cajoling me into the delusion that it was a choice resulting from my own unbiased freewill and discriminating judgment

They basically can't; that's what qualified immunity is.

Even within specifically existing litigation, non-financial damages like injunctive relief aren't necessarily zero-sum either

I've never understood this? Conditional on entering into litigation, economic damages is a zero-sum game between the parties, but litigation as an institution isn't zero sum! Imagine what it would be like to not have legal recourse for anything ever!

Once more: the Supreme Court, strong-form law & economics, and Marxist legal theory agree that the most important function of the Court is to protect capital. What they disagree about is whether that is normatively good.

Nice piece on the specifics of the tax rules that incentivized Warner Bros to shelve Coyote vs Acme, Batgirl, and Scoob!: Warner Bros was likely accelerating a IRC 165 loss to the present year. This maneuver relies on principles unacceptable in other areas of tax law. papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers....

This is the first legislation to specifically target (a subset of) PPLI and comes out of Senator Wyden's Senate Finance Committee investigation of the industry. It also creates some much-needed reporting requirements.

New Wyden Bill Would Close Private Placement Life Insurance Tax Shelter Abused by the Ultra-Rich | The United States Senate Committee on Finance New Wyden Bill Would Close Private Placement Life Insurance Tax Shelter Abused by the Ultra-Rich

Senator Wyden has officially released his Protecting Proper Life Insurance From Abuse Act, which strips the tax benefits from private placement life policies if the underlying segregated insurer asset account supports less than 25 individual policies. www.finance.senate.gov/ranking-memb...

Examining the Cybersyn Project in Chile. A network that in 1972 connected, through telex machines, more than 300 recently nationalized firms, from Sebastian Edwards www.nber.org/papers/w35002

Very proud and happy to see that this is up and that Texas Law students can take my seminar on Unorthodox Business Associations this fall. Always looking for more examples!

This all precedes us even reaching that stage! But it would sure help at least somewhat in grappling with Priest-Klein if we could comprehensively observe litigation conditional on being filed.

Link to original paper, and congrats to the authors: papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers....

On the plus side, the odds that someone will pre-empt your empirical litigation project are minimal because no one else wants to spend a year or more negotiating and managing dataset construction for a project with three-or-four-digit number of observations.

The cumulative effect is that our understanding of basic facts about litigation is astonishingly limited and the advent of agentic AI will be of limited usefulness in changing that reality.

Everything gets much, much worse if you want to use pieces of the docket other than the final judicial opinion. The databases that have these are some combination of slow, expensive, limited, delayed, and/or hostile to large-scale data collection.

If you want to do work on litigation, despite the millions upon millions of court cases in the U.S. system, the best-case scenario is often that you have reasonably good manual access to often un-OCR'd PDFs that drop out entirely circa 2000.

An observation re-inspired by seeing this new paper: in the agentic AI era, the true foe of empirical legal studies is the judiciary. Empirical studies with regulatory data can pull in millions of observations in weeks, days (hours?). But if you do work on litigation, good luck.

Does anyone know why SSRN has abruptly destroyed itself and made articles impossible to find through google search?

Austin’s Surge of New Housing Construction Drove Down Rents After decades of explosive growth, Austin, Texas, in the 2010s was a victim of its own success. Lured by high-tech jobs and the city’s hip reputation, too many people were competing for too few homes....

Austin’s surge of new housing supply drove down housing prices across the board, with the largest benefit going to renters in the lowest cost buildings: “Rents declined about 11% in older non-luxury buildings that cater to lower-income renters, known as Class C buildings.”

What keeps the California property insurance market alive? Cross-subsidization from other states that don’t impose rigorous price caps on their own property insurers. papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers....

In economics, a new generation (people like Simon Oh, Ishita Sen, Ana-Maria Tenekedijieva, Pari Sastry) has begun a revival of interest in property & casualty insurance markets. Life insurance and health insurance are separate animals entirely. We’re watching the tip of an iceberg.

March 18, 2026 Today, civil rights leader Dolores Huerta issued the following statement:

Dolores Huerta's statement on Cesar Chavez: “I am nearly 96 years old, and for the last 60 years have kept a secret because I believed that exposing the truth would hurt the farmworker movement I have spent my entire life fighting for... I can no longer stay silent and must share my own experiences"

a New New Deal amending the Agricultural Adjustment Act to authorize paying social media companies to cease operations from 8am-8pm each day

Among other things, this paper is a showcase of how tools entirely internal to economics can demonstrate findings that are entirely contrary to oversimplistic "econ 101" narratives. pubs.aeaweb.org/doi/pdfplus/...

Article here: www.taxnotes.com/tax-notes-to...

Tax Notes has discovered that Jeffrey Epstein created several Irrevocable Life Insurance Trusts after he was indicted in 2006. My read: the premiums contributed suggest that Epstein was probably not using them for the income tax exemption, but quite possibly for asset protection.

Having a chuckle that this article has the high ratio of downloads to abstract views of any article I've ever seen. What the people want! papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers....

Picture of DOGE guy Nate Cavanaugh

Screenshot of my DOGE letter “Dr. Joseph Rezek Dear NEH Grantee, This letter provides notice that the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) is terminating your federal grant (Grant Application No. FEL29509824) effective April 3, 2025, in accordance with the termination clause in your Grant Agreement. Your grant no longer effectuates the agency's needs and priorities and conditions of the Grant Agreement and is subject to termination due to several reasonable causes, as outlined in 2CFR§200.340. For instance, NEH has reasonable cause to terminate your grant in light of the fact that the NEH is repurposing its funding allocations in a new direction in furtherance of the President's agenda. The President's February 19, 2025 executive order mandates that the NEH eliminate all non-statutorily required activities and functions. See Commencing the Reduction of the Federal Bureaucracy, E.O. 14217 (Feb. 19, 2025). Your grant's immediate termination is necessary to safeguard the interests of the federal government, including its fiscal priorities. Any objections or appeals to this termination will be managed in strict accordance with the President's Executive Orders,

Last year, this guy (left) from DOGE used ChatGPT to find NEH grants that were too “DEI” for Trump, and canceled them, including mine, as shown by the letter I received last April (right). Huge new NYT article on the back story link below

When I worked at the Chicago Fed, we became interested in a unique quirk of insurance accounting: states can issue insurers "permitted practice" accounting exceptions. They're relatively uncommon but acan occasionally be quite significant. Our writeup is out: link.springer.com/epdf/10.1057...

Hey that’s about the cost of the SSI Restoration Act, which would cut recipient poverty by 60%, eliminate marriage penalties, and modernize draconian asset limits.