The United States’ system for regulating employee exposures to hazardous chemicals is broken. Absent regulation, the labor market fails to produce efficient levels of precaution against chemical exposures. Information asymmetries, long disease latency periods, and other characteristics of chemical exposures thwart the market’s ability to produce efficient risk/wage tradeoffs. These same characteristics permit employers and chemical manufacturers to externalize the costs of injuries caused by chemical exposures. The current U.S. regulatory system, including a combination of OSHA regulations and state workers’ compensation programs, is not correcting the labor market’s failure. The result is a level of workplace chemical exposure risk that is systematically too high, and a level of precaution that is systematically too low. The reforms proposed in the literature to date do not harness the financial incentives of the least-cost information providers and least-cost risk avoiders: chemical manufacturers and employers. This Article takes the search for a solution in a new direction by using state workers’ compensation laws to capitalize on the incentives of chemical manufacturers and employers. The Article argues that state workers’ compensation laws should be amended in two ways: (1) shift the default burden of proof on causation to the respondents, but only in cases where there is no applicable OSHA exposure limit, and (2) allow employers to include chemical manufacturers as respondents in workers’ compensation proceedings for purposes of apportioning liability. These amendments could be implemented by convening a new National Commission on State Workers’ Compensation Laws. The result would be a new push for OSHA chemical exposure limits by chemical manufacturers and employers – the entities in the best position to provide the toxicity and precaution information necessary to support OSHA regulations.

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.