Monthly Archives: March 2017

The Science of Sexuality

Marie-Amélie George, The Custody Crucible: The Development of Scientific Authority About Gay and Lesbian Parents, 34 Law & Hist. Rev. 487 (2016), available at SSRN.

Marie-Amélie George’s meticulously researched, provocative study of early gay-and-lesbian custody cases focuses on the power of social science research to reshape both the law and the larger society. George takes us inside the courtroom fights, landmark parenting studies, and conservative strategies that have defined debates about the meaning and origins of homosexuality. Using published opinions, rare trial records, oral histories, personal correspondence, and social-movement records, The Custody Crucible describes how social-science arguments made the difference to gay and lesbian parents seeking to prove that their sexual orientation in no way harmed their children.

But the relationship between scientific research and litigation that George excavates is complex. She convincingly argues that courtroom battles sparked new research about the impact of gay or lesbian parenting on the sexual orientation and gender identity of children. As importantly, the progress made by gay and lesbian parents helped set the agenda of conservative organizations intent on demonstrating that homosexual parents were often sexually abusive, impoverished, and unable to stop their children from becoming deviant. Nuanced and thoughtful, The Custody Crucible contributes to a rich literature on the relationship between cause-lawyering and social change. However, George breaks out of the framework often governing these studies, looking beyond the overall benefit a movement can expect from winning or losing in court. The Custody Crucible illuminates how litigation can help frame scientific questions that resonate well beyond the courtroom. Continue reading "The Science of Sexuality"

Law and Virtue

Kimberley Brownlee, What’s Virtuous About the Law?, 21 Legal Theory 1 (2015).

In this interesting and clearly argued article, Kimberley Brownlee investigates the extent to which the law can serve as a model of virtue. She rightly points out that many ethicists understand law deontologically, as a set of principles that determine rights and duties: in other words, that for law to embody a morality, this morality must be essentially law-like. The article observes that the law’s various concerns cannot be entirely reduced to deontology (P. 5), but there is in any case room for dissatisfaction with the idea that deontology and “virtue ethics” are opposing conceptions of morality. Aquinas, for example, devotes the entire secunda-secundae of the Summa Theologiae to a discussion of the virtues, but does not hesitate to identify duties to be performed (including the human being’s duties to God).1

One interesting observation at the outset of the article is that the law “tends toward injustice.” This is a very arresting comment, and it is a shame that there is no discussion of it. For one thing, it runs contrary to the much-repeated idea of Lon Fuller that the law “works itself pure,” that is, tends toward justice over time, or to the classical common law philosophies of writers such as Hale or Coke, which regarded the law as the accumulation of reason. One could also point to the natural law content of positive law: the suppression and punishment of criminality, maintenance of the inner tranquility of the state, the restraint of fraud, sexual crimes and civil wrongs, regulation of contracts and so forth. In all such cases the tendency of the law seems to be toward justice rather than its contrary. Continue reading "Law and Virtue"

Is It Time to Examine the Concept of Originality in Musical Works?

Emma Steel, Original Sin: Reconciling Originality in Copyright with Music as an Evolutionary Art Form, 37 Eur. Intell. Prop. Rev. 66 (2015).

Copyright often makes little sense, particularly when you explain it to people who are not familiar with its concepts. Jessica Litman expresses this problem well in her book Digital Copyright by stating that people “find it very hard to believe that there’s really a law out there that says the stuff the copyright law says.” Anyone who has had to talk to members of the public about copyright will have similar experiences.

One area of copyright that has been receiving quite a lot of coverage recently is originality of music, especially in various high profile cases in which famous artists have been sued for copyright infringement. The most visible perhaps is the recent case of Williams v. Bridgeport Music, Inc, in which the estate of Marvin Gaye sued Robin Thicke and Pharrell Williams for copyright infringement in the hit song “Blurred Lines,” alleging that the music was too similar to that of Gaye’s famous “Got to Give It Up.” The jury decided in favour of Gaye, and the estate was awarded $7.4 million in damages. That ruling is on appeal at the time of writing, and it has proven controversial amongst copyright experts and music industry insiders. Some have argued that the ruling could have a negative effect on musicians trying to explore music from previous eras, incorporating sounds and styles from famous artists. Similarly, over 200 musicians have supported the ongoing appeal, arguing that the decision could have a chilling effect on creativity.

In Original Sin: Reconciling Originality in Copyright with Music as an Evolutionary Art Form, Emma Steel does not address the case of Williams v. Bridgeport Music as such, but she explores the question of originality in music in an interesting and noteworthy manner that is relevant to that litigation. Steel first describes the evolution of music’s component elements, paying special attention to the evolution of rhythm and melody as the basic building blocks of musical creations. Rhythm takes the form of tempo, metre, and rhythmic pattern. These provide a repetition of timing that tends to be common in various styles and genres. For example, the 4/4 metre is the most popular timing, while 3/4 is found in waltzes and country music. Melody, on the other hand, is where most of the originality in music is manifest, and it is “the relationship between musical tones of various pitch and duration.” Steel comments that in Western musical traditions melodies tend to be repetitive in nature and shared across music genres. Continue reading "Is It Time to Examine the Concept of Originality in Musical Works?"

An Opportunity for Demand Side Innovation

Rebecca S. Eisenberg & W. Nicholson Price II, Promoting Healthcare Innovation on the Demand Side, Oxford Academic J.L. & Biosciences (2017).

The intersection of healthcare information goods, resulting products, and the legal system is frequently reduced to unhelpful binary generalizations such as “regulation (particularly drug safety and data laws) impedes innovation.” Eisenberg and Price helpfully consign such caricatures to the past, substituting far more nuanced (and a lot more interesting) reflections on healthcare and innovation.

Their primary contribution is to describe a different idea of innovation; one based on the demand side rather than the supply side. This is to be contrasted with the “Innovation Law Beyond Intellectual Property (IP)” literature which has examined non-IP mechanisms such as grants, prizes, or insurance to incentivize innovation without utilizing exclusionary patent rights. Those approaches, while they may have been shaped on the demand side, are executed on the supply side (such as a government subsidy paid to a drug company to encourage production of an unprofitable drug). In contrast, Eisenberg and Price are interested in true demand-side innovation based on the data accessible to payers; providers or insurers and, optimally, vertically integrated stakeholders such as large HMOs. These payers, the authors argue, could leverage the enormous clinical and prescribing data sets they can access “to develop new information about drug toxicity, comparative effectiveness, precision medicine, and to perform other forms of innovation.” If successful, “[t]he incentives of payers to cut costs… could be a corrective counterweight to the incentives of product sellers to maximize their own patent-protected profits.” Continue reading "An Opportunity for Demand Side Innovation"

When Less is More

Why are employees who sue to obtain workplace leave under the Family Medical Leave Act of 1993 (FMLA) almost twice as likely to win their cases as those who bring discrimination cases under Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 (Title VII)? The title of Kate Webber’s intriguing article reflects an intuition many feminists and family law scholars already bring to the table: courts find women more sympathetic when they make claims that conform to their appropriate gender roles (as they do when they ask for family leaves) than when they challenge those norms in the workplace (as they do when they make a claim that the workplace is discriminatory). Webber unpacks this intuition, first by identifying differences in the statutory schemes that might help to explain the gap in success rates between the two statutes, and then by examining the ways in which the content of the legal protections each statute provides might understandably trigger different ideological and cognitive responses by judges. The analysis is both cautious and compelling. It is also surprisingly optimistic, concluding that family leave laws provide a legislative model that may actually be more effective than Title VII in reducing institutional workplace inequality.

Other scholars have noted the differences between Title VII and the FMLA.1 The most important of these differences for Webber’s purposes is that the FMLA, though motivated by the desire to relieve work-family conflicts especially among women, is a gender-neutral employee benefit, much like minimum wage laws and OSHA regulation. To win an FMLA claim, a claimant need only show that she was entitled to the benefit and did not get it. In contrast, Title VII creates a civil right available on the basis of membership in a protected class. A Title VII claimant must show both that she experienced an adverse employment action and that this action was caused or motivated by the claimant’s sex, race, religion, or other protected characteristic. The difference is structural: the former defines the status quo; the latter challenges it. Continue reading "When Less is More"

Back to the Essentials

Michael Buckland, Information and Society (The MIT Press Essential Knowledge Series, 2017).

Judging from its title, Professor Michael Buckland‘s book seems to be yet another introduction into the relationship between information and society. Upon reading it you encounter a well-organized, simply but not simplistically written concise introduction enriched by historical references to what was once called library science and is now more often referred to as (non-mathematical) information science.

As such, it fits well into the MIT Press series that has brought us among others John Palfrey’s Intellectual Property Strategy or Samuel Greengard’s The Internet of Things. Continue reading "Back to the Essentials"

Do Claims About Claims to Claims Matter?

J. Maria Glover, A Regulatory Theory of Legal Claims, 70 Vand. L. Rev. 221 (2017).

Oftentimes when we call a thing someone’s “property,” we do so to invoke a very specific picture of the owner’s rights to that thing. To call something “property” often entails significant limits to what one can do to regulate the thing. The Due Process Clause and Takings Clause both enter the picture. Even outside of legal discourse, the term “property” has a rhetorical power that brings to mind what Blackstone called the “sole and despotic dominion” one can exercise over the thing. That is why “[m]ine is often one of the first words toddlers learn.” To quote an old American Express commercial, ownership, like membership, “has its privileges.”

So one would think that conceptualizing a thing as “property” would have an important effect on how we think about the thing. But what if it doesn’t? What if it actually leads to inconsistent, irreconcilable views in different contexts? What if it turns out that thinking about something as “property” does not provide much analytic clarity at all?

This is the bold thesis of J. Maria Glover’s A Regulatory Theory of Legal Claims, where Glover takes on longstanding debates about the conceptual status of the legal claim. Civil procedure scholars continue to debate whether the legal claim is a party’s “property,” as opposed to an aspect of procedure that is subject to the discretionary regulation of the court. Glover’s goal is not to resolve the debate but to dissolve it, as a debate that does not have the significance that the debaters give it. Continue reading "Do Claims About Claims to Claims Matter?"

Bylaws, Politics, and the Institutional Structure of Delaware Corporate Law

David Skeel, The Bylaw Puzzle in Delaware Corporate Law, 72 Bus. Law. 1 (2016/2017), available at SSRN.

Although corporate bylaws are, by and large, the mundane and technical instruments of day-to-day governance that most understand them to be, they have nevertheless become a key front in the battle for corporate governance supremacy. Shareholders, for their part, possess an inalienable statutory right to adopt, amend, and repeal bylaws, and this represents the only corporate governance action of any consequence that shareholders can undertake unilaterally—prompting creative efforts by activists to augment their own governance power at the expense of boards via this mechanism. At the same time, however, the Delaware General Corporation Law (DGCL) authorizes corporations to give directors concurrent bylaw authority via the charter—a power often granted, permitting boards to respond in kind. This straightforwardly tees up a collision of competing shareholder and board authority in Delaware corporations that neither the courts nor the legislature have definitively resolved.

In the article cited above, David Skeel examines these dynamics through recent clashes that prompted targeted responses from both the courts and the legislature alike. The Delaware Supreme Court, in decisions issued in 2008 and 2014 respectively, struck down a proposed bylaw requiring the corporation to reimburse shareholder proxy expenses under certain circumstances, but then upheld a “loser-pays” bylaw aimed at restricting corporate litigation. “This divergence of outcomes is mildly puzzling by itself,” Skeel observes, “but the outcomes get even more puzzling when we consider the response of Delaware lawmakers,” as the legislature swiftly “overruled its courts each time” (in 2009 and 2015 respectively). (P. 4.) Skeel’s article deftly unravels this “bylaw puzzle,” but in so doing looks well beyond competing conceptions of corporate governance. In Skeel’s view, the bylaw puzzle ultimately provides a lens through which to perceive more clearly some of the most fundamental political and institutional dynamics driving the formation of Delaware corporate law—including the differing institutional postures of Delaware’s courts and legislature, the threat posed by the potential for shareholders to file corporate lawsuits outside Delaware, and Delaware’s complex interactions with the federal government as alternative sites of corporate law production. Continue reading "Bylaws, Politics, and the Institutional Structure of Delaware Corporate Law"

The New Institutionalism in Contract Scholarship

Matthew Jennejohn, The Private Order of Innovation Networks, 68 Stan. L. Rev. 281 (2016), available at SSRN.

Relational contract scholarship is at a pivot point. On the one hand, the relationalist revival that has dominated contracts scholarship for almost half a century may be on the wane. Relational contract scholarship has evolved during this period into separate, and often dueling, intellectual traditions. One camp consists of scholars who are typically associated with the “law and economics” movement; in the other camp are scholars who more readily identify with the “law and society” tradition.1 While relationalists have been quarreling with each other, a younger cohort of law and economics scholars, armed with impressive technical skills, have abandoned relational questions in favor of projects that are capable of being analyzed through formal models or sophisticated empirical techniques. In turn, many other of the brightest stars in contract are formally trained in analytic philosophy and focus their energies on classical contract doctrine and the extent to which it adheres to deontological principles grounded in Kantian notions of autonomy. At its best, this new contracts scholarship is analytically elegant and generates counter-intuitive insights. But its analytical rigor requires strong simplifying assumptions. As a consequence, the bulk of this work is a far remove from the complex environment of relational contracting.

This pessimistic view of the legacy of relational scholarship is tempered, however, by the rise of a new institutionalist school of contract scholarship that offers the promise of an accommodation between the dueling branches of relational theory and a counterweight to the elegant but abstract analysis of the philosophers and economists.2 The new institutionalists reflect the older relationalists in their commitment to the belief that the institution of contract can only be understood by observing the law “in action,” but they go beyond relational theory to explore both the potential and the limitations of contract design in a world of uncertainty: how can we understand the circumstances in which different contractual patterns are used to organize different kinds and speeds of innovative activity? A particularly noteworthy example of this new institutionalist school is a recent article by Matthew Jennejohn, The Private Order of Innovation Networks, published recently in the Stanford Law Review. Continue reading "The New Institutionalism in Contract Scholarship"

The Surprising Origins of the Interstate Commerce Commission

Jed Handelsman Shugerman, The Dependent Origins of Independent Agencies: The Interstate Commerce Commission, the Tenure of Office Act, and the Rise of Modern Campaign Finance, 31 J.L. & Pol. 139 (2015), available at SSRN.

 

Many law review articles fail to live up to the promise of their titles or abstracts, leaving disappointed readers in their wake. Others have titles that hide the ball. Behind the wordy and somewhat bland title of Jed Shugerman’s 2015 article—The Dependent Origins of Independent Agencies: The Interstate Commerce Commission, the Tenure of Office Act, and the Rise of Modern Campaign Finance—lies a fascinating new take on the origins of independent agencies.

The identification of the Interstate Commerce Commission (ICC) as the first modern independent regulatory agency is familiar to scholars of American administrative law. The ICC, created in 1887, was the first federal agency with the hallmarks of independence—multiple commissioners appointed by the President with the advice and consent of the Senate, staggered terms of specified duration (six years in this case), removal by the President only for “inefficiency, neglect of duty, or malfeasance and office,” and a requirement of bipartisan membership. Continue reading "The Surprising Origins of the Interstate Commerce Commission"

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