Yearly Archives: 2014
Apr 4, 2014 W. Bradley WendelLegal Profession
Every criminal defense lawyer has been asked The Question: “How can you defend those people?” Even lawyers who do not represent persons accused of crimes have undoubtedly had to deal with the indignation directed at the lawyers representing the most recent high-profile, presumed-guilty defendants—O.J. Simpson, the detainees at Guantánamo Bay, alleged “American Taliban” terrorist John Walker Lindh, the Oklahoma City federal building or Boston Marathon bombing suspects, the man accused of being the guard known as “Ivan the Terrible” at the Treblinka concentration camp. The Question is about moral agency. How can you, an ordinary person, not only associate with but also actively assist terrible people in escaping punishment for terrible crimes?
Abbe Smith and Monroe Freedman have both written eloquently in answer to The Question. Now they have compiled a number of essays—some in the form in which they were previously published, some updated for this book, and some entirely new—written by advocates and academics who take seriously the problem of giving an account for one’s actions within a professional role. All of the essays, in one way or another, address the persistence of moral agency. Inside a criminal defense lawyer there is an ordinary person, with ordinary-person values, committed to non-violence and respect for the rights of others. What is it like to be that person? In this way the essays move beyond justification to consider the issue of motivation. In a classic essay reprinted in this recent book, Barbara Babcock surveys a number of responses, including: Continue reading "Defending Defending, with Integrity"
Apr 2, 2014 Serena MayeriLegal History
Multiple paradoxes lie at the heart of Leigh Ann Wheeler’s How Sex Became a Civil Liberty: a constitutional doctrine of sexual privacy exists alongside a public culture saturated by sex; women and sexual minorities enjoy unprecedented rights and freedoms while pornography proliferates in plain sight and civil libertarian principles underwrite opposition to rape shield laws and hate speech codes. Meanwhile, liberals and conservatives alike speak in a common civil liberties idiom that embraces the individual’s right to access sexual material once considered an obvious and proper target of state regulation. As Wheeler’s engaging history of how the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) helped make sex a civil liberty reveals, commitments to sexual freedom and consumer rights grew out of the changing political and cultural milieu from which the organization emerged and drew its leaders.
Wheeler’s story begins in the early twentieth century with portraits of individual ACLU founders and leaders including Roger Baldwin, Crystal Eastman, and Madeleine Zabriskie Doty. She highlights how their sexual lives—more adventurous and avant-garde than previously understood—shaped their thinking and spawned a civil liberties vanguard. Wheeler’s account intriguingly suggests that men’s and women’s differing experiences of the “first sexual revolution”—relatively unmitigated liberation for men, a much more ambivalent legacy for women who continued to value fidelity and lived in fear of unwanted pregnancy—may have led them to see birth control as an essential liberty that could also help to bridge this gender gap. Continue reading "Sex and Civil Liberties"
Apr 1, 2014 Michael CedroneJurisprudence
Linda Edwards’ article is a thoughtful examination of the hidden and unexplored role of narrative in legal decisions. The article raises fundamental questions about the nature and boundaries of legal discourse and demonstrates that narrative theory and cognitive study can bridge the distance between what one may call ‘traditionalist legal analysis’ and its ‘oppositionist’ critique. The article is a delight. It joins an arresting image to an elegant argument, and it is beautifully written.
Edwards’ arresting image evokes an ancient, walled city. Life proceeds vibrantly inside the walls, where people deliberate and decide questions within a common cultural frame. Outside the walls, prophets shout toward the people, but their voices are lost in the vast plains. Occupants of the city occasionally lob verbal assaults—“Be quiet; stop whining; leave us alone”—but the city largely ignores the prophets. For Edwards, this metaphor captures the relationship between judges and traditionalist legal scholars and critical theorists. Continue reading "On Narrative, Legal Discourse, and Yaser Esam Hamdi"
Mar 31, 2014 Christopher SprigmanIntellectual Property Law
Paul Heald,
The Demand for Out-of-Print Works and Their (Un)Availability in Alternative Markets (2014), available at
SSRN.
Back in mid-2013, Paul Heald posted to SSRN a short paper that already has had far more impact than academic papers usually have on the public debate over copyright policy. That paper, How Copyright Makes Books and Music Disappear (and How Secondary Liability Rules Help Resurrect Old Songs), employed a clever methodology to see whether copyright facilitates the continued availability and distribution of books and music. Encouraging the production of new works is, of course, copyright’s principal justification. But some have contended that copyright is also necessary to encourage continued exploitation and maintenance of older works. We find an example in the late Jack Valenti, who, as head of the Motion Picture Association of America, in 1995 made the argument before the Senate Judiciary Committee that it was necessary to extend the copyright term in part to provide continued incentives for the exploitation of older works. “A public domain work is an orphan,” Valenti testified. “No one is responsible for its life.” And of course if no one is responsible for keeping a creative work alive, it will, Valenti suggests, die.
Is that argument right? Enter Paul Heald. Heald’s 2013 article employs a set of clever methodologies to test whether copyright did, indeed, facilitate the continued availability of creative works—in Heald’s article, books and music. With respect to books, Heald constructed a random sample of 2300 books on Amazon, arranged them in groups according to the decade in which they were published, and counted them. Here are his findings: Continue reading "How Copyright Prevents Us From Getting the Books We Want"
Mar 28, 2014 David OrentlicherHealth Law
Bernard Black, José-Antonio Espín-Sánchez, Eric French & Kate Litvak, The Effect of Health Insurance on Near-Elderly Health and Mortality, Nw. L. & Econ. Research Paper Series, available at SSRN.
While advocates for the Affordable Care Act (ACA) assume it will improve the health of the uninsured, Bernard Black and co-authors observe that the link between health insurance and health is more tenuous than one may think. Partly because other factors have a bigger impact on health than does health care insurance and partly because the uninsured have always been able to rely on the health care safety net, we may see little improvement in the health of the previously uninsured from ACA.
In their study, Black et al., collected nationwide data on people who were age 50-61 in 1992. The authors looked at this “near-elderly” population because a beneficial effect of insurance would be most likely found in that group—younger people are healthier, and older people are covered by Medicare. The authors then looked at the study subjects’ access to health care and their health outcomes for the next 18 years. As expected, insured individuals used more health care resources than did uninsured people. However, there was no evidence that being insured lowered the risk of death 12-14 years into the study, and only mild evidence of a mortality benefit at 16-18 years. Continue reading "Do the Uninsured Become Healthier Once They Receive Health Care Coverage?"
Mar 26, 2014 Angela Onwuachi-WilligFamily Law
Few authors can bring cases and their meaning(s) alive like Professor Bennett Capers. Capers does not disappoint with his recent chapter The Crime of Loving: Loving, Lawrence, and Beyond. Capers provides a criminal law lens for family law scholars to further examine and understand the landmark decision, Loving v. Virginia. In Loving, the Supreme Court struck down Virginia statutes that criminally prohibited and punished marriage between Whites and non-Whites as violations of equal protection and due process. In reconsidering this landmark case through the lens of criminal law, Capers exposes the power of “white-letter law,” which “suggests societal and normative laws that stand side by side and often undergird black-letter law, but . . . [that] remain invisible to the naked eye.” (P. 120.) More so, Capers beautifully reveals how “Loving and Lawrence both serve as cautionary reminders of the long leash we have given to criminal law.” (P. 125.) He details the many ways in which criminal law has been used to regulate and shape many aspects of our personal and social lives. Noting such regulation has occurred through the use of “a whole host of victimless crimes,” such as adultery, gambling, pornography, and premarital sex, Capers joins scholars such as Melissa Murray in exposing the often-ignored manner in which criminal law is used to invade citizens’ privacy and enact a moral code upon behaviors that are not generally associated with criminality.
Capers begins his chapter with a compelling narrative that provides a vivid picture of Loving’s limited impact on towns such as his hometown of Charleston, South Carolina. Capers starts by comparing the “Charleston of [his] youth,” a place that “had only one interracial couple” with Richard and Mildred Loving’s hometown of Central Point, Virginia, a rare, integrated community in the South “in which [the Lovings] knew they could live as husband and wife . . . . a place where they would be welcome . . . . a place they could call home.” (Pp. 114, 118–19.) The difference, Capers explains, was not the black-letter law in the two locations; after all, interracial marriage was illegal in Virginia at the time the Lovings got married, but was legal in Charleston—and indeed, nationally—during his youth. Rather, the difference was in the white-letter law, the extralegal prohibitions “that reminded people of their place and reminds them still.” (P. 116.) As Capers makes clear, “Brown or no Brown, Loving or no Loving,” the Charleston of his youth and of today includes very few interracial families because “people kn[o]w their place.” (P. 116.) Indeed, Capers implies that a black-letter prohibition was unnecessary to maintain this status quo. He writes: Continue reading "Lots of Love for this Loving Analysis"
Mar 25, 2014 Margaret DaviesEquality
Over the past several years, Davina Cooper has been writing about “everyday utopias,” intentionally created practices and spaces, which represent an effort to enact social change in everyday life. In Everyday Utopias: The Conceptual Life of Promising Spaces, Cooper brings together much of this work in a revised form and underpins it with an extensive theoretical discussion of how such practices can be understood as socially transformative.
The individual pieces previously published were always intriguing and highly stimulating—engaging as they did in great detail with a variety of otherwise marginal, and sometimes unstudied, cases. These include Speakers’ Corner in Hyde Park, the Toronto Women’s bath house, Local Exchange Trading Schemes, public nudism, an alternative school, and a state-run equality program. The synthesis of these case studies into one collection adds enormous value to her previous publications, as does the very significant theoretical work Cooper undertakes in framing, connecting, and conceptualizing these spaces. More than this, the book itself is “hopeful and inspired”—as Sara Ahmed says on the back cover—because it offers multiple instances of social transformation in action and an analysis of how shaping the present may influence the future, both in the cases discussed but also in general. Continue reading "Practicing the Future"
Mar 24, 2014 Jennifer ChaconCriminal Law
Scholars analyzing immigration enforcement often do so in a way that treats the matter as separate from more general trends and developments in law enforcement. In fact, however, many of the trends in immigration enforcement are mutually reinforcing of, and in evidence throughout, various law enforcement domains. Anil Kalhan neatly captures that reality in his article Immigration Policing and Federalism Through the Lens of Technology, Surveillance, and Privacy. In so doing, he opens up a discussion that has significant implications for both criminal justice and immigration law scholarship.
In his article, Kalhan critiques the phenomenon that he labels “automated immigration policing.” As he defines them, “[a]utomated immigration policing initiatives deploy interoperable database systems and other technologies to automate and routinize the identification and apprehension of potentially deportable noncitizens in the course of ordinary law enforcement encounters and other moments of day-to-day life.” (P. 1108.) As his article makes amply clear, reliance on automated-policing techniques is not limited to immigration policing. He draws upon the work of numerous federalism, privacy, and criminal procedure scholars to highlight the ways in which automated immigration policing is of a piece with general developments in governmental surveillance and law enforcement. In immigration policing, as in other law enforcement endeavors, a broad—and elastic—range of law enforcement agents access growing stores of personal data accumulated by local, state, federal, and private actors, in the service of multifarious and open-ended law enforcement ends. Continue reading "The Rise of Automated Policing"
Mar 21, 2014 Pat GudridgeConstitutional Law
In their beautifully clear essay, Duke Professors Bradley and Siegel argue that the clarity of constitutional terms—when we glimpse it—is a result of hard work, however implicit. Clarity turns on construction, the effortful identification and deployment of what we decide are apt presuppositions. Seemingly easy cases of constitutional interpretation and enforcement are, Bradley and Siegel think, therefore of a piece with hard cases. At work just below the surface, we discover the same repertoire of devices that lawyers, judges, and academics use in dealing with ambiguities, gaps, anachronism, history, or similar vagaries: senses of purpose or structure, concern for consistency with established readings, popular understandings, and so on. Circa 1980s cls (critical legal studies) discussions of constitutional law were pretty much right in this regard. “It is important to ask not only whether and why American interpreters regard themselves as bound by text that they deem clear,” they write, “but also when they deem the text clear. Text is not merely a fixed structure to be built upon…rather it is also something that is itself partly constructed and reconstructed.”
Are Blue Devils now Red Devils? Bradley and Siegel think not. They believe they are just clearing out confusion about the role of constitutional texts in constitutional thinking. Some theorists posit that constitutional texts as such figure mostly marginally—for example, as focal points within a largely common law analysis (Bradley and Siegel cite David Strauss) or as initial frameworks (they discuss Jack Balkin). But if we understand our readings of constitutional passages as involving the same hard work whether we reach clear conclusions or end indecisively, we may rightly characterize our approaches as strongly textual—as always closely engaging constitutional wordings, even if the literal texts never or hardly ever operate in our thinking in isolation. Professors Bradley and Siegel assemble a substantial list of exemplars in support. They include discussions of the word “Congress” in the First Amendment; Fifth Amendment reverse incorporation of the Fourteenth Amendment’s Equal Protection Clause; the limited limits (so to speak) on the applicability of the Eleventh Amendment, and Lincoln’s reading of the Suspension Clause. Continue reading "Constructive Criticism"
Mar 19, 2014 Brooke D. ColemanCourts Law
Alexander A. Reinert, Screening Out Innovation: The Merits of Meritless Litigation, 89 Ind. L. J. __ (forthcoming 2014) available at SSRN.
Throughout life, we are told that we should learn from our mistakes. Alex Reinert, in Screening Out Innovation: The Merits of Meritless Litigation, forces us to consider why civil litigation shouldn’t have to do the same. Reinert elegantly defines meritless–as distinct from frivolous–litigation, argues why the civil justice system should value it, and argues that Congress, the Court, and federal rulemakers should change the way they think about substantive and procedural change.
In civil litigation, the question of how to manage the tension between efficiency and justice has been resolved by resort to an argument that frivolous claims should be screened out, and screened out early. That proposition appears uncontroversial on its face. Yet, changes like the Twiqbal pleading standard and the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act (PSLRA) are criticized for taking this proposition too far. The argument is that these efforts to achieve efficiency screen out meritorious cases along with the frivolous. Those in favor of these changes respond by arguing that it is worth sacrificing a few meritorious cases because the overall system benefits when frivolous cases are eliminated. Proponents argue this leaves more room for meritorious cases to receive careful attention. What gets left out of this debate, at least explicitly, is the role of meritless cases in the system and how those meritless cases should be valued when considering substantive and procedural reform. Continue reading "Recognizing the Value of Failure in Civil Litigation"
