Legal Theory Lexicon: The Reasonable Person Introduction Today’s Legal Theory Lexicon is about the “reasonable person.” The notion of a “reasonable person” usually makes its first appearance in the…...

Legal Theory Lexicon: The Reasonable Person

Introduction Today’s Legal Theory Lexicon is about the “reasonable person.” The notion of a “reasonable person” usually makes its first appearance in the Torts course. The context, of course, is the tort of negligence, where the “reasonable person” is used to define the standard of care that triggers liability for unintentional harms. But what makes a “reasonable person” reasonable? The concept of the reasonable person is not limited to torts, however.

legaltheoryblog.com

Now available on @ssrn.bsky.social: "When Is the Best Reading of a Statute That It Delegates Discretion?" Co-authored with @kevintobia.bsky.social and Marko Petrovic. We use experimental surveys to explore how "ordinary readers" understand Loper Bright delegations. papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers....

Gillian Metzger, Eloise Pasachoff, & I finished the 2026 supplement to the Gellhorn & Byse Administrative Law casebook. It is comprehensive, with excerpts from many cases, administrative documents, & scholarship. Email me if you want a copy. We hope it is useful to practitioners as well as teachers.

🚨New paper w/ @ProfArbel, "Generative Gap Filling"🚨 SSRN: papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.... And a 🧵.

Do high practical stakes reduce knowledge? Many philosophers assume yes. A fascinating paper shows stakes don't affect lay evaluations of what one "knows." Yet, they do impact actionability: e.g., when the stakes of X are high, we should double-check X. onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/pdf/10.1...

A puzzle about knowledge ascriptions

Philosophers have argued that stakes affect knowledge: a given amount of evidence may suffice for knowledge if the stakes are low, but not if the stakes are high. By contrast, empirical work on the i....

onlinelibrary.wiley.com

Officially out!! Resource-rational contractualism: A triple theory of moral cognition. Our vision for a unified theory of moral cognition, putting agreement-based processes at the core of morality. Now out in BBS, published alongside 27 commentaries and our response.

Capital B's most ambitious project yet is here! For the Record is an oral history archive that will collect at least 250 firsthand accounts of Black American life. It's our way of making sure that a gaunt, sanitized version of history isn't the one that endures. fortherecordarchive.org

For the Record: A Black Oral History Archive

Black stories, told in Black voices, documenting the American story in full.

fortherecordarchive.org

I gather that mine is an unpopular opinion: but the Supreme Court deciding the Birthright Citizenship case by reaching the Constitution, rather than holding the executive order unlawful as violating the statute (INA), follows naturally from a week of opinions that strengthen #SCOTUS power overall.

Mark Joseph Stern@mjsdc.bsky.social · 2mo ago

John Roberts will want you to forget everything that happened this week at SCOTUS after he confirms that the first sentence of the 14th Amendment means what it says, please do not fall for it

Many LPE articles (including mine) draw on quantitative empirical work, including studies that employ modern causal inference methods. And the Blog has even published some, e.g., lpeproject.org/blog/as-if-t... lpeproject.org/blog/the-bad... But also lpeproject.org/blog/law-lib...

A thought on the LPE v. L&E debate from an empiricist uncommitted to either paradigm... (1) This blog post is right: The suggestion that "empirical legal studies = law and econ." is wrong and frustrating to encounter.

I have posted a revised version of my forthcoming article on “The General Law and the Local Law of Interpretation.” I hope it may be of value to people interested in: (1) the early American history of statutory interpretation, (2) state statutory interpretation (where the action was), and …

For years I've tracked billionaire excess. Each year I show students a chart that blows their minds. This year I had to redraw it for a trillionaire: Elon Musk, $1.32T. Depressing that we're here. Silver lining: couldn't have happened to a less deserving person, proof that wealth ≠ merit.

Elon Musk's $1.32 Trillion, to Scale

The first trillionaire's fortune, one pixel per $1,000 — scroll past every dollar, and see what a fraction of it could do instead.

stanford.edu

I'm at #Harvard for #BSPA2026 sharing new #bioethics results about identity, #law, and #medicine. I'll post more from BSPA on Bluesky. Our poster: Intuitions about a real #neurology case implied #PhineasGage effects may be more about point-of-view and physicality than morality.

Some personal news I’m proud to share:

2026 McGlothlin Teaching Award Given to Exceptional Law and Business Professors

The 2026 McGlothlin Award for Exceptional Teaching has been granted to Professor Aaron-Andrew P. Bruhl of William & Mary Law School and to Professor Dawn Edmiston of the Raymond A. Mason School of Bus...

law.wm.edu

Postdoc opening in experimental jurisprudence at @jagiellonskiuni.bsky.social

Kamil Mamak@kamilmamak.bsky.social · 4mo ago

🔍 Postdoc opening on my @erc.europa.eu project ROBOCRIM Looking for someone with experience in experimental philosophy / experimental jurisprudence Kraków, Poland 3 years, full-time, ~€3,585–4,375/month gross. 30 June 2026 📩 Link: praca.bip.uj.edu.pl/stanowiska-b...

🇪🇺🏳️‍🌈⚖️🇭🇺 A legal earthquake - CJEU finds Hungary to have violated EU law on multiple counts with its anti-LGBT+ legislation (as expected) but also for the first time in history, in an EU law-reshaping precedent, finds Hungary to violate Art 2 TEU in a self-standing manner.

Lawrence and Nevitt on the Two-Year Clause and Military Appropriations Matthew B. Lawrence and Mark Nevitt (both Emory University School of Law) have posted Reviving the Military’s Term Limit (G.W. L. Rev. (forthcoming)) on SSRN. Here is the abstract: This Article argues for the revival of a…

Announcing my latest law review article, Law-Policy Tethering, will be published in Iowa Law Review. The Supreme Court is transforming the law-policy relationship, with big implications for health, environment, labor, and voting. Judicial review is too strict & too deferential. (1/2)

We now have a complete set of teaching case studies on our law and language website! 🤗🥳 These case studies share the experience of 8 Australian academics who have incorporated a law and language focus into their teaching, across diverse, units, disciplines and universities.

Teaching Case Studies

In 2025, the LLIRN ran its first internship program, with the goal of developing a set of peer-informed resources to support those wishing to incorporate a law and language focus into their teachin…

lawandlanguage.org

Orbán turns out to be more of a democrat than the U.S. president and a nontrivial number of GOP candidates.

András Tóth-Czifra@minczifra.bsky.social · 5mo ago

ORBÁN CONCEDED

Download of the Week: “Historical Practice Theories” by Ahmed The Download of the Week is Historical Practice Theories by Ashraf Ahmed. Here is the abstract: Contemporary constitutional law and theory is preoccupied with the question of practice. Over the last decade, across a range of issues—from…

Download of the Week: “Historical Practice Theories” by Ahmed

The Download of the Week is Historical Practice Theories by Ashraf Ahmed. Here is the abstract: Contemporary constitutional law and theory is preoccupied with the question of practice. Over the last decade, across a range of issues—from gun rights to elections to school prayer to the structure of the administrative state—the Supreme Court has decided cases on the basis of past practice.

legaltheoryblog.com

Honestly still in shock by its placement, but my article (and job talk paper), “Indigenous Constitutionalism,” is officially out in the Harvard Law Review. A brief thread on this project🧵 harvardlawreview.org/print/vol-13...

Grateful to Professor @lsolum.bsky.social for sharing our work - and for the "Download it while it's hot!" accolade!

Lawrence Solum@lsolum.bsky.social · 5mo ago

Tobia & Waldon on Linguistics and Textualism Kevin Tobia (Georgetown University Law Center) & Brandon Waldon (University of South Carolina) have posted Linguistics and Textualism in the New York University Law Review (2026) on SSRN. Here is the abstract: Should linguistics inform textualism? When…

Prior studies have found that people perceive AI-led legal processes as less fair than human-led ones. This is the legal "human-AI fairness gap." New studies (N = 7,651) discover that this gap is mitigated with even minimal human involvement in the AI process. papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers....

Two weeks to remove him. Now.

Important thread and paper. This is one of my biggest worries about chatbots, especially when combined with roleplay and any kind of user-chatbot "relationship." And now imagine persuasion for politics and other topics, not just purchasing choices...

Manoel Horta Ribeiro@manoelhortaribeiro.bsky.social · 5mo ago

Our results show that conversational agents can covertly redirect consumer choices at scale, most users cannot tell when it is happening, and existing transparency mechanisms are insufficient. We call for further regulatory scrutiny and structural safeguards.

Whatever happens, this is a deeply shameful episode in American history that will leave a permanent stain on the country. Repeatedly vowing to commit war crimes against millions of innocent civilians is beyond the pale.

This is a threat to commit an atrocity crime of extraordinary proportions. The statement appears to be designed to spread terror among the Iranian population, which would render the threat itself a violation of international law, as recognized in the DoD Law of War Manual.

Republicans in Congress support this. It’s that simple

Kai Ryssdal@kairyssdal.bsky.social · 5mo ago

Unhinged

Trump has done many terrible things over the past decade. He deliberately created anxiety, fear, and instability. But today's dread feels different. He is threatening a different order of terror. Mass war crimes. Countless civilian deaths. Will the date April 7, like Dec. 7, live in infamy?