Faculty Bibliography

I took the new VW ID. Buzz for a drive down memory lane. Things got bumpy.

An artificial voice has long been a dream of tinkerers and technologists. Now that A.I. can talk, though, we may forget who we’re talking to.

In 1921, John Maynard Keynes and Frank Knight independently insisted on the importance of making a distinction between uncertainty and risk. Keynes referred to matters about which ‘there is no scientific basis on which to form any calculable probability whatever’. Knight claimed that ‘Uncertainty must be taken in a sense radically distinct from the familiar notion of Risk, from which it has never been properly separated’. Knightian uncertainty exists when people cannot assign probabilities to imaginable outcomes. People might know that a course of action might produce bad outcomes A, B, C, D and E, without knowing much or anything about the probability of each. Contrary to a standard view in economics, Knightian uncertainty is real, and it poses challenging and unresolved issues for decision theory and regulatory practice. It bears on many problems, potentially including those raised by artificial intelligence. It is tempting to seek to eliminate the worst-case scenario, and thus to adopt the maximin rule, which might seem to be the appropriate approach under Knightian uncertainty. But serious problems arise if eliminating the worst-case scenario would (1) impose high risks and costs, (2) eliminate large benefits or potential ‘miracles’ or (3) create uncertain risks.

With its arrest warrants, the International Criminal Court disgraces the rule of international law.

Interstitial Private Law encourages the next generation of private law theorists to engage with the “connective tissue” of private law. Long regarded by US legal scholars as uninteresting, private law theory has received renewed attention in the United States and around the world. Yet, even amid this scholarly revival, private law is still too often reduced to the more traditional concepts found within tort, property, and contract law. These basic categories alone cannot provide sufficient basis for informed doctrinal analysis—lawyers who hope to apply private law theory must also understand the rules and concepts that operate independently of, across, or within the interstices of these fields. This book introduces and analyzes these crucially important interstitial aspects, including legal personhood, agency, and other attribution rules, consent, estoppel, equity, remedies, and restitution. Contributions explain what interstitial concepts are and explore the ways they operate, contributing to the systematicity and functional coherence of private law systems. In doing so, the book broadens and deepens the scholarly agenda for private law theory in the United States and worldwide.

Food consumption and production contribute significantly to global greenhouse gas emissions, making them crucial entry points for mitigating climate change and maintaining a liveable planet. Over the past two decades, food policy initiatives have explored interventions to reshape production and consumption patterns, focusing on reducing food waste and curbing ruminant meat consumption. While the evidence of "what works" improves, evaluating which policies are appropriate and effective in specific contexts remains difficult due to external validity challenges. This paper demonstrates that a fine-tuned large language model (LLM) can accurately predict the direction of outcomes in approximately 80% of empirical studies measuring dietary-based impacts (e.g. food choices, sales, waste) resulting from behavioral interventions and policies. Approximately 75 prompts were required to achieve optimal results, with performance showing signs of catastrophic loss beyond this point. Our findings indicate that greater input detail enhances predictive accuracy, although the model still faces challenges with unseen studies, underscoring the importance of a representative training sample. As LLMs continue to improve and diversify, they hold promise for advancing data-driven, evidence-based policymaking.

From spreading misinformation to selling deadly products, bad actors use technology platforms to their advantage while causing devastating harms to privacy, health, and even democracy. Despite their central role in enabling these bad actors, the platforms almost entirely escape liability. This legal immunity is purportedly grounded in economics. From the beginning, courts and legislatures feared that liability would chill innovation, growth, and user access. They also speculated that platforms have sufficient market incentives to voluntarily police bad actors, making liability unnecessary. Whereas many scholars have argued that platform immunity is blind to justice, this Article shows that it is also blind to economics. We challenge the fundamental precepts that market incentives suffice and that liability inevitably brings detrimental chilling effects. By tracing the legal origins of platform immunity and synthesizing decades of legal and economic research, we show how judges and lawmakers have consistently applied shallow or misguided economic reasoning. Their misconceptions rely on an outdated depiction of economics and a narrow view of efficiency. Once updated for key factors such as platforms’ financial incentives to allow bad actors and the feasibility of platforms deploying automated monitoring technologies to prevent harms, economics fails to justify a broad shield against liability. Instead, economics offers a promising roadmap for holding platforms accountable for their harms while preserving their social benefits. Designing a better liability framework is increasingly important as advances in artificial intelligence accelerate technology’s presence in our everyday lives, creating unpredictable opportunities for bad actors to weaponize platforms. Anchoring platform liability more effectively in economic reasoning will help create a more adaptive legal framework that keeps pace with the future.

The Harris campaign felt the need to remind women voters that they can vote for whomever they want. Women understood this. The campaign failed to.

In a decades-long series of decisions culminating with its 2014 ruling in In re MFW Shareholders Litigation, the Delaware courts constructed a doctrinal infrastructure that encouraged two procedural protections for minority shareholders in freezeout transactions: approval by a special committee of independent directors (“SC approval”), and approval by a majority-of-the-minority shares (a “MOM condition”). Empirical evidence indicated that practitioners largely adopted this dual-pronged approach to freezeouts for most of the following decade. However, in a trilogy of decisions from 2022-2023, the Delaware Chancery Court unintentionally created dis-incentives for MOM conditions. We present the first empirical evidence from this new doctrinal regime, and find that MOM conditions have indeed decreased significantly in incidence: from approximately 85% beforehand to approximately 50% afterwards. As a policy matter, we argue that our findings reflect a step in the wrong direction. Delaware courts should encourage the procedural protections of SC approval and a MOM condition, because these protections track the procedural protections in an arms-length deal process. While jurisdictions around the world are attempting to replicate Delaware’s protections for minority shareholders, Delaware itself has unintentionally moved away from those same protections. To the extent that controllers and special committees are declining to provide MOM conditions due to “hold up” risk by activist investors, we offer a majority-of-the-original minority (MOOM) condition as an alternative that would address this concern.

As American civic life has become increasingly shaped by algorithms, trust in government has plummeted. Is there any turning back?

Congress passed a law to clarify the electoral vote-counting process and prevent the next Jan. 6. It was well within its power to do so.

Mark Tushnet’s work argues that successful democracy may require civic virtues and suggests that radically decentralized governance and “engagement” remedies in courts might help cultivate civic attitudes that enable democracy to work. This chapter takes up the idea of civic virtue, exploring what it is, who should have it, what public expectations of public officials’ morality are, whether such expectations matter, and how a sense of civic duty might be encouraged. A core element of civic virtue is an orientation to help improve the broader community of which one is a part; a sense of civic duty is especially important for those who hold power, but this cannot be sustained without public expectations of civic-minded official conduct. The chapter suggests a link between Tushnet’s arguments and William James’s view that democracy requires citizens with a “tincture of self doubt” and tolerance for different ideas and that education could contribute to these attitudes. Approaches, beyond those discussed by Tushnet, for the cultivation of the kind of civic attitudes necessary for democracy, as well as knowledge of how to participate in governance, might include civic education, a greater emphasis by constitutional jurists on the concept and content of nonjusticiable duties of proconstitutional public officials, and recognition of the constitutional role of knowledge institutions in encouraging attitudes of epistemic openness and tolerance for disagreement.

Despite recent criticisms ably presented by Sergio Verdugo, the concept of constituent power seems essential to explain how irregular constitutional changes—those brought about by processes not authorized by the constitution in place—are or become legally binding. Properly understood, the concept of constituent power is not used properly either “in the moment” or prospectively, that is, as partisans advocate for irregular changes or implement irregular processes to put such changes in place. Rather, the concept is properly used only retrospectively, not as Verdugo suggests to support a claim that a unified people actually endorsed the changes when they first occurred, but rather to identify those irregular changes that “stick”—that a nation’s people come over time to accept as legally binding.

In prominent voting models, expected pivotality drives voters’ turnout decisions and hence determines voting outcomes. In practice, many individuals turn out for reasons unrelated to pivotality, and their votes overwhelm the forces analyzed in pivotality-based models. Accordingly, we examine a model of large-N elections at the opposite end of the spectrum, where pivotality effects vanish and turnout is driven entirely by individuals’ direct costs and benefits from the act of voting itself. Under certain conditions, the level of turnout is irrelevant to representativeness—and thus to outcomes. Under others, anything is possible: for any distribution of underlying preferences, any other distribution of preferences in the turnout set—and thus any voting outcome—can arise. We characterize particular skews in terms of representativeness and offer limiting results. These results sharpen and in some respects redirect applied work examining voter turnout, with an emphasis on underlying determinants of representativeness.

Bringing the thoughts of Mark Tushnet on the service (or disservice) of constitutionalism to democracy into conjunction with those of John Rawls, a striking overlap is found. We also find at least one seeming point of difference. Where Rawls shows no qualms about assignment to a judicial tribunal of a nearer-term decisive say over the constitutional validity of ordinary legislation when challenged as constitutionally noncompliant, Tushnet does. Rawls might limit judicial nay-saying to laws for which no credible defense can be summoned from within a wide space of reasonable disputability among adherents to constitutional democracy (and in that way draw closer to Tushnet), but Tushnet seeks ways to avoid or minimize even that much concession of shorter-term decisive authority away from ordinary democratic-majoritarian resolution. This chapter asks whether that difference necessarily signals some deeper division between the two bodies of thought over the political value or values to be served by constitutionalism in relation to democracy. Adverting then to Tushnet’s evident and persistent pursuit of an interest in weak-form judicial constitutional review—and giving consideration to possible explanations for that pursuit that would still not imply any positive embrace by Tushnet of constitutionalism for a country he would like to live in—the chapter concludes that it probably does not.

Journal of Corporation Law Search Site Main Navigation Home Issues Volume 50, Number 2 Volume 50, Number 1 Volume 49, Number 5 Volume 49, Number 4 Volume 49, Number 3 Volume 49, Number 2 Volume 49, Number 1 Volume 48, Number 4 Volume 48, Number 3 Volume 48, Number 2 Volume 48, Number 1 Volume 47, Number 4 Issue Archive JCL Digital Symposia Submissions Donate Contact About Breadcrumb Home Articles Stakeholder Amnesia in M&A Deals Wednesday, November 27, 2024 Written by Caley Petrucci , Guhan Subramanian The most fundamental and longstanding debate in corporate law—the purpose of the corporation—has found new energy in connection with broader discussions about the power of modern corporations and their role in society. Companies have increasingly embraced the consideration of employees, communities, and other stakeholders in the course of everyday business. However, these same considerations are virtually non-existent in merger and acquisition (M&A) transactions. Elon Musk’s recent acquisition of Twitter provides an illustration of this stark disconnect. Prior to the transaction, Twitter pursued numerous stakeholder-centric goals. In contrast, Musk had taken a skeptical, if not hostile, stance toward stakeholder governance. When Twitter negotiated its sale to Musk, the board succumbed to “stakeholder amnesia”—overlooking its stakeholder commitments in favor of the high-premium all-cash offer from Musk. Twitter is not alone: stakeholder amnesia is a widespread phenomenon in M&A. In this Article, we argue that corporate boards have the legal and practical ability to consider stakeholder interests in their dealmaking. We examine three of the most significant barriers that might prevent a board from incorporating their stakeholder-related objectives into transactions—fiduciary duties, negotiation leverage, and contractual feasibility—and demonstrate that, outside of the Revlon context, none of these are compelling barriers. Rather, boards that consider stakeholder interests in their dealmaking can be acting consistently with their fiduciary duties. Moreover, boards often have the negotiation leverage and capability to incorporate stakeholder protections into their contractual agreements. We conclude that stakeholder considerations can pervade all aspects of managerial decision-making, including decisions about the sale of the company. In doing so, we also provide specific recommendations for courts, boards, and transaction planners.

I have been suspended from Harvard’s library for silently supporting students who protested about Palestine and Lebanon.

Many moral judgments are rooted in the outrage heuristic. In making such judgments about certain personal injury cases, people’s judgments are both predictable and widely shared. With respect to outrage (on a bounded scale of one to six) and punitive intent (also on a bounded scale of one to six), the judgments of one group of six people, or 12 people, nicely predict the judgements of other groups of six people, or 12 people. Moreover, outrage judgments are highly predictive of punitive intentions. Because of their use of the outrage heuristic, people are intuitive retributivists. People care about deterrence, but they do not think in terms of optimal deterrence. Because outrage is category-specific, those who use the outrage heuristic are likely to produce patterns that they would themselves reject, if only they were to see them. Because people are intuitive retributivists, they reject some of the most common and central understandings in economic and utilitarian theory. To the extent that a system of criminal justice depends on the moral psychology of ordinary people, it is likely to operate on the basis of the outrage heuristic and will, from the utilitarian point of view, end up making serious and systematic errors.

As the environment for litigation and legislative advocacy becomes increasingly hostile at the federal level, many have turned to state legislative advocacy and state court litigation to protect and promote voting rights. This chapter does not discuss every important reform, nor every troubling restriction, being considered at the state level, but rather outlines some key categories of laws that help, or hinder, historically disenfranchised communities with respect to voting. The first part focuses on some of the main ways that people of color, people with disabilities, young voters, and people involved in the criminal justice system are affected by state voting laws. Part two looks at the relatively recent development of state voting rights acts that seek to provide protections for people of color as federal protections are eroded, and even go well beyond the types of protections that have historically been provided by federal legislation.

Dropout often threatens the validity of causal inference in longitudinal studies. While existing studies have focused on the problem of missing outcomes caused by treatment, we study an important but overlooked source of dropout, selective eligibility. For example, patients may become ineligible for subsequent treatments due to severe side effects or complete recovery. Selective eligibility differs from the problem of ``truncation by death'' because dropout occurs after observing the outcome but before receiving the subsequent treatment. This difference makes the standard approach to dropout inapplicable. We propose a general methodological framework for longitudinal causal inference with selective eligibility. By focusing on subgroups of units who would become eligible for treatment given a specific treatment history, we define the time-specific eligible treatment effect (ETE) and expected number of outcome events (EOE) under a treatment sequence of interest. Assuming a generalized version of sequential ignorability, we derive two nonparametric identification formulae, each leveraging different parts of the observed data distribution. We then derive the efficient influence function of each causal estimand, yielding the corresponding doubly robust estimator. Finally, we apply the proposed methodology to an impact evaluation of a pre-trial risk assessment instrument in the criminal justice system, in which selective eligibility arises due to recidivism.

The university suspended students from the library. Will it suspend faculty members?

May 11, 2023, marked the end of the federal COVID-19 Public Health Emergency (PHE). During the PHE, regulatory flexibilities allowed telehealth to more effectively connect physicians providing care and patients seeking it. This paper discusses the implications of the end of the PHE on telehealth coverage, payment, reimbursement, and licensure, and exposes inconsistencies and inequities in extant state regulations.

The Voting Rights Act (VRA) was Congress’s fourth attempt since 1957 to enforce the promise of the Fifteenth Amendment. All prior attempts sought solutions through the judicial system and failed. This was because, as Attorney General Nicholas Katzenbach explained during his Senate testimony in 1965, no matter what the courts decided, recalcitrant states found a way around it. “What is required,” Katzenbach told the House subcommittee, “is a systematic, automatic method to deal with discriminatory tests, with discriminatory testers, and with discriminatory threats.” The challenge was to design a systematic approach that stayed a step ahead of the discriminators. The VRA was the solution to this challenge. This chapter tells the story of the drafting of the Voting Rights Act. The VRA is rightly lauded as one of the most effective and significant civil rights statutes enacted by Congress. The Act is also understood as a radical intervention into matters that the U.S. Constitution leaves to the states. This chapter offers three arguments. First, that rather than a radical intervention, the Voting Rights Act was a conservative solution. Second, that the Supreme Court’s understanding of racism as “pathological racism” anchored its voting rights jurisprudence. It justified the Court’s approach to federalism, state sovereignty, sectionalism, and the Act’s disparate treatment of the states. Third, and finally, once the consensus over pathological racism weakened, the VRA came under threat. This explains Shelby County v. Holder and the perilous future of the Act.

Many field public goods are provided by a small number of contributors: the ‘superstars’ of their respective communities. This paper focuses on Wikipedia, one of the largest online volunteering platforms. Over nine consecutive years, we study the relationship between social preferences—reciprocity, altruism and social image—and field cooperation. Wikipedia editors are quite prosocial on average, and superstars even more so. But while reciprocal and social image preferences strongly relate to contribution quantity among casual editors, only social image concerns continue to predict differences in contribution levels between superstars. In addition, we find that social image–driven editors—both casual and superstars—contribute lower-quality content on average. Evidence points to a perverse social incentive effect, as quantity is more readily observable than quality on Wikipedia.

From March 2020 to May 2023, millions of noncitizens were expelled from the United States without a hearing under the so-called "Title 42" process. The government claimed that an obscure public health law ousted all the substantive and procedural rights that normally constrain immigration enforcement, and used it as a pretext to rapidly eject refugees at the southern border. The CDC's "Title 42" orders have now expired, but the regulation that authorized them remains in force and could be reactivated at any time. Instead of treating this episode as closed, this Article closely examines the hasty rise and slow demise of the "Title 42" regime, and the litigation it spawned, in search of lessons for the future. The "Title 42" regulation invites abuse, and would distort even a well-intentioned response to the next major pandemic. The regulation must be repealed or rewritten, and the Article discusses how it should be reformed.

This wide-ranging collection of essays reflects the manifold scholarly interests of legal historian Charles Donahue, whose former students engage here with questions related to foundational Roman law concepts, the impact of the law on women ...

Consent lay at the core of medieval English marriage law due to its centrality in the rules adopted by Pope Alexander III, recognizing an exchange of present consent or an exchange of future consent followed by intercourse as creating a binding marriage. Consent was also an important concept in the realm of sin and crime, where it connoted an interior disposition toward committing a wrongful act. To be convicted of felony in medieval England, a person must have consented to involvement in an alleged crime. When a husband and wife were implicated in crime together, their marital status gave rise to presumptions, most notably that a wife might have had no alternative but to obey her husband, thereby calling into doubt her consent to the alleged crime. In both the marital and criminal contexts, an emphasis on consent led to evidentiary challenges and a reliance on presumptions to aid adjudication. The resulting adjudicatory processes ensured that the marital bond, forged in consent, did not inevitably give rise to liability for a spouse’s criminal behavior.

Alessandro Ferrara’s argument in Sovereignty Across Generations takes shape within a broadly Rawlsian ‘political liberal’ framework of thought about moral underpinnings for a constitutional-democratic practice of politics. Where, exactly (I ask here), is the place within that thought for concern about occurrences in a country’s past of popular constituent power? If the country’s currently established constitutional regime is fully democratic (and is otherwise morally in order) by whatever operational measures you and I might think to apply, why should we or anyone care about how or by whose authority the regime got set up and running in the first place? By Ferrara’s Rawls-inspired teaching in Sovereignty Across Generations, the answer to that question will come from a certain conception of political legitimacy. But then a potent objection comes from those who press the question of how to reconcile a democratic conception of legitimacy with a subjection of current (say) deliberative-majoritarian rule to antecedently imposed terms of constraint. Under Rawlsian and Ferrarian stimulus, I look into the possible relevance here of H.L.A. Hart’s proposition of a complementarity or fusion, in our concept of law, of an ‘internal’ with an ‘external’ perspective that those involved may adopt toward the coercive social practice in question. Underlying the Rawlsian constitutional proposition on legitimacy, I end by suggesting, is the thought that, in order for a person to live in freedom under law, that person will have to sustain simultaneously an internal attitude of bonding to their society’s own ongoing project of legality and an external attitude of critical judgemental of that project as reasonably and rationally acceptable to free and equal citizens in conditions of reasonable pluralism.

For many decades, administrative law has been clouded, or perhaps haunted, by a Grand Narrative. According to that narrative, the Supreme Court has abdicated. It has allowed the modern administrative state to breach the safeguards established by Article I, Article II, and Article III. The Court permitted the breach of Article I by authorizing Congress to delegate broad discretionary authority to agencies (and thus to become legislators). The Court permitted the breach of Article II by authorizing Congress to create independent agencies, immunized from presidential control. The Court permitted the breach of Article III in two ways: (1) by giving Congress broad authority to allow administrative agencies to engage in adjudication, unprotected by the Constitution's tenure and salary provisions and (2) by granting interpretive authority to such agencies. In recent years, the Court has acted as if the Grand Narrative is essentially right. Thus it has sharply cabined Congress' power to create independent agencies; imposed new constraints on Congress' power to allow agencies to adjudicate; signaled the vitality of the nondelegation doctrine; insisted on independent judicial interpretation of law; and invoked the separation of powers, through the major questions doctrine, to limit the exercise of discretionary power by agencies. The Grand Narrative also affects other areas of administrative law, including "arbitrary or capricious" review. There are other grand narratives about administrative law (originalist, Burkean, Thayerian, and pragmatic), and they might well be more compelling; but in the current era, they are not nearly as grand, or as influential, as the Grand Narrative. Law has multiple equilibria, and the current equilibrium, if it can be called that, is one in which the Grand Narrative is on the ascendency.

You need only look at the state level to understand who supports workers and who doesn’t.

Legal scholars continue to revisit historical treaties between Western and non-Western nations to challenge long-standing accounts of non-Western peoples’ engagement with international law. Following this trend, new scholarship has stressed African agency in Euro-African treaty-making. However, legal scholars have generally overlooked African perspectives, pointing to a lack of sources. Focusing on nineteenth-century treaty-making between France and the polities of the Western Sudan in West Africa, this article excavates African perspectives through a novel reading of Euro-African treaties in an African context. This reading analyses treaties within the Western Sudan’s broader diplomatic corpus in both French and Arabic. By focusing on markers of translation, transcription, and negotiation left on different copies of treaties, this method brings to light arguments and practices that have been obscured in published European-language versions. Reading Franco-Sudanian treaties in a Sudanian context reveals that different norms governed the ratification of treaties in the Western Sudan and Europe. Treaties that scholars have long considered unratified were in fact ratified according to Western Sudanian norms, which designated the governor of French Senegal rather than the French president as the official competent to ratify treaties for France. However, when French officials sought to use treaties to claim sovereign rights in West Africa against Great Britain, they pressed the president to ratify them again. Presidential ratification thus served to transpose Franco-Sudanian treaties from an African to a Western normative order. Uncovering the African origins of Euro-African treaties thus reveals their differential operation across autonomous inter-polity orders.

The use of Artificial Intelligence (AI), or more generally data-driven algorithms, has become ubiquitous in today's society. Yet, in many cases and especially when stakes are high, humans still make final decisions. The critical question, therefore, is whether AI helps humans make better decisions compared to a human-alone or AI-alone system. We introduce a new methodological framework to empirically answer this question with a minimal set of assumptions. We measure a decision maker's ability to make correct decisions using standard classification metrics based on the baseline potential outcome. We consider a single-blinded and unconfounded treatment assignment, where the provision of AI-generated recommendations is assumed to be randomized across cases with humans making final decisions. Under this study design, we show how to compare the performance of three alternative decision-making systems--human-alone, human-with-AI, and AI-alone. Importantly, the AI-alone system includes any individualized treatment assignment, including those that are not used in the original study. We also show when AI recommendations should be provided to a human-decision maker, and when one should follow such recommendations. We apply the proposed methodology to our own randomized controlled trial evaluating a pretrial risk assessment instrument. We find that the risk assessment recommendations do not improve the classification accuracy of a judge's decision to impose cash bail. Furthermore, we find that replacing a human judge with algorithms--the risk assessment score and a large language model in particular--leads to a worse classification performance.

This Viewpoint discusses potential benefits and obstacles regarding US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) oversight of laboratory-developed tests.

This Viewpoint discusses whether the federal EMTALA act requires that hospitals provide abortions when needed to protect the health of the pregnant person, even if prohibited by state law.

A privately-informed entrepreneur may withhold material information from prospective investors who may sue the firm ex post for (alleged) non-disclosure. Absent liability, the entrepreneur has an excessive incentive to withhold bad news and pursue socially-wasteful projects. Liability deters inefficient non-disclosure and prevents capital misallocation. Any damage award received by investors is partially offset by a reduction in equity value. Depending on the likelihood of court error and litigation cost, the socially-optimal damage award may be either zero or the minimum necessary for full deterrence. The private incentive to waive liability may be socially excessive or insufficient. Positive and normative implications are discussed.

This essay makes two claims about Trump v. United States. First, the immunity holding that has been the focus of most attention will not be nearly as consequential for the presidency as many critics claim. Second, the decision’s main significance for the presidency lies in its expansive discussion of exclusive presidential powers, independent of the immunity ruling.

We began our work as cochairs of Harvard’s Open Inquiry and Constructive Dialogue Working Group with listening sessions and a campuswide survey. What we learned was sobering.

For the past decade or so, we have been worrying about democratic backsliding – movement toward autocratic rule in nations that we thought were stably democratic. Our attention to backsliding may have distracted us, though, from another important phenomenon – front-sliding, so to speak. If backsliding is a move from democracy toward autocracy, frontsliding is a move from autocracy to democracy. Professors Dan Slater and Joseph Wong’s important book From Development to Democracy offers an elegant argument that sometimes autocrats themselves initiate movement toward democracy even when they are not facing imminent collapse. They show how dominant political parties in South Korea, Taiwan, and Japan gave up a seeming guarantee of remaining in power through continuing repression in order to remain in power through reasonably free and fair elections instead. Their argument, which I outline in Part ii, is that sometimes democracy occurs because the dominant party is strong rather than weak and on the verge of collapse. That opens up the possibility of similar frontsliding transformations in other authoritarian, autocratic, or quasi-autocratic nations, including Singapore and, most intriguingly, China. I examine this possibility in Part iii.