How to Resolve a Conflict When You Hate Your Opponent’s Guts
Yascha Mounk, The New York Times
In the late 1970s, Jay and Lorna walked into the legal offices of Gary Friedman. After years of marriage, they had decided to call it quits. But instead of going through an adversarial process, they wanted somebody to help them disentangle their lives with as little belligerence as possible. That someone, they hoped, would be Friedman. Friedman declined. It seemed improper for one lawyer to represent two parties to the same conflict. He had never heard of such a thing. Apologetically, he told...

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Measuring Lawyer Well‐Being Systematically: Evidence from the National Health Interview Survey
Yair Listokin and Raymond Noonan, Journal of Empirical Legal Studies
Conventional wisdom says that lawyers are uniquely unhappy. Unfortunately, this conventional wisdom rests on a weak empirical foundation. The “unhappy lawyers” narrative relies on nonrandom survey data collected from volunteer respondents. Instead of depending on such data, researchers should study lawyer mental health by relying on large microdatasets of public health data, such as the National Health Interview Survey (NHIS) administered by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control. The NHIS includes...

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Judging Autonomous Vehicles
Jeffrey J. Rachlinski and Andrew J. Wistrich, SSRN
The introduction of any new technologies challenges judges to determine how it into existing liability schemes. If judges choose poorly, they can unleash novel injuries on society without redress or stifle progress by overburdening a technological breakthrough. The emergence of self-driving, or autonomous, vehicles will present an enormous challenge of this sort to judges, as this technology will alter the foundation of the largest source of civil liability in the United States. Although regulatory...

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