VOLUME 161, ISSUE 3 February 2013

Professor Abraham's new Article, Four Conceptions of Insurance, offers an invaluable overview and critique of four modern conceptions of insurance. He cautions that “the particular lens through which we view insurance law cannot tell us what principles should govern or what policy choices to make.” But who is the “we” in that statement? This Response focuses on three overlooked groups with an important interest in such governing principles and policy choices. First, Abraham mentions insurance brokers only briefly, describing how large insurance brokers can negotiate policy terms. But brokers, large and small, play an important role in deciding which available insurance a policyholder purchases. Second, any discussion of homeowners insurance should include mortgage holders, who require mortgagors to purchase insurance and whose interest in the scope of coverage is equal to or greater than the homeowner's. Third, within the construction industry, general contractors seek to transfer risk to their subcontractors, who must purchase liability policies naming general contractors as “additional insureds.” The contract model, which looks to the intent of the insurer and the subcontractor, as expressed in the policy language, preserves the expectations of the parties to the contract. In examining each of these three overlooked groups' interests in an insurance transaction, we may discover that the contract model, so frequently maligned in the academic literature, is not so bad after all.

The idea of using law to change the built environment in ways that reduce opportunities to commit crimes has a long history. Unfortunately, this idea has received relatively little attention in the legal academy and only limited rigorous empirical scrutiny. In this Article, we review the considerable literature on the relationship between zoning, the built environment, and crime. We then report the results of two empirical studies on these relationships. First, we conducted a study of the effect of zoning on crime using 205 blocks selected in eight different relatively high crime neighborhoods in Los Angeles that have similar demographic characteristics but different forms of zoned land use. We find that mixed commercial- and residential-zoned areas are associated with lower crime than are commercial-only zoned areas. Second, we matched neighborhoods undergoing zoning changes between 2006 and 2010 with neighborhoods that underwent no zoning changes during this period but had similar preexisting crime trajectories between 1994 and 2005. The primary zoning change in these neighborhoods was to convert parcels to residential uses. We find that neighborhoods in which there was a zoning change experienced a significant decline in crime. Our results suggest that mixing residential-only zoning into commercial blocks may be a promising means of reducing crime.

In 1989, the Supreme Court in Price Waterhouse v. Hopkins declared that sex stereotyping was a prohibited form of sex discrimination at work. This seemingly simple declaration has been the most important development in sex discrimination jurisprudence since the passage of Title VII. It has been used to extend Title VII’s coverage and to protect groups that were previously excluded. Astonishingly, however, the contours, dimensions, and requirements of the prohibition have never been clearly articulated by courts or scholars. In this paper I evaluate and reject the interpretations most often offered by scholars—namely that the prohibition requires either freedom of gender expression or sex-blind neutrality. I argue that the prohibition reflects not a coherent antidiscrimination principle but a pragmatic burden-shifting framework that turns on the compliance costs for the worker. I conclude by arguing that the sex stereotyping prohibition has not lived up to its rhetorical promise. Indeed, the implications of the prohibition are both dangerous and ironic in ways that scholars have yet to recognize. While the prohibition has extended Title VII’s protection to new classes of workers, it has done so by relying on and reinforcing traditional gender categories. The result is that the prohibition protects some individuals at the expense of the class whose subordination— stemming from socially salient gender norms—remains intact.