The Global Financial Crisis precipitated a condensing of capital and a fall in global equities markets that resulted not solely in the necessity of government bailouts of the financial industry but also exposed a number of Ponzi schemes that collectively will cost investors tens of billions of dollars. With a new wave of litigation by innocent investors against Ponzi scheme operators just beginning, and likely to take years, it becomes important to clearly identify the methodologies used to value the loss and allocate existing assets among remaining creditors. To that end I offer this article to argue that courts ought to use a comparatively new approach – the loss to the losing victim methodology originally pioneered in criminal law – to determine how equally innocent victims share the losses these schemes precipitated. By standardizing the calculation of loss to investors in both criminal and civil law, the courts will not only make the determination of loss considerably easier, but also more equitable.

Scholars of the Supreme Court often use a justice’s political ideology to predict their ultimate vote on Constitutional questions. While this approach may serve scholars well when questions involve hot button civil liberties issues that are the focus of confirmation hearings, ideology is in actuality a poor predictor of judicial behavior in other areas of law. This paper looks at one of the more complex – Federal Indian Law – and uses both descriptive statistics and more advanced quantitative analysis to go beyond the pure ideology and explain why individual Justices vote the way they do. Using the Fisher Exact Test, and a comprehensive new database of Indian Law decisions, I demonstrate that contrary to common expectations, factors like the Solicitor General’s participation are not significant in swaying an individual Justice’s vote, while factors like being the appellant party and certified questions of conflicting jurisdiction do statistically significantly alter an individual Justice’s vote on the merits. These factors provide better insight into the ultimate outcome – at a Justice level – of Indian law decisions before the Court, and can be used by parties to predict future Supreme Court outcomes on Indian law questions.