Chicago-Kent Professor Wins Best Paper Award for New Theory Explaining the Hidden Power of Law

“I’m really excited,” Chicago-Kent Associate Professor Noah Smith-Drelich says. “It’s always good to get recognition. This is a project that I’ve been actively working on for over two years but really thinking about for much longer.”

Smith-Drelich won the 2026  Policing, Policy, and Philosophy Initiative (3PI) Paper Prize for his paper “False Positive Law,”  in which he outlines a new legal theory describing how authority can improperly influence people to behave in ways that the law does not require or even permit. The paper will be published in the forthcoming edition of Minnesota Law Review.

Legal theorists generally explain law through three categories: positive law, which includes laws created by legislatures and courts; natural law, which derives authority from morality; and custom, the unwritten rules that develop within communities. Smith-Drelich argues there is a fourth force at work.

His theory of false positive law describes situations where people act as though something has the force of law because someone in authority makes it appear that way—even when the law says otherwise.

One example comes from policing.

Protesters are frequently arrested despite having committed no crime. Even if the charges are later dropped, a person has still spent hours in custody, hired an attorney, appeared before a judge, and experienced the stress and humiliation of being arrested.

“The arrest itself punishes, it deters, it imposes costs on the person that’s been arrested,” Smith-Drelich says. “That’s the false positive law.”

The same principle appears in everyday life.

Many consumers sign contracts containing provisions that courts would never enforce, such as certain noncompete agreements or liability waivers. Even though those clauses may have no legal effect, people often change their behavior because they believe they are bound by them.

Rather than viewing these as unrelated problems, Smith-Drelich argues that they are all examples of the same phenomenon. Once recognized as “false positive law,” they can be studied together, allowing scholars working in different areas, from policing to contract law, to learn from one another’s research and potential solutions.

“Once we understand these different problems arising from different areas of the law as actually being related to one another, it helps us understand them better, and it helps us look into solutions we might make in different ways,” he says.