Yearly Archives: 2014
Jun 9, 2014 Roman HoyosLegal History
Law and conquest are deeply intertwined phenomena. We typically think of conquest as the physically violent and genocidal subjugation of people. But as a process, conquest involves the subjugation of both people and space and the reorganization of people within space. Conquest can only be consolidated, as Chief Justice John Marshall explained in Johnson v. M’Intosh (1823), when it generates new sovereignal claims and legal rights. Law, however, is not merely a consequence of conquest, it is also a constitutive element of it. The re-organization of space depends upon and generates ideas about how people relate to one another within that space, as well as ideas about how space can be owned and used, by whom, and to what purposes.
In Before L.A., David Torres-Rouff explores how Spanish, Mexican, and American migrants conquered Los Angeles by tracing “an interdependent, mutually constitutive relationship between race and space.” (P. 13.) Drawing on critical geography, which draws links between the built environment and social relationships, Torres-Rouff explains how, “In much the same way that race making leads to the formation of new individual and collective identities, place making leads to the transformation of previously neutral spaces into places with particular meanings that contain their own individual and differentiated identities.” (P. 11.) More specifically, he uses this interdependent relationship between race and space to demonstrate how local contests for power over land, labor, and water were integral to the construction of race in early Los Angeles. Continue reading "Law in the Conquest of L.A."
Jun 6, 2014 Angela BanksLexImmigration
The Fourteenth Amendment of the United States Constitution grants birthright citizenship to all individuals born within the territory of the United States, with an exception for the children of diplomats. Consequently, the children of unauthorized migrants born in the United States are United States citizens. A number of individuals, including members of Congress, contend that birthright citizenship serves as an incentive for unauthorized migration. As recently as January 3, 2013, the House of Representatives considered a bill that would limit constitutional birthright citizenship to the children of U.S. citizens, lawful permanent residents, and noncitizens serving in the armed forces. Carolina Núñez’s article makes an important contribution to this debate, and to the academic literature on citizenship and membership more broadly, because it offers substantive criteria for determining who should have birthright citizenship in the United States and because it analyzes a variety of proxies for measuring these substantive criteria.
Through an examination of post-American-Revolution cases and the congressional debates for the Fourteenth Amendment, Núñez identifies three substantive factors that have been critical in making membership decisions: mutuality of obligation, community ties, and community preservation. Núñez introduces three models of membership utilized in U.S. law (the territorial model, the status-based model, and the post-territorial model) and assesses each model’s ability to effectively measure the substantive criteria. She concludes that the use of “inaccurate proxies are unavoidable” when assigning birthright citizenship, but that the territorial model offers the most accurate proxy. (P. 857.) Continue reading "The Substantive Criteria Underlying Birthright Citizenship"
Jun 4, 2014 Brian TamanahaJurisprudence
Jeremy Waldron,
What is Natural Law Like?,
N.Y.U. Working Paper Series (2012), available at
SSRN.
Seldom do I come across a jurisprudence article that uses a simple shift in framing to place an old topic in a completely new light. “What is Natural Law Like?” by Jeremy Waldron prompted questions about natural law that had not occurred to me in two decades of following the subject. The standard ways of discussing the topic cover the natural law tradition, starting with Aquinas and moving to the present; take up what qualifies a theory as “natural law,” usually a claim of objective principles; elaborate on the debate between natural law and legal positivism; and lay out the positions of various “natural law” theorists, including John Finnis, Ronald Dworkin, and others. Much of this territory is familiar and well-worn.
Waldron starts with a standard question, “what is a law of nature?”, but immediately adds a twist by positing, “we should expect natural law to be law-like. It should be like law.” This seems innocuous as he states it, but it quickly produces unusual implications. Continue reading "Treating Natural Law as Law"
Jun 3, 2014 Rebecca RoipheLegal Profession
Sida Liu, Lily Liang, & Terence C. Halliday,
The Trial of Li Zhuang: Chinese Lawyers’ Collective Action Against Populism, 1
Asian J.L. & Soc’y (forthcoming 2014), available at
SSRN.
Perhaps all the lawyer jokes are not such bad a thing. Rather than trying to make lawyers more appealing, we ought to protect the profession from the sometimes-inevitable popular resentment. By telling the shocking story of defense attorney Li Zhuang’s prosecution in China, Sida Liu, Lily Liang, and Terence Halliday remind us of the power of professionalism and the need, at times, to resist both government pressure and public anger at lawyers.
In America, we are living through a time of radical change in the profession and in professional education. The market seems, in many ways, to be winning out. The concept of professionalism is assuming a sort of hazy anachronistic aura. Some scholars even declare the notion defunct and celebrate its demise. While the profession has always experienced itself in a state of crisis, the suggestion that we abandon the notion of an independent legal profession is relatively new. Perhaps it is changes within the profession, such as its growing size and competitiveness, which have led to the decline in professionalism. Broader cultural trends toward consumerism and away from collective approaches to social problems must also contribute to this shift. If we accept the general momentum, the question remains whether to embrace or resist it. Continue reading "The Forgotten Promise of Professionalism"
Jun 2, 2014 Clifford RoskyFamily Law
Fourteen years ago, Kenji Yoshino observed that the terms “heterosexual” and “homosexual” were commonly used “as mutually exclusive, cumulatively exhaustive categories”—a usage that casually implied that “bisexuals” and “asexuals” did not exist. In this well-known article in the Stanford Law Review, Yoshino methodically examined the ways that straights and gays have conspired to “erase” bisexuals. But while he acknowledged that “asexuals are, if anything, more likely than bisexuals to be erased in sexuality discourse,” he regretfully decided “not to attempt a systematic discussion of asexuals in this article.” In light of the “undertheorized divergences between bisexuality and asexuality,” he concluded “that the two topics deserve separate analysis.”
Under the circumstances, it is especially fitting that the Stanford Law Review has published the first law review article on asexuality. In Compulsory Sexuality, Emens demonstrates the payoff of giving asexuality its analytical due. After briefly describing asexuality’s emergence in several discourses, she turns her eye toward the questions of theory and law posed by the rise of this new identity movement. Continue reading "LGBTA: Asexuality Becomes a Movement"
May 30, 2014 Elaine CraigEquality
“Why should women live in anticipatory dread and hypervigilence?” Elizabeth Sheehy writes in the concluding chapter of her important new book Defending Battered Women on Trial: Lessons from the Transcripts. Instead, she argues, the legal system should “shift the risk of death to those men whose aggressions have created such dehumanizing fear in their female partners”.
In Defending Battered Women on Trial: Lessons from the Transcripts, Sheehy offers a compelling and startling account of the criminal justice system’s failure to protect women from the men who batter them. She begins the book by situating the issue in its historical legal context. Making the work accessible to an audience much broader than just those well-versed in criminal law, Sheehy provides the reader with ample background to understand the legal context in Canada both prior to and in the years following the Supreme Court of Canada’s 1990 recognition of battered women syndrome in R. v Lavallee. Continue reading "It is Not Open Season on Men"
May 28, 2014 Stacey DoganIntellectual Property Law
Graeme B. Dinwoodie,
Secondary Liability for Online Trademark Infringement: The International Landscape,
36 Colum. J.L. & Arts (forthcoming 2014), available at
SSRN.
Although we live in a global, interconnected world, legal scholarship – even scholarship about the Internet – often focuses on domestic law with little more than a nod to developments in other jurisdictions. That’s not necessarily a bad thing; after all, theoretically robust or historically thorough works can rarely achieve their goals while surveying the landscape across multiple countries with disparate traditions and laws. But as a student of U.S. law, I appreciate articles that explain how other legal systems are addressing issues that perplex or divide our scholars and courts. Given the tumult over intermediary liability in recent years, comparative commentary on that topic has special salience.
In this brief (draft) article, Graeme Dinwoodie explores both structural and substantive differences in how the United States and Europe approach intermediary trademark liability in the Internet context. To an outsider, the European web of private agreements, Community Directives, CJEU opinions, and sundry domestic laws can appear daunting and sometimes self-contradictory. Dinwoodie puts them all into context, offering a coherent explanation of the interaction between Community law, member state law, and private ordering, and situating the overall picture within a broad normative framework. And he contrasts that picture with the one emerging through common law in the United States. The result is a readable, informative study of two related but distinct approaches to intermediary trademark law. Continue reading "Intermediary Trademark Liability: A Comparative Lens"
May 27, 2014 Kathleen BoozangHealth Law
Pharmaceutical companies represent the poster-child defendant for whether public-private enforcement works. While subject to FDA prosecution for violation of the Food Drug Cosmetic Act, they more often face qui tam suits by private relators, usually but not exclusively for off-label promotion. DOJ may or may not choose to intervene, but if it does jump in, the Department operates with the advantage of a 90% success rate (frequently as a result of settlement because the companies can’t risk debarment). Before the case is concluded, it may have been joined by some combination of the Veterans Administration, state Medicaid Fraud Units or relators under mirror state-law False Claims Acts for recovery of Medicaid dollars, as well as by private insurance companies under RICO, and states’ attorneys general under consumer protection laws. The Department of Health and Human Services Office of Inspector General (HHS OIG) will likely be at any settlement negotiations to hammer out a 100-page Corporate Integrity Agreement (CIA). If the company’s activities are really offensive, DOJ may throw in a mail or wire fraud charge. When the fines are announced, and the CIA is signed, shareholders will file a derivative suit against the directors seeking reimbursement, claiming that if they weren’t asleep on the job the company would have avoided what often exceed billion dollar fines. And that’s just for off-label activity. The enforcement regime currently policing the life sciences industry is mind-bogglingly complex, representing a new and clearly unimagined era in “public-private enforcement.”
A must-read for health academics is David Freeman Engstrom’s trilogy of articles about public-private enforcement, focusing specifically on the False Claims Act (FCA), the “gold standard” of hybrid enforcement: Harnessing the Private Attorney General: Evidence from Qui Tam Litigation, found in Columbia Law Review, Public Regulation of Private Enforcement: Empirical Analysis of DOJ Oversight of Qui Tam Litigation Under the False Claims Act, appearing in Northwestern Law Review, and Agencies as Gatekeepers, published in Yale Law Journal. Unsurprisingly, healthcare cases comprise a disproportionate share of FCA cases, thereby making Engstrom’s work extremely important to the health law academy. These articles represent a breath-taking amount of work, providing a theoretical framework from which to analyze the balance and effectiveness of a public-private enforcement regime as well as empirical data to assess both fans’ and critics’ perspectives of FCA prosecution as well as relators’ and DOJ’s roles. Continue reading "The Public-Private Enforcement Regime: Does the False Claims Act Work?"
May 26, 2014 Paul OhmTechnology Law
Have you heard any of these arguments lately? Consumers willingly pay for the wonderful free services they enjoy using the currency of their personal information. We can’t trust surveys that say that consumers despise commercial tracking practices, because the revealed preferences of consumers demonstrate that they are willing to tolerate tracking in return for free social networking services, email, and mobile apps. If privacy law X were implemented, it would kill the free Internet (or more immodestly, the Internet).
Two recent articles take on all of these arguments and more in the context of the privacy of information collected online by private corporations. The articles are similarly entitled (before their subtitle colons), Free and Free Fall. Both are written by excellent interdisciplinary scholars, Free by Chris Hoofnagle and Jan Whittington and Free Fall by Kathy Strandburg. These articles, individually but even more taken together, present a thorough, forceful, and compelling rebuttal to pervasive libertarian paeans to the supposed well-functioning online market for personal information. Continue reading "Free for the Taking (or Why Libertarians are Wrong about Markets for Privacy)"
May 23, 2014 Christopher SloboginCriminal Law
The “grand social experiment” that is hyper-incarceration in the United States is coming to an end, and we need to be ready to reinvest correctional resources in more community-oriented programs. That, in a nutshell, is the message of The Punishment Imperative: The Rise and Failure of Mass Incarceration in America, by Todd Clear and Natasha Frost, well-known criminologists who have been writing about punishment practices for decades. Many of the general points made in this book will be familiar to criminal justice lawyers and professors who have paid any attention to the literature on punishment. But the book’s 200 pages of detail and its prescriptions will be intriguing even to those who know the field.
Here is the authors’ summary of research about the effects of this country’s four-decade obsession with putting increasing numbers of people behind bars for increasingly longer periods of time (Pp. 152–53):
- “Longer prison sentences do not deter the people who receive them from crime; there is almost no relationship between the length of a prison stay and the likelihood of recidivism.”
- “Going to prison does not deter; people who receive probation are no more likely (and may be slightly less likely) to recidivate.”
- “Incapacitation effects of prison are small, primarily due to replacement.”
- “Rehabilitation programs offered in prison are less effective than when they are offered in the community.”
- Victims are no happier with the (more punitive) criminal justice system today than they were forty years ago.
- Expanding the prison system has contributed to intergenerational criminality, broken families, problems in school, sexually transmitted diseases, teenage births, anti-conventional attitudes, depleted labor markets, racial inequality and crime.
In short, government policies such as truth-in-sentencing, mandatory minima, three-strikes laws, increased collateral consequences, and imprisonment after technical parole violations have not made communities safer and probably have aggravated the crime problem. Continue reading "What Comes After Mass Incarceration?"
