Contract-Wrapped Property

For nearly two centuries, the law has allowed servitudes that “run with” real property while consistently refusing to permit servitudes attached to personal property. That is, owners of land can establish new, specific requirements for the property that bind all future owners—but owners of chattels cannot. In recent decades, however, firms have increasingly begun relying on contract provisions that purport to bind future owners of chattels. These developments began in the context of software licensing, but they have started to migrate to chattels not encumbered by software. Courts encountering these provisions have mostly missed their significance, focusing instead on questions of contract doctrine, such as whether opening shrink wrap constitutes assent to be bound. Property concepts never enter their analysis. The result of this oversight is that courts have de facto recognized equitable servitudes on chattels—a category that our legal system has long forbidden. Yet because courts are often unfamiliar with property-law principles, and because lawyers have failed to make property-based arguments, individual contracts cases are remodeling the architecture of property rights without anyone realizing it.This Article identifies the unexpected emergence of servitudes on chattels via contract law. It explores the consequences of that development and argues that we should see it as deeply troubling. By unwittingly reestablishing equitable servitudes on chattels—something our legal system rejected long ago for good reason—this change in law threatens to undo longstanding precedent, disrupt settled expectations, and effectively recognize a new form of property. More generally, elevating contract over other private law doctrines disrupts the private law’s equilibrium in which a complementary suite of doctrines developed to promote economic liberty while curtailing opportunistic impulses. While the pathologies that have flourished internally in modern contract doctrine have been well studied by scholars, the way in which contract law is threatening to consume property and other areas of private law has received less attention. Using servitudes on personal property as a window into the larger problem of contract-dominated private law, this Article explores the private law’s role in shaping environmental conservation, autonomy, innovation, and the legitimacy of the law itself. Those values are all in jeopardy as if contract law is allowed to encroach on property and to erode the very concept of ownership

The False Promise of Jurisdiction Stripping

Jurisdiction stripping is seen as a nuclear option. Its logic is simple: by depriving federal courts of jurisdiction over some set of cases, Congress ensures those courts cannot render bad decisions. In theory, it frees up the political branches and the states to act without fear of judicial second-guessing. To its proponents, it offers the ultimate check on unelected and unaccountable judges. To critics, it poses a grave threat to the separation of powers. Both sides agree, though, that jurisdiction stripping is a powerful weapon. On this understanding, politicians, activists, and scholars throughout American history have proposed jurisdiction stripping measures as a way for Congress to reclaim policymaking authority from the courts. The conventional understanding is wrong. Whatever the scope of Congress’s Article III power to limit the jurisdiction of the Supreme Court and other federal courts, jurisdiction stripping is unlikely to succeed as a practical strategy. At least beyond the very short term, Congress cannot use it to effectuate policy in the face of judicial opposition. Its consequences are chaotic and unpredictable, courts have tools they can use to push back on jurisdiction strips if they desire, and the active participation of the judiciary is ultimately necessary for Congress to achieve many of its goals. Jurisdiction stripping will often accomplish nothing and sometimes will even exacerbate the very problems it purports to solve. Jurisdiction stripping can still prove beneficial, but only in subtle and indirect ways. Congress can regulate jurisdiction to manipulate the timing of judicial review—slowing things down or speeding them up—even if it cannot prevent review entirely. Jurisdiction stripping also provides a means for Congress to signal to the public and the judiciary the importance of an issue—and, possibly, to pressure courts to change course. But these effects are contingent, indeterminate, and unreliable. As a tool to influence policy directly, jurisdiction stripping simply is not the power that its proponents hope or its critics fear

States, Firms, and Their Legal Fictions: Attributing Identity and Responsibility to Artificial Entities

This volume offers a new point of entry into questions about how the law conceives of states and firms. Because states and firms are fictitious constructs rather than products of evolutionary biology, the law dictates which acts should be attributed to each entity, and by which actors. Those legal decisions construct firms and states by attributing identity and consequences to them. As the volume shows, these legal decisions are often products of path dependence or conceptual metaphors like “personhood” that have expanded beyond their original uses. Focusing on attribution, the volume considers an array of questions about artificial entities that are usually divided into doctrinal siloes. These include questions about attribution of international legal responsibility to states and state-owned entities, transnational attribution of liabilities to firms, and attribution of identity rights to corporations. Durkee highlights the artificiality of doctrines that construct firms and states, and therefore their susceptibility to change

Robust 6D Fluorescence Microscopy

Single-Molecule Orientation Localization Microscopy (SMOLM) measures the positions and orientations of single fluorophores precisely, approaching fundamental classical and quantum limits. However, a disadvantage of SMOLM is the time-consuming nature of its acquisition and reconstruction processes. In my thesis, I introduce an innovative framework that simplifies the detection and estimation algorithms used in SMOLM into a computationally efficient high-dimensional deconvolution algorithm. This framework extracts six-dimensional information of continuous biological structures from just a single camera image (i.e., a single shot). While this method is diffraction limited, unlike conventional SMOLM algorithms, it nevertheless offers accurate and precise estimations of the orientations of collections of molecules. Crucially, it is suitable for capturing dynamic changes in biological structures, thereby broadening its applicability in scientific investigations

Learning to Disagree: The Surprising Path to Navigating Differences with Empathy and Respect

Are you discouraged by our divided, angry culture, where even listening to a different perspective sometimes feels impossible? If so, you\u27re not alone, and it doesn\u27t have to be this way. Learning to Disagree reveals the surprising path to learning how to disagree in ways that build new bridges with our neighbors, coworkers, and loved ones--and help us find better ways to live joyfully in a complex society. In a tense cultural climate, is it possible to disagree productively and respectfully without compromising our convictions? Spanning a range of challenging issues--including critical race theory, sexual assault, campus protests, and clashes over religious freedom--highly regarded thought leader and law professor John Inazu helps us engage honestly and empathetically with people whose viewpoints we find strange, wrong, or even dangerous. As a constitutional scholar, legal expert, and former litigator, John has spent his career learning how to disagree well with other people. In Learning to Disagree, John shares memorable stories and draws on the practices that legal training imparts--seeing the complexity in every issue and inhabiting the mindset of an opposing point of view--to help us handle daily encounters and lifelong relationships with those who see life very differently than we do. This groundbreaking, poignant, and highly practical book equips us to: Understand what holds us back from healthy disagreement Learn specific, start-today strategies for dialoguing clearly and authentically Move from stuck, broken disagreements to mature, healthy disagreements Cultivate empathy as a core skill for our personal lives and our whole society If you are feeling exhausted from the tattered state of dialogue in your social media feed, around the country, and in daily conversations, you\u27re not alone. Discover a more connected life while still maintaining the strength of your convictions through this unique, often-humorous, thought-provoking, and ultimately life-changing exploration of the best way to disagree

Voting Under the Federal Constitution

There is no explicit, affirmative right to vote in the federal Constitution. At the Founding, States had total discretion to choose their electorate. Although that electorate was the most democratic in history, the franchise was largely limited to property-owning White men. Over the course of two centuries, the United States democratized, albeit in fits and starts. The right to vote was often expanded in response to wartime service and mobilization.A series of constitutional amendments prohibited discrimination in voting on account of race (Fifteenth), sex (Nineteenth), inability to pay a poll tax (Twenty-Fourth), and age (Twenty-Sixth). These amendments were worded as anti-discrimination provisions with nearly identical language. Although they vastly expanded who was eligible to vote, these constitutional amendments’ negative framing permits States to disenfranchise voters through facially neutral requirements, such as felon disenfranchisement laws.Starting in the 1960s, the Supreme Court relied on the Equal Protection Clause—rather than the voting rights amendments themselves—to protect the “fundamental” right to vote, applying strict scrutiny to voting qualifications. This line of cases comes closest to recognizing an affirmative right to vote that receives protection even absent an invidious facial classification. These decisions, combined with the Voting Rights Act of 1965 (VRA) and the civil rights movement, helped eradicate Jim Crow.This chapter charts how the United States democratized, and its focus is on voting qualifications under the federal Constitution. As this chapter demonstrates, democratization has been accomplished through federal constitutional amendments, state-law changes, judicial decisions, and popular support during or shortly after wartime

Implementing RRT* Path Planning with the Crazyflie Drone

Crazyflie drone is a compact and agile platform ideal for advanced autonomous navigation. RRT*, an optimization of the standard RRT, offers efficient path planning in complex environments, enhancing the drone\u27s ability to navigate dynamically around obstacles. This implementation showcases significant potential for applications in areas such as search and rescue, surveillance, and environ-mental monitoring

Reflections, Accomplishments, and Opportunities: The CSD Annual Letter

In this annual letter to mark the start of the Center\u27s for Social Development\u27s 30th year, Founding Director Michael Sherraden shares reflections on some recent accomplishments and discusses the opportunities ahead

ERISA Principles

ERISA, the detailed and technical amalgam of labor law, trust law, and tax law, directly governs trillions of dollars spent on retirement savings, health care, and other important benefits for more than 100 million Americans. Despite playing this central role in the US economy and social insurance systems, the complexities of ERISA are often understood by only a few specialists. ERISA Principles elucidates employee benefit law from a policy perspective, concisely explaining how common themes apply across a wide range of benefit plans and factual contexts. The book\u27s non-technical language and cross-cutting conceptual organization reveal latent similarities and rationalize differences between the regulatory treatment of apparently disparate programs, including traditional pensions, 401(k), and health care plans. Important legal developments - whether statutory, judicial, or administrative - are framed and analyzed in an accessible, principles-centric manner, explaining how ERISA functions as a coherent whole

Essays on Customer Relationship Management

The general topic of my dissertation is customer relationship management. Specifically, I use quasi-experimental causal inference methods, randomized field experiments, and machine learning methods to study and measure consumer response to co-branded credit cards and email communications promoting subscriptions. In Chapter 1, “The Impact of Co-branded Credit Card Adoption on Customer Loyalty”, we estimate the treatment effects of adopting a co-branded credit card on spending and loyalty behaviors using a comprehensive longitudinal dataset from a North American airline. Our data set contained detailed records of both airline credit card adopters and non-adopters, including their travel and loyalty program activities over a four-year horizon. We deal with the self-selection of card adopters by (1) using rolling-based matching procedure, (2) conducting difference-in-differences estimation on the matched sample with a two-way fixed effects specification, and (3) dividing treatment effects into three phases of time and argue that the endogenous timing of card adoption will most likely manifest in the short-term effect and is least likely to affect long-term effect. We find statistically significant and economically meaningful effects of card adoption on a multitude of behaviors. Specifically, flight spend was lifted by 42% when considering spend more than 12 months after adoption, demonstrating the persistence of the effect. These flight spend increases were largely driven by more flights purchased rather than higher prices paid per flight, which is indicative of increasing share-of-wallet among adopters. Card adopters also increased award flight redemption to a greater extent than redeeming loyalty program points with airline partners. Finally, card adopters who experienced the highest increase in flight spend, tended to live near hub airports of the airline firm or were already existing members of the loyalty program. In Chapter 2, “An Experimental Investigation of Price vs. Non-Price Messaging in Subscription Programs”, we study how firms can attract and retain customers for subscription services. Subscriptions of digital and physical goods are becoming increasingly popular, and firms often compete heavily on price for customer acquisition. However, the challenge associated with advertised price discounts is substantial, as the featured price discounts highlight price savings and this might create an adverse selection problem with some customers signing up for just the price discount and then churning soon after. We worked with a major retailer that sells pet products, and we launched a four-week field experiment where we randomized price and non-price messaging in email advertising of subscription. We find that the non-price messages perform as well as the price messages in terms of sign-up rates and outperform price messages for reorder rates. This pattern also holds for number of orders, revenue and profit margin. We find that the inferior performance of the price message is primarily due to price attracting lower quality customers. Our findings suggest that one of the most dominant strategies of selling subscriptions is very suboptimal. Firms would be better off with the messages that make non-price motivations more prominent. Further, firms could also use previous purchase history to better target customers who could be a good match for the subscription services. Our results suggest that the price message should be sent to customers who are less familiar with the online channel, customers who are new to subscription, customers who have more regular purchase history, and customers who are less deal-prone. The rest should be sent non-price messages. Customers with no prior engagement with the firm should be targeted with the risk message by default. Finally, those who are most deal-prone and most familiar with online channels should not be sent any messages at all