The University of Alabama School of Law’s faculty research spans diverse fields such as constitutional law, environmental policy, and international relations, addressing critical issues like climate change, workplace discrimination, and nuclear control. By merging theoretical insights with practical applications, their work influences policy and practice, providing tangible benefits locally and globally. The interdisciplinary nature of their studies—covering topics like AI in judicial processes and privacy in the digital age—creates a dynamic academic environment that fosters critical thinking. This prepares students to become thoughtful, impactful legal professionals equipped to navigate and shape the future legal landscape.
Alabama Law's pioneering faculty research inspires critical thinking
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Faculty News
Recent Research
Sharing is Caring: Does Organ Allocation Policy Work?
Benjamin McMichael: I examine changes in organ allocation policies. I find these policies increase national organ sharing and improve some transplant-specific outcomes. I introduce the novel concept of "transplant amenable deaths" to measure policy impacts beyond the transplant system, addressing an important gap in the literature. These deaths, representing potential lives saved by transplants, increase…
Inequitable Organ Allocation
Benjamin J. McMichael: Seventeen people die every day in the United States waiting for an organ transplant, and over 100,000 people are currently on waitlists to receive a donated organ. Given these stark numbers, the allocation policies governing who receives donated organs are both critically important and hotly debated. Congress passed the National Organ Transplant Act in 1984 with the goal of eliminating markets for…
Cutthroat Business
Luke Herrine: The production of meat is almost entirely controlled by a small group of multinational agribusinesses. These corporations own everything from animal genetics to feed to wholesaling to slaughtering to butchering-leaving only the raising of the animals to nominally independent farmers, who are, in turn, controlled through one-sided contracts. Packing companies use this power not just to push down…
The Public/Private Home
Clare Ryan: Families today are more private and more public than traditional family law doctrine ever envisioned. This Article reveals how many elements of family life, which the law often assumes will occur in public—work, school, social life—have moved into the private sphere of the home. While at the same time, private family life has become increasingly visible and public through social media and…
Time & Contract Interpretation: Lessons from Machine Learning
Yonathan A. Arbel: Contract interpretation is the task of estimating what distant in time parties meant to say or would have said about a specific contingency. For at least a century, scholars and courts have been debating how to best carry out this task. Conceiving of the interpretative task as one of prediction, I suggest that there are some valuable lessons to be drawn from a field devoted to building prediction…
Waste, Property, and Useless Things
Meredith Render: How should the law respond to intentionally useless objects that are constructed from scarce materials and thrust into an overcrowded world? Approximately 60 million tons of electronic waste, or “e-waste” –e.g., discarded iPhones, refrigerators, desktop computers—is produced each year. This annual pile of electronic rubbish represents $62 billion worth of tangible raw materials (such as gold and…
A Constitutional False Claims Act
Benjamin J. McMichael, Mackenzi Barrett, W. Kip Viscusi: The False Claims Act (FCA) represents one of the most important sources, if not the most important source, of liability in the healthcare system and other industries that routinely provide goods and services to the federal government. Originally designed to police fraud during the Civil War, the FCA has become a general statute to enforce many other complex legal schemes. Because failure to comply…
Exoneration Finance
Kay L. Levine, Russell M. Gold: The path to financial compensation for the wrongfully convicted can be complex and time-consuming. Exonerees often struggle to make ends meet and function in free society, let alone navigate a serpentine process while waiting years for the recovery they deserve. Securing the assistance of an attorney is often a critical step, but too few lawyers are willing to risk taking these complicated cases…
Integrating Interference Theory
Daiquiri Steele: Robust retaliation protections are an essential component of any effective enforcement regime. Recognizing this, Congress has included a provision prohibiting retaliation in nearly every workplace statute passed in the past century. In statutes more than a century old, like the Civil Rights Act of 1866, where Congress neglected to include an explicit anti-retaliation provision in the statutory…
The Dog That Didn't Bark is Rewriting the Second Amendment
Fredrick E. Vars: The Supreme Court’s Second Amendment test is based on nothing. By “nothing,” I mean the absence of something. The Court in Bruen suggested that a modern gun regulation could be constitutional only if there was an analogous historical regulation. Thus, legislative inaction defines the scope of the Second Amendment. This form of argument is often called “the dog that didn’t bark,” after a famous…
The Price of Criminal Law
Russell M. Gold: Should tax dollars pay for more criminal law, better public schools, or a new community center? Different counties will answer the question differently, but facing these tradeoffs is profoundly important to democratic governance. Nonetheless, because the criminal legal system diffuses power and hides and offloads costs, officials and voters do not have to…
Eroding Immigrants' Rights Through the 'New' New Textualism
Shalini Bhargava Ray: This essay analyzes statutory interpretation in three immigration cases from the 2021-2022 Supreme Court term: Johnson v. Arteaga-Martinez, Garland v. Aleman Gonzalez, and Patel v. Garland.
Tax Incentives for Investment Crowdfunding: A Comparative Analysis
Mirit Eyal-Cohen: “Investment Crowdfunding” is a unique form of funding a venture via several individuals’ monetary contributions. In 2012, Congress passed the Jumpstart Our Business Startups Act (JOBS Act) allowing some firms to participate in equity crowdfunding transactions online. Although the JOBS Act eased registration criteria for smaller firms, the latest regulations necessitate companies to fulfill…
Enforcing Equity
Daiquiri Steele: Federal administrative agencies that enforce workplace laws have dual responsibilities: (1) to prevent or remedy noncompliance with the underlying workplace law and (2) to prevent or remedy noncompliance with the law’s antiretaliation provisions. Disparities based on race, sex, and their intersection exist with respect to both of these types of employer noncompliance, as female workers and workers…
Citizenship and Racial Subordination
Shalini Bhargava Ray: Citizenship is a powerful concept in public discourse, often regarded as a tool for promoting inclusion and racial equality. But citizenship has important limitations as a vehicle for achieving egalitarian aspirations. As scholars have noted, citizenship has an exclusionary logic, and gradations of citizenship are inevitable. Contrary to the conventional wisdom, it has often served as only a weak…