Articles and Essays

Most of my work is available on SSRN; or by request here.

Published and Forthcoming Work

Truth Bounties: A Market Solution to Fake News, (with Michael Gilbert)

The Credibility Effect, Journal of Legal Studies (Forthcoming)

Defamation with Bayesian Audience, Journal of Legal Studies (Forthcoming) (with Murat Mungan)

Contracts in the Age of Smart Readers, 90 George Washington Law Review 83 (2022) (With Samuel Becher)

  • Reviewed in JOTWELL

All-Caps, Journal of Empirical Legal Studies (Forthcoming, 2020) (with Andrew Toler)

Informal summary: Expand

If you ever read a consumer contract–think your wireless phone or the car dealership agreement–you surely noticed long blocks of text that appear in all-caps. The reason why all-caps exist is that courts and legislators insist on them, and will often not enforce an important term unless it is capitalized. All-caps is supposed to act as a consumer protection device of sorts, by drawing attention to important aspects of the contract.
Here we test this theory. We first collect data from hundreds of agreements used by firms across the US and find that all-caps appears in ~77% of them. We then test in lab settings whether people notice contract terms more when they appear in all-caps. We find evidence that all-caps fails to meaningfully improve consumer notice, thus undermining the case for uppercase. As all-caps is very common and there is often a lot at stake, we ask courts to stop relying on this odd measure.

Payday, 98 Washington University Law Review 1 (2020)

Slicing Defamation by Contract, Chicago Law Review Online (2020)

Theory of the Nudnik: The Future of Consumer Activism and What We Can Do to Stop It, 73 Vanderbilt Law Review 929(2020) (with Roy Shapira)

  • Podcast interview, Ipse Dixit, with Brian L. Frye: Link, Spotify
  • Selected for the Stanford Junior Forum for Law & STEM

Consumer Activism, DePaul Law Review (2020) (Invited symposium contribution, Rising Stars in Legal Academia, with Roy Shapira)

The Case Against Expanding Defamation Laws, 1 Alabama Law Review 453 (2019) (with Murat Mungan)

  • Selected for the Stanford/Yale/Harvard Junior Faculty Forum

Reputation Failure and the Limits of Market Discipline, 54 Wake Forest Law Review 1239 (2019)

Adminization: Gatekeeping Consumer Contracts, 71 Vanderbilt Law Review 121 (2018)

  • Selected for the Stanford/Yale/Harvard Junior Faculty Forum

Tort Reform through the Backdoor: A Critique of Law and Apologies, 90 Southern California Law Review 1199 (2017)  (with Yotam Kaplan)

Shielding of Assets and Lending Contracts, 48 Int’l Review Law & Economics 26 (2016) (Peer-reviewed)

Contract Remedies in Action: Specific Performance, 118 West Virginia Law Review 100 (2015)

Work in Progress

Contracting for Truth (with Michael Gilbert) (Working Paper)

  • Selected for ALEA 2022, MLEA 2022

Nano Contracts (Working Paper)

  • Selected for Stanford/Penn/Northwestern Law & Stem (Blind Review); MLEA

Smart Contracts and Smart Gavels (Work in Progress)

The Misunderstood Economics of Defamation Law (Work in Progress)

Other Work

Book Review: Reconsidering Civil Justice, Civil Justice Quarterly, 2019 (Invited Book Review)

Asset Freezing in Israel, in Asset Freezing (2016, Kluwer, with Elad Peled)

The Execution and Enforcement of Private Legal Obligations (May 25, 2015) (SJD Dissertation, Harvard Law School)

Study on the Application of the Cross Border Mergers Directive, for the European Union, Directorate-General for the Internal Market and Services (project leader, professional report, empirical analysis in 28 countries) (2012)

Information Wants to Be Free (2010). Co-authored with Tehila Altshuler. (232 pp, policy paper)