VOLUME 163, ISSUE 6 May 2015

As the Great Recession has painfully demonstrated, housing bubbles pose an enormous threat to economic stability. However, the principal mortgage market reforms in response to the latest boom and bust—the Dodd-Frank Act's provisions on mortgage lending and securitization—are not designed to protect the economy from a housing bubble. Instead, these reforms tinker with the incentives of securitizers and lenders to prevent their exploitation of naive investors and borrowers. In particular, these changes require securitizers to retain credit risk and lenders to assess borrowers' ability to repay.

This approach misses the mark. The sine qua non of a bubble is marketwide overoptimism about future house prices. Irrational exuberance in a bubble leads parties across the entire system of housing finance to make risky bets based on rosy beliefs. It is not just investors who underprice credit risk and borrowers who overextend. Securitizers and lenders are also eager to take on dangerous levels of risk and leverage. The Dodd-Frank Act's incentive-based reforms, by relying on rational behavior by supposedly sophisticated parties, will do little to protect the economy from a bubble. They might even increase systemic risk by concentrating mortgage risk in large financial institutions.

Because indirect incentive-based regulation is ineffective in a bubble, more direct mandates should be employed. We suggest a number of direct regulations to limit mortgage leverage, debt-to-income levels, and other contractual features that enable or induce borrowers to take out larger loans. We show how such limits can curb bubbles, lower defaults, and reduce household exposure to housing risk. While such limits would undoubtedly entail costs, such as restricting access to mortgage credit and homeownership, we suggest straightforward ways to mitigate many of these concerns. Our critique of incentive-based regulation also provides an important new perspective on current legislative efforts to reform the broader architecture of housing finance.

The Dodd-Frank Act's mistargeted approach reflects in part the growing literature in behavioral law and economics that shows how sophisticated firms take advantage of biased consumers. Indeed, much of the debate over the appropriate response to the Great Recession has been about how to keep Main Street safe from Wall Street. We advance this literature by showing that the mistakes of firms have important implications for the design of regulation. Our analysis calls for a fundamental paradigm shift. The central policy challenge is to keep Main Street and Wall Street safe from themselves.

The latest in a long line of reform proposals, health courts have been called “the best option for fixing our broken system of medical justice.” And, if health courts’ supporters are to be believed, these specialized courts are poised to revolutionize medical malpractice litigation: They would offer faster compensation to far more people, while restoring faith in the reliability of legal decisionmaking. But these benefits are, as some leading supporters have acknowledged, “hoped for, but untested.” The question remains: Will health courts actually operate as effectively as proponents now predict?

The best evidence to answer that question comes, I suggest, from the Vaccine Injury Compensation Program (VICP)—a Program that employs very similar procedures to handle very similar claims and that had, at its birth, a very similar ambition. Mining nearly three decades of previously untapped material concerning the VICP’s operation, this Article analyzes how an American compensation program that wrests jurisdiction from traditional courts has, in practice, fared. Findings are discouraging. Though the VICP and health courts share many of the same procedural innovations, those innovations, in the VICP context, have largely failed to expedite adjudications and rationalize compensation decisions. This fact carries significant implications for health courts, suggesting that they won’t operate nearly as effectively as their proponents now predict. More broadly, this study of an American no-fault regime, in action and over time, enriches—and at times complicates—current understanding of the prospects, promise, and “perceived virtues” of other specialized courts and alternative compensation mechanisms.

In an unprecedented move, the Illinois Supreme Court in the mid-1990s imposed hard caps on the state’s appeals courts, drastically reducing the number of opinions they could publish, while also narrowing the formal criteria for opinions to qualify for publication. The high court explained that the amendment’s purpose was to reduce the “avalanche of opinions emanating from [the] Appellate Court,” which was causing legal research to become “unnecessarily burdensome, difficult and costly.”

This unusual and sudden policy shift offers the chance to observe the priorities of a common law court in its production of published opinions. The method we introduce here can be seen as a sort of revealed-preferences approach: when forced to choose, which types of opinions were these courts more likely to continue publishing, and which types were they more likely to abandon?

Our method, which seems straightforward, has turned out to reveal more than we expected: it has uncovered more than the simple priorities raised in the thought experiment above. One especially surprising pattern forces us to develop new theories about how higher-level judicial priorities—such as a concern for outward appearances—compete for influence over judicial choices.