The Health Insurer Nudge – Article by Wendy Netter Epstein

Lawmakers are looking for Affordable Care Act savings in the wrong place. Removing sick people from risk pools or reducing health plan benefits—the focus of lawmakers’ attention—would harm vulnerable populations. Instead, reform should target the $210 billion worth of unnecessary care prescribed by doctors, consented to by patients, and paid for by insurers.

This Article unravels the mystery of why the insurance market has failed to excise this waste on its own. A toxic combination of mismatched legal incentives, market failures, and industry norms means that the insurance market cannot solve the problem absent intervention.

The Delaware Trap: An Empirical Analysis of Incorporation Decisions – Article by Robert Anderson IV

One of the most enduring debates in corporate law centers on why Delaware has become the dominant state in the market for corporate charters. Traditionally, two perspectives dominated the debate, the “race-to-the-top” perspective that sees competition among states as driving legal rules toward efficiency and the “race-to-the-bottom” perspective that sees competition among states as driving legal rules toward the interests of corporate managers. The two dominant perspectives have struggled to explain why approximately half of large companies incorporate in Delaware, while the other half incorporate in their home states. Whether the choices are attributable to the quality of state law, the characteristics of the companies themselves, or both has given rise to a large, but inconclusive empirical literature.

Whose Bathroom Is It, Anyway?: The Legal Status of Transgender Bathroom Access Under Federal Employment Law – Note by Allison Bader

In many ways, Michael C. Hughes is an average American family man. He is a middle-aged father of four from Rochester, Minnesota. He has been married to his wife for twelve years. He has a broad, muscular frame and is partial to cowboy hats and wide belt buckles. But Hughes is unlike the average American family man in one fundamental way: he was born biologically female. Hughes is one of the more than 1.4 million transgender adults in the United States, a small but increasingly visible group of people who are currently facing a unique legal battle to use restrooms and single-sex facilities that align with their gender identity.

Hughes garnered publicity with a viral photo taken in a public restroom, in protest of “bathroom bills”—laws that require Hughes to use women’s restrooms and facilities, despite his gender identity. “Bathroom bill” is the common name for legislation that prohibits individuals from using bathrooms (or other private, single-sex facilities like locker rooms) that do not match their biological sex or sex markers on their identification documents, depending on the bill. Posing in front of the bathroom mirror in a women’s restroom, as female patrons look on questioningly, Hughes “presents” as a male—making him appear out of place in the restroom that nonetheless matches his biological sex. Hughes’ photo and its accompanying hashtag, “#WeJustNeedtoPee,” went viral in 2016, reflecting Americans’ rapt attention on transgender issues.

“Moore” Than Just a Number: Why IQ Cutoffs Are an Unconstitutional Measure for Determining Intellectual Disability – Note by Courtney Johnson

Bobby James Moore was twenty years old when he “fatally shot a store clerk” while robbing a grocery store in April 1980. On paper, this is a tragic felony murder, but behind the scenes lies a different story. Bobby was not a typical twenty-year-old; he did not understand “the days of the week, the months of the year, [or] the seasons.” Bobby could barely tell time, and he could not understand standard measurements or that subtraction is the opposite of addition. Bobby suffered an “abuse-filled childhood.” Bobby dropped out of high school due to “his limited ability to read and write,” and he lived on the streets after being kicked out of his home for being “stupid.” Bobby is intellectually disabled, and despite the evidence put forth demonstrating his disability, he was sentenced to death pursuant to a set of factors used by a Texas court; these factors are largely based on stereotypes and caricatures from literature. As the United States Supreme Court decided in 2017, this was a gross violation of the Eighth Amendment’s protection against cruel and unusual punishment to rely on “wholly nonclinical” factors rather than the “medical community’s diagnostic framework.”

The Jury and Empire: The Insular Cases and the Anti-Jury Movement in the Gilded Age and Progressive Era – Article by Andrew Kent

This Article argues that there was an important causal link, to date unrecognized, between the widespread dissatisfaction with the jury in the United States during the Gilded Age and Progressive era among many elite lawyers and judges and choices by U.S. policymakers and jurists about colonial governance in Puerto Rico and the Philippines. The story starts with the Insular Cases—landmark Supreme Court decisions from the early twentieth century holding that jury rights and some other constitutional guarantees did not apply in Puerto Rico and the Philippines until and unless Congress had taken decisive action to “incorporate” the territories into the union, which it never did. The conventional wisdom among scholars is that the Supreme Court in these decisions shamefully ratified the U.S. government’s discrimination and domination over the peoples of newly-acquired colonies. Racism and cultural chauvinism are blamed as primary causal factors.

The Article shows that Congress, the executive, the courts, and local legislatures in the Philippines and Puerto Rico granted almost every single right contained in the Constitution to the territorial inhabitants, with the exception of the jury. While racism was present and causally important, it is also true that U.S. governance in the territories was not a project of wholesale discrimination. Motivations, goals, and outcomes were complex. Protection of rights of local inhabitants was a key concern of U.S. policymakers. But the jury was considered a unique case, different than other rights.

Exclusionary Megacities – Article by Wendell Pritchett & Shitong Qiao

Human beings should live in places where they are most productive, and megacities, where information, innovation, and opportunities congregate, would be the optimal choice. Yet megacities in both China and the United States are excluding people by limiting the housing supply. Why, despite their many differences, is the same type of exclusion happening in both Chinese and U.S. megacities? Urban law and policy scholars argue that Not-In-My-Back-Yard (“NIMBY”) homeowners are taking over megacities in the U.S. and hindering housing development. They pin their hopes on an efficient growth machine that makes sure “above all, nothing gets in the way of building.” Yet the growth-dominated megacities of China demonstrate that relying on business and political elites to provide affordable housing is a false hope. Our comparative study of the homeowner-dominated megacities of the U.S. and growth-dominated megacities of China demonstrates that the origin of exclusionary megacities is not a choice between growth elites and homeowners, but the exclusionary nature of property rights. Our study reveals that megacities in the two countries share a property-centered approach, which prioritizes the maximization of existing property interests and neglects the interests of the ultimate consumers of housing, resulting in housing that is unaffordable. Giving housing consumers a voice in land use control and urban governance becomes the last resort to counteract this result. This comparative study shows that the conventional triangular framework of land use—comprising government, developers, and homeowners—is incomplete, and argues for a citizenship-based approach to urban governance.

Eyewitness Identifications: Recommendations to the Third Circuit – Note by Brady Witbeck

Just before two o’clock in the afternoon on October 22, 1991, two high school students, Chedell Williams and Zahra Howard, ascended the steps of the Fern Rock train station in North Philadelphia, planning to take a train back to their homes. Seemingly out of nowhere, two men appeared, blocked the girls’ way up to the station, and demanded Chedell’s earrings. Terrified, the girls bolted in opposite directions. The two men followed Chedell. They soon caught her and tore out her earrings. Then “[o]ne of the men grabbed her, held a silver handgun to her neck, and shot her.” The perpetrators fled. Chedell was pronounced dead within the hour.

Police soon focused their investigation on James Dennis, who lived relatively close to the train station in the Abbotsford Homes projects. Detectives would later explain that they heard rumors that Dennis was involved in the shooting, though they were at that time “unable to identify the source of the rumors.” The detectives obtained preliminary descriptions of the perpetrators from three eyewitnesses. These initial descriptions did not align well with Dennis’s actual appearance. Nonetheless, a few eyewitnesses identified Dennis during subsequent photo lineups, live lineups, and the trial. In presenting the government’s case, the prosecution relied heavily on these eyewitness identifications. Dennis was found guilty of “first-degree murder, robbery, carrying a firearm without a license, criminal conspiracy, and possession of an instrument of a crime.” He was sentenced to death.

Should Statistical Sampling Be Used to Prove Liability Under the False Claims Act in Healthcare Fraud? – Note by Milene Vega

In recent years the False Claims Act (“FCA”) has become the Department of Justice’s (“DOJ”) favorite tool to combat large-scale fraud—particularly healthcare fraud. In fact, from 2009 to 2016 alone, the DOJ recovered over $19.3 billion in health care fraud—“more than half the health care fraud dollars recovered since the 1986 amendments to the False Claims Act.” In general, the statute prohibits (1) knowingly submitting false claims to the federal government or causing another to submit a false claim, (2) knowingly creating a false record or statement to get a false claim paid by the federal government, and (3) retaining funds improperly received from the federal government.

Although the FCA originated during the Civil War, Congress has periodically strengthened the FCA through amendments, which have converted it into a “modern weapon” that the DOJ and whistleblowers use to punish providers who knowingly submit false claims or false records or retain funds improperly received from the government. The amendments have permitted larger damages, which in turn have incentivized whistleblowers and the DOJ to use whatever means available to prove liability in as many false claims as possible. During the last five years in particular, that has meant turning away from proving liability for each individual claim and instead using statistical sampling as proof of liability for a much larger number of claims.