Yearly Archives: 2013
Oct 4, 2013 Thomas E. BakerConstitutional Law
Cass R. Sunstein, Constitutional Personae (preliminary draft July 25, 2013), available at SSRN.
Several years ago, I attended an AALS program featuring Cass Sunstein as a panelist. He spoke last, about an hour into the session. The moderator introduced him to knowing laughter by announcing, “Our last presenter is Cass Sunstein, who has just written another book . . . while he has been waiting to speak this morning.” Sunstein is an original, provocative thinker and a remarkably prolific writer: the kind of scholar who shuttles from the University of Chicago to Harvard University, the kind of public intellectual who takes time off to run OIRA (Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs) in the Obama Administration.
Sunstein writes—a lot!—about administrative law and constitutional law. In my own field, constitutional law, Sunstein always delivers intriguing insights. He does it again in this draft article. Conceptual articles like this one remind me of the economic models I studied in college: they are abstracted from reality but help us to better understand it. The SSRN version I read is clearly a draft and still has some way to go. (I wonder if any of his other fans occasionally get the feeling that Sunstein sometimes lets go of his pieces too soon.) Continue reading "SCOTUS Masks"
Oct 2, 2013 Kathryn WattsAdministrative Law
Kent H. Barnett, To the Victor Goes the Toil—Remedies for Regulated Parties in Separation-of-Powers Litigation, 92 N.C.L. Rev. (forthcoming, 2014), available at SSRN.
This coming Term, the U.S. Supreme Court is set to decide National Labor Relations Board v. Noel Canning, a case involving the constitutionality of the President using his recess appointment power to fill various vacancies on the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB). Unless the Court ducks the issues presented in the case, Noel Canning promises to become yet another important case in a string of recent decisions involving structural challenges to federal administrative agencies—challenges that have sought to limit agencies’ power based upon the Appointments Clause, the President’s recess appointment power, the President’s general Article II powers, and the judiciary’s Article III powers. For example, in 2010 in Free Enterprise Fund v. Public Company Accounting Oversight Board the Court held that the dual for-cause restrictions placed on removal of members of the Public Company Accounting Oversight Board (PCAOB) violated separation-of-powers principles. Similarly, in 2011 in Stern v. Marshall the Court held that a non-Article III bankruptcy court could not constitutionally enter a final judgment on a state-law tortious interference counterclaim.
Even though significant attention has been given to the constitutional merits of these and other recent cases, exceedingly little attention has been given by litigants, the courts and scholars to a subsidiary question lurking in the background of the cases: What should the proper remedy be when separation-of-powers violations are found to exist in the structures of federal administrative agencies? Professor Kent Barnett, an assistant professor at the University of Georgia School of Law, quite perceptively identifies this little-noticed question and begins to try to answer it in a forthcoming article titled To the Victor Goes the Toil—Remedies for Regulated Parties in Separation-of-Powers Litigation, which is soon to be published in the North Carolina Law Review. Given that the Noel Canning case is looming on the Court’s docket and various other structural challenges have been brought challenging the newly-formed Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB), Professor Barnett’s article is extremely timely. Indeed, it is a “must read” for courts and litigants involved in structural separation-of-powers cases as well as constitutional and administrative law scholars. Continue reading "Remedying Structural Separation-of-Powers Violations"
Oct 1, 2013 Michael J. ZimmerWork Law
This book is the result of a project funded by the Russell Sage Foundation that brought all of the contributors together in September 2010 in the outstanding setting of Bellagio, Italy. The contributors were an all-star group of 22 academics and practitioners from around the world. Ten are from law, five from industrial relations, and the rest from various social sciences and business. Despite the idyllic setting for their work, the result of their collaboration is a collection of papers that work very well together to focus on significant development in the world of work, the rise and fall of what they call the “standard employment contract” (SEC). After the end of World War II and until sometime in the 1990s, a large percentage of workers in most of the developed countries had SECs. They had an array of job rights including “decent wages, protections against unfair treatment at work, social insurance provided by the state or the employer and, notably, some degree of job security.” While not all workers had them, SECs “became one of the pillars of the postwar economic system.” The system was the basis of the creation of a substantial middle class made up of workers, mostly male, in large manufacturing enterprises.
What is also made clear is that, while SECs had been the norm, the factors that produced them were substantially different among these different countries. Some SEC systems were driven by legislative mandate, while others, like those in the United States, were the result of labor markets internal to individual enterprises where the mutual expectation of long term employment created an incentive for both the employer and its workers to invest in firm specific skills. While perhaps procrustean, the developed Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Developement (OECD) countries are based on three broad economic traditions— “liberal” market oriented societies like the United States and the United Kingdom; “corporatist” countries in continental Europe like France and Germany, in which the government sits at the bargaining table with labor and management; and “Nordic” social-market economies like Sweden and Denmark that have universal and extensive social benefits with significant wealth redistribution through taxation. Continue reading "What Happened to the “Standard Employment Contract” and What Are Some Countries Doing About It?"
Sep 30, 2013 Anne-Marie RhodesTrusts & Estates
Professor David Horton argues that testation is a form of expressive speech that may raise Constitutional concerns. In doing so, he reminds us of a basic reality—a will that disposes of property is also the will of an individual speaking to his or her family, friends, and community. Legal trends that emphasize efficiency over the testator’s individual voice are troubling.
Horton begins by examining three traditional analogies used by courts in deciding trust and estates cases—property, contract, and corporate law. In describing each analogy, Horton notes that none of these is spot on, there is an ill fit associated with each. This provides the intellectual space for other theories and perspectives, including speech. Horton acknowledges that his conceptualization of testation as Constitutional speech is also not a perfect fit; nevertheless it offers an intriguing lens through which to view some difficult cases and doctrines. Continue reading "To Praise Testator’s Speech"
Sep 27, 2013 Gregory KeatingTorts
Sean Hannon Williams’ Lost Life and Life Projects tackles “wrongful death damages from the perspective of individual justice accounts of tort law.” Wrongful death damages—or, more accurately, their inadequacy—have long troubled tort scholars. Lately, as Williams shows, their shortcomings have been a particular sore point for economically oriented tort scholars.
The early common law of torts did not recognize any damages at all for wrongful death. Tort actions were personal and they died with the victim. Legislatures soon responded to this gap by passing two different kinds of statutes. One kind—survival statutes—enabled the estates of those wrongfully killed to recover the damages to which the dead would have been entitled had they not died (e.g., damages for medical treatment prior to death). The other kind—wrongful death statutes—addressed relational harm. Wrongful death statutes permit intimate relatives of the victim to recover for harm that they have suffered from her death (e.g., loss of financial support). Neither statute addressed the harm to the victim of her own premature, wrongful death. Only recently has there been any movement to remedy this gap by awarding damages for the victim’s lost “enjoyment of life.” Williams’ project is to bolster the case for such damages, in the name of justice to those who have lost their lives. Continue reading "Redressing the Harm of Death"
Sep 25, 2013 Kristin HickmanTax Law
In contemporary governance, while the U.S. Constitution recognizes the fifty states as sovereign entities, federal and state governmental policies and operations are functionally quite intertwined. Nevertheless, state governments frequently like to show flashes of independence, particularly on hot button political issues. Hence, we have seen states like California and Massachusetts getting ahead of their federal counterparts in adopting laws and policies to protect the environment and embrace gay marriage. On the opposite side of the political spectrum, we have states like North Dakota, Texas, and Arizona challenging federal laws and policies regarding abortion rights, health care, and immigration.
Tax policy ranks among the more heated issues in modern politics. Politicians argue a lot about what rates to apply to which taxpayers, but the tax policy debate is not limited to tax rates. It is strange, therefore, just how little state individual income tax regimes differ from their federal counterpart. State tax laws tweak the federal model here and there around the edges, but in the main, all of the states that impose a broad-based income tax rely either explicitly or implicitly on federal tax laws to define their tax base. In her thoughtful article, Delegating Up: State Conformity with the Federal Tax Base, Ruth Mason thoroughly documents and persuasively challenges federal and state lawmakers to think more carefully about the consequences of this phenomenon. Continue reading "Recognizing and Rethinking Federal-State Tax-Base Conformity"
Sep 24, 2013 John FloodLegal Profession
The leadership role in law firms and other professional service firms (PSFs) tends to be either a residual characteristic or is defined by the “great man” ideal (think of Paul Cravath and his vaunted system). Modern versions exist still: the recently departed Joe Flom of Skadden and Marty Lipton of Wachtell were exemplars of visionary law firm leaders who created great law firms. However, since around 1985, PSFs and law firms have become more anonymous in their leadership as the bureaucratized firm supersedes the charismatic individual.
Usually when scholars study PSFs—and for purposes of this review I focus on law firms—the entire firm is the unit of study rather than its management or governance. If we think of Nelson’s Partners with Power, Starbuck’s Keeping a Butterfly and an Elephant in a House of Cards, or Wald’s Smart Growth: The Large Law Firm in the Twenty-First Century, leaders, senior partners, and others flit by, but they essentially subsist in an environment that is expressed as collegial and lacking in explicit hierarchy. Continue reading "How Are Professional Service Firms Governed?"
Sep 23, 2013 Steve VladeckCourts Law
One of the longer-lasting consequences of the “Summer of Snowden” may well be the increased attention paid to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (FISC)—the special, secrecy-laden tribunal created by Congress in 1978 to oversee the U.S. government’s foreign intelligence activities. Among other things, greater public knowledge of the FISC’s role in both approving and circumscribing the government’s use of its secret surveillance authorities has rekindled the decade-old debate over the need for Congress to create special “national security courts.”
The animating justification for such tribunals is that, like the FISC, they would be in a better position than the ordinary Article III district courts to reconcile the central tension in national security adjudication: Balancing the secrecy pervading most national security and counterterrorism policies with the need to provide victims of governmental overreaching a forum in which to vindicate their statutory and constitutional rights. Indeed, although they have varied (at times, dramatically) in their details, proposals for specialized national security courts often hold out the FISC as the model upon which such tribunals can—and should—be based. To similar effect, many of the proposed reforms spurred by Snowden’s revelations have focused on increasing the volume and scope of litigation handled by the FISC, rather than shunting more of these issues into the federal district courts. Continue reading "The National Security Courts We Already Have"
Sep 20, 2013 Christina Duffy PonsaLegal History
One of the challenges of reviewing Eliga Gould’s international history of the American Revolution, Among the Powers of the Earth, is that the book makes you feel like you’re looking at history through a 360-degree lens. A legal, diplomatic, and intellectual history spanning from the mid-18th century to the declaration of the Monroe Doctrine in 1823, the book situates the Revolution in the context of the evolving law of nations in a strikingly rich and detailed account. Everything, it seems, is in there.
Partly it’s Gould’s writing style. Rich in narrative and streamlined in argument, its movements back and forth between the two are unlabored. Continue reading "Empire Before Nationhood"
Sep 18, 2013 Daria RoithmayrJurisprudence
I’ve been the first Latina hired in a number of institutions, and on most occasions, those institutions have proudly and visibly trumpeted my hiring, in institutional media and outside as well. I’m well aware that my identity (if not my name) plus my hiring has accorded value to the institution. I’m also aware that in at least one institution, my hiring was an instance of what race scholar Nancy Leong calls “thin diversity,” but what I call fake diversity: signaling a commitment to racial diversity that didn’t really exist. Was I harmed (or was the public harmed) by this fake signal? Perhaps. But I like to think that I earned compensation, in the form of a job, and that the public benefited, because I might have helped to transform the institution in a real way despite the fake signal at the outset. All in all, I think a fair trade.
I was very excited to read Nancy Leong’s article, Racial Capitalism, and then to read Stacy Hawkins’ reply to Leong, Selling Diversity Short. These two scholars are welcome additions to the conversation about affirmative action, fresh voices in what can sometimes be a conversation that has become a bit tired and played out. Thanks to the wonders of electronic publishing, I might actually have read the critique before reading the actual article. Hawkins’ critique came out online in 2012 and Leong’s article in 2013. But in whatever order I read them, the back and forth among these scholars was terrific. Continue reading "Faking It"
