New Episode: The Based Direction
TM v. U. Md. Medical System
Our latest episode, The Based Direction, is up. Everything you ever wanted to know about the Rooker-Feldman doctrine but didn’t know who to ask:
We're back from vacation and chipping away at the summer backlog. Before the substance: listeners weigh in on our AI-generated cover art, Claude's new prediction scorecard grades our respective forecasting records, and Justices Kagan and Barrett take the Court's budget request — and some docket-terminology talk — to Congress. Then we spend the rest of the show on T.M. v. University of Maryland Medical System Corporation, in which the Rooker-Feldman doctrine, pronounced dead in the Green Bag two decades ago, proves alive enough to reach state-court judgments still on appeal. We try to figure out what the doctrine actually is, whether § 1257 or § 1331 is doing the work, and why the Court's committed formalists split down the middle. Along the way: insider trading as a University of Chicago virtue, a concurrence that may be playing a long game on federal habeas, and a dissent that's "exactly correct and not the law."
Comments welcome!
Regarding prediction markets I was so glad for you to mention that insider trading is kinda the *point* of a prediction market. If you really ban trading on any kind of non-public information then they do become nothing more than gambling. But I don't even understand how you can possibly draw that distinction for a prediction market.
Even the most archetypal bet on a prediction market -- saying hey I don't plan to vote for canidate X and none of the many friends I have do either -- is a kind of weak insider trading: you know how you and your friends plan to vote. Now let's say your a former member of that canidates social circle and you remember he was always dogged with rumors/bad vibes about how they treated women. Is that really very different?
Yes, if you can change the outcome of the event to make money (Santos) that may be a fairness concern but otherwise the fact that some people making those trades may have information that you lack just has to be part of a good trading model.
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It's also an interesting legal question because none of this fits the breech of fiduciary duty model the courts have accepted for insider trading prosecution. Maybe they can use wire fraud charges because the platforms have language against insider trading in their TOS but I wonder how they can possibly clearly define that.