system. Whereas research has shown that CU traits predict later arrest, it remains unknown whether rearrest predicts changes in CU traits and whether these associations may be modified by maternal relationship

Cooperative forms of policy implementation bear the promise of being an answer to the policy delivery challenge resulting from policy growth, with the quality of network management often rated as a key success factor. The positive relationship between network management and performance in networks, however, is primarily supported by theoretical reasoning rather than empirical evidence. The present

The governing attributes of authority, legitimacy, and accountability are essential to any type of governance to be able to function effectively. For public forms of governing, the attributes are part of the structures and institutions of democratic states, for example, through the tripartition of power, voting, and legal structures. For private forms of governance, such as multi‐stakeholder initiatives

In civil law jurisdictions, plants have traditionally been classified as ‘objects’ (or ‘things’) under private law, reflecting an age-old tendency, certainly in the Western world, to underestimate and undervalue plants. Recent legal debates increasingly acknowledge the special nature of plants. Perhaps the most eye-catching debate in this context is the one on Rights of Nature, which have much potential

This article maps the shared legal anatomy of climate and environmental lawsuits, in which plaintiffs claim protection for future generations before domestic or international courts. By closely analyzing the litigation strategies of plaintiffs and the inquiry of courts, the article argues that these proceedings revolve around structurally similar legal standards across domestic and international jurisdictions