Remember all of the recent discussion about the uselessness of law review articles, and the way nay-sayers like to invoke Chief Justice Roberts’s remark about “the influence of Immanuel Kant on evidentiary approaches in 18th-century Bulgaria”?
Today the Chief Justice issued an opinion respecting the cert denial in Marek v. Lane, a challenge to the abuse of “cy pres” in class action settlements. The opinion noted the many potential problems raised by such settlements, and their growing importance. Other than the record and lower court decisions, the only thing cited in the entire opinion is … a law review article. (The article is Cy Pres Relief and the Pathologies of the Modern Class Action: A Normative and Empirical Analysis, 62 Fla. L. Rev. 617 (2010) by Martin Redish, Peter Julian, and Samantha Zyontz.)
Of course, to those who have been paying attention, this should actually be old news; Orin posted something similar a year and a half ago.