Annual Review of Law and Social Science - Early Publication

Cryptocurrency proclaims itself trustless—jettisoning the intermediaries, organizations, and legal authorities (what its creator called trust) upon which the traditional financial system relies. Instead, it offers “trustless trust,” distributing self-regulatory responsibility to software run by decentralized masses of volunteers and deploying a buzzword that denotes safety and privacy of transactions untethered to law, the state, or corporate intermediaries. But decentralization and distributed responsibility have proven difficult to sustain. At every turn, entrepreneurs and users of digital currencies have embraced centralization and new organizational forms, many able to dodge both crypto self-regulation and conventional financial regulation entirely, while enjoying the benefits of their purported trustworthiness. This faux decentralization leaves crypto platforms vulnerable to wrongdoing, but also to the legal and regulatory interventions that mitigate risk in traditional financial instruments. Moreover, crypto technology provides a unique window into misconduct and new opportunities to forestall or regulate it, measures unavailable to conventional currencies.

The US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) is one of the largest and most important regulators of public health worldwide. Throughout its history, it has sought to build a reputation of decision-making based on science and evidence. However, shrinking trust in political institutions, growing political polarization, and a recent pandemic have confronted the FDA with unprecedent challenges. In light of these developments, we first provide an overview of the role that science and law have played across the development of the FDA. We then focus on notice and comment rulemaking and the guidance document process, which are broad policy and lawmaking tools used by the FDA, before assessing its narrower regulatory powers in the form of its drug and vaccine approval processes. After analyzing the FDA's role during the COVID-19 pandemic, we provide an outlook for its future and offer a critical appraisal of where scholars have opportunities to advance knowledge.

The fear of being suckered is such a strong social and psychological phenomenon that political movements, and bodies of law, have been built around it. This review offers a framework for understanding how the psychology of feeling suckered affects legal decision-making. Feeling exploited or scammed is a core and widely shared aversion, and yet also a malleable construct, subject to framing effects and triggered (or untriggered) by subtle situational cues. The stakes for the sucker inference are high; people worried about being cheated predictably react by refusing to cooperate in prosocial activities, and by retaliating. The flight-or-fight response has deep implications for legal decision-making, undermining investment in cooperative enterprises, dispute settlement, and efficient social policy. Finally, the review considers the unique ambivalence toward suckers themselves—the competing feelings of sympathy and scorn—and how that ambivalence plays into underreporting of legal harms, misattributions of consent, and victim blaming. I conclude by suggesting that the ambivalence offers opportunities for productive legal interventions to reward trust.