Here is the latest faculty scholarship from the University of Wisconsin Law School Legal Studies Research Papers series via SSRN.

Joshua Braver (UW Law), Deference Due? “Considers” and the Insurrection Act

Braver offers the first sustained statutory interpretation of the Insurrection Act, the principal authority for deploying military force on American streets to enforce federal law. The prevailing view, reflected in recent circuit court decisions, gives the president “great deference” in determining whether deployment conditions are met. Braver pushes back. Courts do not owe that level of deference under three of the Act’s four trigger provisions—only under Section 252’s “judicial proceedings trigger,” which uniquely keys the president’s authority to what the president “considers.” Braver traces that word to an 1861 amendment designed to resolve a specific controversy at the Civil War’s outset.

Bryna Godar and Miriam Seifter (both UW Law), Court Reform and State Constitutions, Northwestern U.L. Rev. (forthcoming 2026)

State legislatures regularly pursue measures designed to shape the outcomes of state courts—court-packing schemes, jurisdiction-stripping, and other maneuvers that would draw intense scrutiny at the federal level but often pass with little public notice. Godar and Seifter bring these outcome-shaping reform efforts into focus and evaluate them against state constitutional law. Their argument: state constitutions don’t bar measures that align courts with popular preferences, but they do require that outcome-shaping changes receive genuine public engagement. Legislative efforts that sidestep that engagement run afoul of state constitutional principles.

Nina Varsava (UW Law) and Bill Watson (University of Illinois College of Law), Originalism’s General-Law Turn

Originalists have increasingly embraced a general-law theory of constitutional rights—the idea that constitutional enactment declared but did not create those rights, whose content was and remains a question of unwritten law that transcends jurisdictional lines. Varsava and Watson offer a theory of what general law actually is, drawing on early American cases and recent legal history. Their answer: general law depended on morality, which means that applying it requires moral reasoning. The implications for originalism are striking. The general-law theory requires reconceiving the movement’s core principles of fixation and constraint, and supports an approach to adjudication consistent with a range of nonoriginalist methods.

Peter Carstensen (UW Law and American Antitrust Institute), The DOJ Knows What To Do About Those Seed Mergers. Will They Reverse Them?, ProMarket (January 2026)

Carstensen takes up DOJ Assistant Attorney General Gail Slater’s recent speech repudiating the laissez-faire antitrust enforcement posture of past administrations, along with President Trump’s order directing antitrust agencies to investigate food price-fixing. His argument: if the administration is serious about bringing food prices down, it should start with the costs farmers face—specifically, by investigating and potentially challenging the large seed-seller mergers that occurred during Trump’s first term.

Derek Clinger (UW Law), Harnessing Unclaimed Funds for Election Administration, Journal of Election Administration, Research, and Practice 15 (2025)

Election administrators across the country operate under persistent financial strain, with local governments bearing most of the costs and state and federal support falling short. Clinger proposes a state-level solution: dedicating a portion of state-held unclaimed funds to election administration. States currently hold more than $108 billion in unclaimed assets such as abandoned bank accounts and forgotten insurance proceeds. The paper outlines several workable models and argues that this approach builds on established practices, requires no new taxes, and can be tailored to each state’s fiscal and political realities.

Arti Walker-Peddakotla (UW Law), Surveillance Architectures, Wisconsin Law Review (forthcoming 2026)

Urban planning and architecture decisions shape not just the physical environment but the surveillance environment as well. Walker-Peddakotla argues that the two are inseparable—decisions about how to design physical space are also decisions about whether to enact virtual surveillance. She introduces the concept of “surveillance by environmental design” to describe this link, situating it within urban planning, criminology, and critical geography scholarship.

Paul Connell (UW Law), Better Court Structure, Better Judgments: Exploring the Impact of Term Limits, Court Specialization and Rule Clarity with a Diagnostic Model of Judging in Securities Class Action Litigation

Court structure matters for decision quality. Connell uses data from securities class action litigation to estimate federal judges’ skill at identifying and dismissing non-meritorious suits, and to examine how that skill changes with experience and age. He finds that rule clarity plays a significant role in improving the accuracy and predictability of judicial decisions. Running counterfactual scenarios, Connell estimates that optimal term limits and subject-matter specialization—had they been in place when the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act passed in 1995—could have prevented more than $17 billion in non-meritorious settlements.

Bonnie J. Shucha (UW Law), AI Prompting for Legal Professionals: The Art of Asking the Right Question, 98(10) Wisconsin Lawyer 29 (2025)

Prompting is simply the art of asking generative AI the right question in the right way. The paper introduces the “7 Ps Framework” as a systematic approach to crafting more effective prompts, built around seven key elements: persona, product, prompt, purpose, prime, privacy, and polish. Not every prompt will need all seven, but understanding each component helps legal professionals make deliberate choices about how to structure their queries—and get more useful answers in return.

All papers are available for free download through the UW Law Legal Studies Research Paper Series. We invite you to explore the papers and to follow our faculty’s work on our website and on Bluesky.

This post was developed by the author with organizational and drafting assistance from Claude AI. All content was reviewed and refined for accuracy.