Yearly Archives: 2014
Dec 9, 2014 Browne LewisTrusts & Estates
As an elder law attorney, I spent my career helping my clients prepare for incapacity and death. A part of that preparation entailed assisting them with the execution of living wills and/or other health care directives. My goal was to ensure that their wishes with regards to end-of-life care were known and respected. Because of my experiences comforting and counseling sick and dying clients I have spent my academic career researching and writing about the ethical and legal issues surrounding end-of-life decision-making.
Two phenomena make a discussion of this subject so important. First, due to the aging baby boomer population, the number of patients who face these types of decisions will continue to increase. Second, as a consequence of the existence of medical technology that enables physicians to artificially sustain life longer, more people will be forced to make end-of-life decisions. Legislatures and courts have taken steps to establish processes that make it easier for patients to provide information to their health care providers about their choices with regards to end-of-life care. Nonetheless, Professor Shepherd claims that laws exclusively designed to help patients express their end-of-life preferences may not be needed. According to Professor Shepherd, the better approach would be for health care providers to treat end-of-life choices similar to other types of medical decisions. Continue reading "Compassionate Care for the Living and the Dying"
Dec 8, 2014 Melissa MurrayFamily Law
In 2008, America elected its first black president. In the same election, a slim majority of Californians voted to enact Proposition 8, a ballot initiative that amended the California constitution to prohibit legal recognition of same-sex marriages. Almost immediately, the election of the nation’s first black president and the enactment of Proposition 8 were linked in the media coverage of these two events and in the popular imagination. Black voters, it was argued, turned out in droves to support Barack Obama; and these same voters cast votes to deny gay men and lesbians the right to marry. According to the conventional wisdom, a group that historically struggled against prejudice and oppression had furthered the oppression of another minority group.
In his recent article, Marriage Equality Post-Racialism, Russell Robinson takes on this stock narrative of the 2008 election, and in so doing, launches a broader discussion of the racial discourse and politics of the marriage equality movement. As other scholars have done, Robinson relies on empirical evidence to dispute the claim that black voters were solely responsible for Proposition 8’s enactment. Critically, however, Robinson goes beyond merely setting the empirical record straight to offer astute observations about the intersection of race and sexuality, and the role of race in the effort to secure marriage equality for LGBT persons. Continue reading "The Oppression of Analogy"
Dec 5, 2014 Robert LeckeyEquality
It will not surprise readers alive to anti-discrimination law’s limited capacity to transform systems that Ireland’s reform to protect workers in certain care relationships from discrimination based on their family status has reinforced gendered assumptions about care and workforce participation. However much its findings line up with our pessimistic hunches, Olivia Smith’s study is worth reading because it exemplifies an admirable kind of feminist scholarship: quantitatively and qualitatively empirical; theoretically grounded; alert to the intersection of gender with other grounds of disadvantage, such as class; and self-conscious of its limits.
Smith offers a “contextualized assessment” of a dozen years’ tribunal litigation under the “family status” discrimination ground. Prior to this ground’s adoption in the Employment Equality Acts 1998-2011, women had challenged discrimination associated with their care obligations under the ground of gender. As Smith notes, that tack had confirmed the gendered view of care as women’s work. Yet while the gender-neutral ground of “family status” might signal that care obligations bear on men as well as on women, the litigation record shows it to have reinforced the gendered dynamics of Irish work and family life. Continue reading "The Careless Ideal Worker"
Dec 3, 2014 Tal ZarskyTechnology Law
Alongside the explosive growth of the internet, digital marketing is also growing aggressively. According to some projections, it might even surpass TV-based advertising in the coming decades. One of its most prominent and controversial features is commonly referred to as “behavioral advertising”; the tailoring of advertisements to specific users at a specific time, on the basis of previously collected personal information about those users’ online activities.
Behavioral advertising is creating a substantial buzz in the press. It is therefore no surprise that this issue is also generating a vibrant discussion in the legal and policy realm. Addressing it properly is a serious intellectual challenge. Behavioral advertising generates an uneasy feeling (some might find it “creepy“). Yet it is not necessarily simple to figure out why. Consumers have dealt with marketers—some of them quite aggressive—since the dawn of time. Existing mechanisms, which incorporate a delicate mix of market forces, reputation concerns and in extreme cases regulatory action, have produced an acceptable status quo. Recently, this status quo has apparently been breached. The challenge academics and policy makers face is explaining why and how. In his recent Article, Ryan Calo tackles this challenge directly, and sets forth important answers. His insights will enhance the policy debates about the regulation of behavioral marketing, and push them in the right direction. Continue reading "Digital Behavioral Advertising – Why Worry?"
Dec 2, 2014 Jonathan SimonCriminal Law
The police killing of Michael Brown this summer in Ferguson, Missouri, sparked a nationwide wave of outrage at heavy-handed police behavior generally and toward young men of color in particular. But scores of young black men are killed every year by the police, many in even more suspicious circumstances; what made Ferguson different? One significant element was the fact that police left Michael Brown’s body exposed to public view and the hot sun for some four hours. Perhaps even more than the shooting of Michael Brown (which might yet be given an explanation), the exposure of his body for such a prolonged period, conveyed to millions through social media, constituted a striking violation of social norms of respect which appeared to have no possible explanation. Leaving his body to deteriorate in the view of his family and neighbors seemed to reflect the fact that police did not view Michael Brown as a human being, or his neighbors as citizens worthy of respect. The police shooting may in fact have been justified, but their treatment of Michael Brown’s body defiled human dignity
The growing sense that the carceral state (both police and prisons) has become a threat to the human dignity of Americans is an important new dimension of political and legal opposition to the supersized role that it now plays in our lives. Objections to NSA digital snooping, outrage at mistreatment of mentally ill prisoners, and protests against the routinized degradation of “stop and frisk” policing are growing. And these arguments are working not just in the street but in courts, where in Brown v. Plata in May 2011, the Supreme Court reminded American states that prisoners “retain the essence of human dignity inherent in all person[s].” So far, however, the force of dignity has had little influence on challenges to police using their arrest and related powers under the Fourth Amendment. Continue reading "Dignity, too"
Dec 1, 2014 Bill BrattonCorporate Law
Colin Mayer’s Firm Commitment is not exactly a book about corporate law, but it’s still best corporate law book I have encountered in a long while. Here a leading academic in business and finance challenges the status quo, bringing financial economics, agency theory, and corporate law to bear to persuade us that something has gone very wrong with corporate organizations in English-speaking economies.
Unlike many critics of corporate institutions, Mayer approves of large corporate entities. He points out that they allow us to partition assets off from individuals and create stable productive environments conducive to group participation. They are ubiquitous for very good reasons and do great things. But there’s also a dark side. In describing it, Mayer pulls together a number of things that we all know are out there and builds them into a binary theory. On one side of the description there’s a long list of phenomena, bundled up and characterized as the “control” paradigm. The market for corporate control sits at the top of the list, followed by environmental degradation, reductions in workforces, the shareholder value maximization norm, the trend to shareholder empowerment, short termism, leveraged restructuring, asset substitution, and leveraged speculation. All these work together with and within corporate entities to lead to disastrous results for society and the economy, manifested in the form of both externalities and opportunity costs. As society tries to cope with this onslaught of injury, there result layers and layers of choking regulation. Continue reading "Surmounting the Control Paradigm"
Nov 28, 2014 Adam SteinmanCourts Law
Two judicial and scholarly heavyweights squared off recently in a case challenging the constitutionality of Wisconsin’s voter ID law. Writing for the Seventh Circuit panel, Judge Easterbrook reasoned that “whether a photo ID requirement promotes public confidence in the electoral system is a ‘legislative fact’—a proposition about the state of the world, as opposed to a proposition about these litigants or about a single state.” The Seventh Circuit was bound to accept that a photo ID requirement did promote public confidence in elections because “[o]n matters of legislative fact, courts accept the findings of legislatures and judges of lower courts must accept findings by the Supreme Court.” Dissenting from the denial of rehearing en banc, Judge Posner responded that Easterbrook’s approach “conjures up a fact-free cocoon.” Posner asked: “If the Supreme Court once thought that requiring photo identification increases public confidence in elections, and experience and academic study since shows that the Court was mistaken, do we do a favor to the Court … by making the mistake a premise of our decision?”
This disagreement between Easterbrook and Posner—in the language of Allison Orr Larsen’s excellent article—is about Factual Precedents: whether the Supreme Court’s statements about legislative facts should receive “separate precedential force, distinct from the precedential force of whatever legal conclusions they contributed to originally.” (P. 63.) As Larsen explains, such “facts” are everywhere in judicial opinions—facts like “partial birth abortions are never medically necessary, fleeing from the police in a car leads to fatalities, and violent video games affect the neurological development of a child’s brain.” (P. 71.) To support such claims, Supreme Court Justices regularly invoke authorities that have never been made part of the evidentiary record or subjected to adversarial challenge by the parties to the case. Yet—as the Easterbrook opinion suggests—lower-court judges often treat factual propositions as precedent that they are bound to accept as a matter of stare decisis. Larsen convincingly argues that this is a mistake. Rather, “generalized factual claims from the Supreme Court should not receive any precedential value separate and apart from the legal rules they helped to create.” (P. 99.) Continue reading "Judicial Fact-Making"
Nov 26, 2014 Jack BeermannAdministrative Law
When I saw the title of Robert Ahdieh’s recent article, Reanalyzing Cost-Benefit Analysis: Toward a Framework of Function(s) and Form(s), I thought, “oh no, not another article about CBA.” Knowing Professor Adhieh’s work, I took a flyer and read it anyway, and boy was I happy with my decision. This is a great article which should be of interest to anyone involved in administrative law, securities regulation and policy analysis more generally. Cost-benefit analysis has become an important regulatory tool, and Professor Adhieh’s article makes a valuable contribution to the literature on the special analysis required under Section 106 of the National Securities Market Improvement Act of 1996, 15 U.S.C. § 77b (2012) and to the literature on cost-benefit analysis more generally.
Ahdieh’s jumping-off point, section 106 of the National Securities Market Improvement Act of 1996, requires the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) to consider, in all of its actions, including rulemaking, “in addition to the protection of investors, whether [an] action will promote efficiency, competition, and capital formation.” As Ahdieh observes, on its face, this provision has little bite—it requires only consideration of the effect on markets and it does not impose any substantive standard such as the efficiency requirement imposed by Congress in other regulatory contexts. Despite the moderate nature of Congress’s language, as Ahdieh reports, when the SEC promulgated a regulation expanding shareholder access to corporate proxies to nominate corporate directors, “[c]onsidering SEC rulemaking unsafe at any speed, . . . the Business Roundtable and the Chamber of Commerce challenged the new rule . . . invoking the language of Section 106 . . . [arguing] that the SEC’s assessment of the costs and benefits of mandatory proxy access had not met the requirements of Section 106.” Continue reading "Safe at Any Speed: Robert Ahdieh’s Take on Cost-Benefit Analysis in Financial Markets"
Nov 25, 2014 Joseph SlaterWork Law
Charlotte Garden,
Meta Rights, 83
Fordham L. Rev. 855 (2014).
Meta Rights is a thought-provoking article that addresses concerns about labor law rules governing agency fee payments in public-sector employment by comparing these rules to doctrines in analogous situations in other areas of law. Specifically, after the Supreme Court decided Knox v. SEIU Local 100 in 2012, 132 S.Ct. 2277 (2012), many felt that the Supreme Court was primed to change the default rule for agency payers from “opt-out” (an employee covered by a union security agreement would have to affirmatively state a preference not to pay dues for activities deemed “not related to collective bargaining”) to an “opt-in” system (unions could not require such dues absent specific, individual consent). Many in the field also noted that Harris v. Quinn, 134 S.Ct. 2618 (2014), looming but not yet decided when this article was written, could result in the Supreme Court mandating the “opt-in” system (I thought that was the most likely result in Harris). This is a very important issue in labor law and policy and for the labor movement as a whole. Although these cases explicitly covered only public-sector unions, such unions make up about half the total membership of all unions in the U.S.
Professor Garden could have written an article solely about whether “opt-in” rules were good or bad labor policy, or the extent to which constitutionally mandating such a system would be consistent with previous precedent (e.g., Abood v. City of Detroit, 431 U.S. 209 (1977)). Instead, she wrote a more interesting article by casting her net much more widely, describing when, in other contexts, courts have required Party A to give notice to Party B that Party B has certain constitutional rights. This takes her well beyond labor and employment law, and indeed beyond civil law (e.g., by discussing Miranda rights). Showing that such “meta rights” are relatively rare (e.g., public schools need not give notice to students that they have a First Amendment right to abstain from reciting the Pledge of Allegiance), Professor Garden provides a strong, principled, and broad-based critique of “opt in” rules. Continue reading "Putting Union Security Clause First Amendment Law in a Broader Context: Charlotte Garden’s Meta Rights"
Nov 24, 2014 Anne-Marie RhodesTrusts & Estates
Articles routinely appear that serve up a simple, everyday scenario that has potential to morph into a terribly complex legal situation and in the process, twist legal doctrines pretzel-like to reach the preferred result. We read them, digest them for the nugget to divulge in class, and file them away to cite in a later article. Rare is the article that serves up a simple everyday scenario that could have a disastrous effect that causes us to actually do something to avert the potential disaster. Stewart E. Sterk and Melanie B. Leslie have done just that in their masterful, co-authored piece, Accidental Inheritance: Retirement Accounts and the Hidden Law of Succession.
Starting with the fairy tale beginning of “once upon a time,” the authors bring us back to the days when wills controlled the disposition of property at death. Judges were in control of the probate process, much, if not most, property was probate, and rules had developed to ameliorate the routine mistakes and missteps that occur between the signing of the will and the date of death. Marriage, birth of a child, divorce, and the death of a beneficiary no longer have to upset the decedent’s presumed intent for his heirs, as we had developed rules for the probate process to reach the preferred result. As the non-probate revolution has settled into mainstream life, the issue has become how many of those presumed-intent rules apply. So far pretty standard fare, but consider $9 trillion in retirement accounts (a most significant non-probate asset), a changing American family, and the impending demise of the baby boomer generation, and the consequences have the potential to be dramatic and, in the view of the authors, intolerable. Continue reading "Transmitting Retirement Accounts: Getting It Right"
