News
Conventional wisdom in law and economics holds that legal rules should be designed solely to promote efficiency, leaving income redistribution to the tax system. But when does this principle hold true, and when might it fall short?
April Rice became a methamphetamine user at a young age in Galesburg, Illinois, and had many scrapes with the law, including a felony conviction for meth possession. So, when she pleaded guilty to a more serious charge—conspiracy to manufacture and distribute meth—in 2012, she faced an especially harsh prison term.
On the evening of Saturday, January 18, Clinical Professor Erica Zunkel received a phone call that produced “one of the most powerful moments of [her] professional career.”
Five University of Chicago Law School professors have been named among the nation’s top 100 legal scholars in a newly released ranking—two of whom earned spots in the top five.
Professor Emeritus Bill Landes late last year completed teaching his final class, capping a fifty-year career teaching at the Law School.
Faculty in the News
Prof. Tom Ginsburg discussed democracy and the rule of law at a symposium at Georgetown Law that was broadcast on C-SPAN. “In my view, democracy requires bureaucracy. It requires a civil service of people who stay there and take political instructions, whoever happens to be power,” he said.
Advances in artificial intelligence can prompt heady predictions of utopia and apocalypse. But they can also prompt reflection about the purpose of the human institutions AI threatens to replace. Take a recent University of Chicago paper pitting real federal judges against ChatGPT.
Elon Musk’s assertion of power over some of the government’s largest and most sensitive data systems isn’t merely a contravention of American statutory law, administrative norms, and individual privacy rights. It is an act of constitutional restructuring, and should be understood in those terms.
