Lolly Gasaway Faculty-Student Writing Award
The Order of the Coif presents one award each year for exceptional scholarship authored collaboratively by a student and a faculty member. The award celebrates the high level of intellectual achievement at its member schools by recognizing the published scholarship and faculty members.
Award winners’ scholarship must be of the highest quality. It shall exhibit originality, in-depth thought and analysis, and professional writing. It must make a substantial contribution to legal thought. At least one student and one faculty member must be named as primary authors of the work.
The Lolly Gasaway Student-Faculty Scholarship Award was established in 2022 to honor Lolly Gasaway for her many years of exceptional service to the Order of the Coif as Treasurer-Secretary. Lolly Gasaway retired from this role in 2022.
2024 Gasaway Award Winner
Expecting Specific Performance by Tess Wilkinson-Ryan, David Hoffman & Emily Campbell was published in volume 98 of the New York University Law Review in 2023.
From the abstract:
Using a series of surveys and experiments, we find that ordinary people think that courts will give them exactly what they bargained for after breach of contract; in other words, specific performance is the expected contractual remedy. This expectation is widespread even for the diverse array of deals where the legal remedy is traditionally limited to money damages. But for a significant fraction of people, the focus on
equity seems to be a naïve belief that is open to updating. In the studies reported here, individuals were less likely to anticipate specific performance when they were briefly introduced to the possibility that courts sometimes award damages in contract disputes.We argue that the default expectation of equitable relief is a widespread but malleable intuition—and that even a fragile legal intuition has practical consequences, individually and systemically. In a follow-up experiment, we show that subjects are more interested in the prospect of efficient breach when they know
that money damages are a possible remedy. This finding suggests that the mismatch between what people assume the law will do (specific performance) and what it actually does (money damages) sometimes encourages performance. We consider the potential for exploitation of this tendency. Finally, we offer some suggestions about how scholars of law and psychology should elicit folk beliefs about legal rules and remedies.
Expecting Specific Performance
by Tess Wilkinson-Ryan, David Hoffman, Emily Campbell
2024 Gasaway Award Honorable Mention
Fact and Friction: A Case Study in the Fight Against False News by Ayelet Gordon-Tapiero, Paul Ohm & Ashwin Ramaswami was published in volume 57 of the U.C. Davis Law Review in 2023.
From the abstract:
There is growing recognition within the technology industry of the power of friction to promote important human values and address online harms. Leading technology platforms have begun to slow down communications to give time and space for user thought and deliberation to try to help solve seemingly intractable problems that have emerged from their frictionless designs. Legal scholars have begun to study these uses of friction as a promising self-regulatory and regulatory approach. This Article contributes a new foundation stone to that emerging literature.
Some platforms have injected friction into their social media and messaging services to try to limit the spread of false news. To this end, WhatsApp tags some messages as “frequently forwarded” and places limits on how those messages can be shared. The stakes are high, as the past several years have seen a rise in the prevalence of false news spread via WhatsApp, contributing to election disruptions, mob violence, and even deaths.
WhatsApp’s approach has been widely hailed and held out as a best practice by policymakers, journalists, and academics alike, yet it has never been the subject of an extensive technical or policy analysis until now. This Article reports the results of analysis conducted by a team of legal and technical scholars. While we confirmed many of WhatsApp’s claims about its mechanisms, we were also able to find many ways to circumvent their celebrated restrictions.
Today’s self-regulatory attempts to introduce friction-in-design can serve as a blueprint for tomorrow’s regulatory mandates. From the insights generated by our technical analysis we draw lessons for policymakers considering new laws mandating WhatsApp-style friction into social media and messaging services and other forms of friction-in-design regulation.