Yearly Archives: 2014
Sep 23, 2014 Matt BodieWork Law
If the law of the workplace could be anthropomorphized into a family of four siblings, here’s how it might go: labor law would be the oldest, a raconteur spinning yarns about the old days; employment discrimination would be the middle child, an activist vigorously standing up for justice and equality; employee benefits would be an accountant, quietly off to the side at family dinners; and employment law would be the oddball youngest child, jumping from activity to activity without rhyme or reason. I teach employment law, and it is often compared to a “catch-all” or “grab-bag” category: anything that doesn’t fit in the other courses is covered there. The Fair Labor Standards Act is paired with covenants not to compete; unemployment compensation is alongside the at-will doctrine. This hodge-podge looks like an unfortunate intellectual shambles when contrasted with labor law, which has the coherence of an overarching (and little amended) system of regulation, as well as employment discrimination, which has a limited set of comparable federal statutory schemes. Perhaps as a result, the employment law course tends to be one that a professor picks up on the side, to accompany one’s main interest in one of the other three subjects.
Sam Bagenstos has set himself the task of cleaning up this particular set of Augean stables by providing an overarching theory to justify our set of employment law doctrines. In Employment Law and Social Equality, Bagenstos sets out a “social equality” theory of employment law under which individual employment doctrines can be understood, as well as justified, for their promotion of social equality. Jumping off from his work on social equality and antidiscrimination protections, Bagenstos notes the difference: “[w]here employment discrimination law targets the threats to social equality caused by occupational segregation and group-based subordination, individual employment law should be understood as targeting the threat to social equality posed by a boss’s ability to leverage her economic power over workers into a more general social hierarchy in and out of the workplace.” (P. 232.) He argues that social equality—the notion that each of us are equal members of our communities—serves as the primary justification for many important employment law doctrines, such as employee privacy and autonomy protections, antiretaliation provisions, arbitration regulation, child labor laws, and overtime protections. Nimbly straddling the line between positive and normative claims, Bagenstos argues that social equality can serve as a theoretical lens for both seeing the law and critiquing it. As an example, he argues that critics of the at-will rule are primarily concerned with its effects in undermining social equality, and that the rule should be dismantled for propping up workplace hierarchies. His “social equality” theory thus serves as a tool for understanding the law as well as a sword for attacking it when it exacerbates existing hierarchies. Continue reading "A Grand Unified Theory of Employment Law"
Sep 22, 2014 Alexander Boni-SaenzTrusts & Estates
David Horton,
Indescendibility, 102
Calif. L. Rev. __ (forthcoming, 2014), available at
SSRN.
Should the right to transfer an asset after death extend to kidneys, personal injury claims, or frequent flier miles? In Indescendibility, Professor Horton provides a fascinating and in-depth examination of this neglected right in property law’s bundle of sticks. He maps out a theoretical justification for indescendibility, grounding it in a set of practical concerns about the administration of posthumous property, and offers several suggestions for law reform. Professor Horton has a knack for unearthing unique and cross-cutting themes in the law of trusts and estates, and this piece again provides readers with significant food for thought.
Part I takes us on a tour of the variety of things that have been made indescendible by law, as well as the diverse sources of law from which this indescendibility flows. The United States Constitution prohibits the descendibility of noble titles and hereditary privileges, a move by the early American political elites to distinguish themselves from the British. Indescendibility is also the standard rule for body parts, where descendibility has been regulated by statute or outright prohibited because body parts have not typically been considered to be property. The common law doctrine of abatement restricts descendibility of legal claims for physical injury. While this doctrine has been superseded by survival statutes in nearly all states, these statutes are inconsistent in their scope and application, sometimes leaving the abatement rule intact in practice. Indescendibility by contract is the newest frontier of interest, where fine print often prevents sports fans from passing season tickets to their heirs. Continue reading "Descendibility: The Neglected Stick in the Bundle"
Sep 19, 2014 Sheila ScheuermanTorts
The questions raised by punitive damages are numerous and varied: Should punishment be a part of the civil system? Are punitive damages awards “out of control”? Should a punitive damages award be split between the State and the individual plaintiff? Should caps be placed on punitive damages? Indeed, the topic of punitive damages has been examined from competing empirical perspectives, from a comparative law analysis, from a historical angle, and the list goes on and on and on.
Enter a new article by Yehuda Adar. In this thought-provoking piece, Adar offers a framework for organizing these various debates about punitive damages. In so doing, Adar provides a convenient and helpful synthesis of both the current objections to punitive damages, and the counter-arguments in support of punitive damages’ place in the civil liability system. Continue reading "A Map Through the Punitive Damages Forest"
Sep 17, 2014 Lily KahngTax Law
Anthony C. Infanti,
Big (Gay) Love: Has the IRS Legalized Polygamy?, N.C.L. Rev. Addendum (forthcoming, 2014), available at
SSRN.
Gay marriage opponents love to fear monger about the slippery slope of extending marriage beyond the legal union between one man and one woman. They prophesy that if we allow marriage between two men or two women, we will descend into a Gomorrah of incest, adultery, polygamy, and animal love. In his essay, Big (Gay) Love: Has the IRS Legalized Polygamy?, Anthony Infanti makes subversive use of this repugnant meme to advance his view that tax results should not depend on marriage in the first place.
Infanti’s argument focuses on an analysis of Revenue Ruling 2013-17 (the Ruling), which recognizes same-sex marriages for federal tax purposes. Issued in 2013, after the U.S. Supreme Court invalidated section three of the federal Defense of Marriage Act, the Ruling announces the IRS’s adoption of a general interpretive rule that “for Federal tax purposes … recognizes the validity of a same-sex marriage that was valid in the state where it was entered into, regardless of the married couple’s place of domicile.” Infanti interprets the Ruling to apply to a limited subset of same-sex marriages, in contrast to what he calls the “alternative interpretation” of the Ruling, which reads the Ruling more expansively to cover a larger number of same-sex marriages. Infanti claims that under alternative interpretation of the Ruling, the IRS would also have to recognize the validity of plural marriages. Continue reading "Next Up, Incest"
Sep 16, 2014 Stephen UriceLexArt and Cultural Property Law
Full fathom five thy father lies;
Of his bones are coral made;
Those are pearls that were his eyes:
Nothing of him that doth fade
But doth suffer a sea-change
Into something rich and strange.
Sea-nymphs hourly ring his knell
Ding-dong
Hark! now I hear them – Ding-dong, bell.
–William Shakespeare, The Tempest
During the War of 1812, Philadelphia’s Academy of Fine Arts petitioned a Nova Scotia admiralty court to release works of art bound for it from Italy aboard an American merchant ship captured by the British and brought to Halifax. The court granted the petition distinguishing, for the first time in a published judicial opinion, cultural property from other chattel, stating that works of art are “entitled to favour and protection.” By creating an exception for paintings and prints, the court gave cultural property a special legal status, the contours and extent of which remain elastic. Two centuries after the Nova Scotia court christened the field of cultural property law, Valentina Vadi has written an insightful article seeking to determine whether a norm of customary international law is developing to distinguish and provide special legal treatment for a particular kind of cultural property: sunken warships.
Sunken ships are an especially complicated form of cultural property. A ship’s wreckage and cargo are often historically and aesthetically important and immensely valuable monetarily; their archaeological context preserves unique and irreplaceable information; their human remains implicate practices and traditions relating to treatment of the dead; and some pose environmental hazards to flora and fauna (both of which are deemed cultural property under a 1970 UNESCO cultural property convention). Because new technologies are facilitating the discovery, identification, and recovery of shipwrecks, it is reasonably foreseeable that disputes over them will continue. Thus, the growing scholarship on shipwrecks is timely, and Valentina Vadi’s inquiry, in particular, responds to an important question. Continue reading "Those Are Pearls That Were His Eyes"
Sep 15, 2014 Sida LiuLegal Profession
In the past a few decades, feminization has been one of the most notable developments in the legal profession worldwide. From Continental Europe to North America, from Latin America to Asia, research has shown a rapid increase in the proportion of female lawyers in vastly different national and legal contexts (see Kay and Gorman 2008 for a review). Yet few existing studies provide a good cross-national comparison of the global trends of lawyer feminization. Despite the enduring structural barriers in recruitment, compensation, and promotion that women face in law firms and other elite legal institutions, they have continued to enter the bar in vastly different social contexts. What are the driving forces behind the feminization of lawyers? And how does this process vary from one country to another?
Using data on lawyer populations and gender compositions assembled from national censuses and lawyer statistics in 86 countries, Ethan Michelson’s recent study offers a comprehensive and convincing analysis of the relationship between bar expansion and lawyer feminization. Despite large variations of legal systems and lawyer demographics across different countries, Michelson finds a highly consistent pattern, that is, almost no country’s legal profession has attained a feminization level of at least 30% of women before its lawyer density (i.e., lawyer/population ratio) surpassed a level of 2,000 people per lawyer. In other words, feminization is part of some larger demographic changes in the legal profession worldwide. Continue reading "Just the Beginning: Studying the Global Demography of Lawyers"
Sep 12, 2014 Karen TaniLegal History
“Legal interpretation,” Robert Cover famously wrote, “takes place in a field of pain and death.” Honoring Cover’s important insight is one of the great challenges of legal scholarship. As we use our expertise to explore the nooks and crannies of our “legal world”—the clever transactional devices, complex regulatory schemes, and jurisdictional puzzles—do we recognize the state-inflicted and -sanctioned violence on which this world depends? Barbara Young Welke’s The Cowboy Suit Tragedy is a powerful example of how to write about law without losing sight of what Cover calls the “bodies on the line.” In the tradition of critical legal history, Welke’s insightful and empathetic account of a mid-twentieth-century products liability case goes further still, to show us the profoundly unequal impact of law’s violence. By placing the case in the context of the “democratization of [consumer] desire,” the rise of product liability insurance, and the inherently atomizing features of private law, Welke reminds us that even when tort law forced manufacturers to bear the monetary cost of accidents, the emotional and physical injuries lay where they fell. Families—here, children—owned the hazards inherent in many products, and most often they owned them not as a class or community, but as individuals, as scattered and disconnected as the transactions that brought the products into their lives.
The Cowboy Suit Tragedy centers on the New York case McCormack v. M. A. Henry Co., a wrongful death suit brought by the McCormack family against the manufacturers of the Gene Autry cowboy suit. A popular toy since it first came off the production line in 1942, the “Autry cowboy ranch outfit” offered parents a way to “provide their children with a protected childhood,” an intense postwar desire, while participating in the mass consumer economy that increasingly defined American identity. (P. 103.) Unfortunately for seven-year-old Tommy McCormack, who received the toy for Christmas in 1944, there was a hazard “designed in” to the costume: its plush white chaps were made from a highly flammable viscose rayon fiber, at a time when “children encountered fire as a regular part of daily life.” “One minute Tommy was playing,” Welke writes, drawing from court testimony, “and the next he was screaming,” in what his brother Jackie remembered as “a ‘circle of fire.’” After four long months, he died from his injuries. (P. 101.) Other children had by then suffered similar fates, but after Mr. McCormack’s chance encounter with a lawyer, Tommy became the cowboy suit’s first legally cognizable victim. (P. 111.) Continue reading "Bodies on the Line: The Private Tragedies Underlying Modern Products Liability Law"
Sep 10, 2014 Michael GreenJurisprudence
That Dworkin waited until the very end of his career to take on international law might seem strange. One of Dworkin’s great insights is that participants in legal practices often disagree about the criteria for identifying law, while nevertheless thinking that their disagreement has a determinate answer. If we are to do justice to these “theoretical disagreements,” as Dworkin called them, we cannot hold a positivist theory, like H.L.A. Hart’s, under which the existence and content of the law are ultimately determined solely by social facts about a community’s legal practices. Only by introducing evaluative considerations can we make sense of practitioners’ commitment to law that transcends these social facts.
International law would appear to be a poster child for the Dworkinian theory of law. Theoretical disagreements about international law are common, and those seeking to resolve them commonly appeal to evaluative considerations. What is more, it appears that international law, by its very nature, transcends social facts about the legal practices of a particular community. The principles of international law seem to stand above and bind the American, French, or Uzbek communities. Continue reading "International Law and Dworkin’s Legal Monism"
Sep 9, 2014 Rebecca TushnetIntellectual Property Law
There are many ways to use empirical research in intellectual property scholarship. Work can be qualitative or quantitative, interdisciplinary or highly focused on the law. One of the most intriguing questions I’ve seen investigated empirically of late is “what makes us think that one work is similar enough to a previous one to infringe?” Given the significant expansion in the scope of copyright from pure reproduction to derivative works and substantially similar works, this is an important issue.
The two articles I highlight here approach the question from very different, but complementary, perspectives. The authors of Judging Similarity start with legal scenarios adapted from real cases and ask survey respondents whether the works are similar enough to infringe. Kate Klonick, like David Morrison, examines similarity from a cognitive science perspective, starting with what researchers already know about human judgments of similarity and difference in nonlegal contexts. (Disclosure: I advised Klonick, now pursuing a Ph.D. at Yale, on this project.) Continue reading "Seeing Like a Copyright Lawyer: Judging Similarity in Copyright Cases"
Sep 8, 2014 Kathleen BoozangHealth Law
Joseph W. Yockey,
Choosing Governance in the FCPA Reform Debate, 38
J. Corp. L. 325 (2013), available at
SSRN.
Health law scholars sometimes pay inadequate attention to those who don’t write specifically in our area, which is the reason I have dedicated this and my previous jot to articles by non-health law professors that give us the big picture on issues related to the False Claims Act and the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act (FCPA), both of which are key enforcement mechanisms in the health sector. Bribery is unquestionably one of the most significant risks global life science companies face, given the SEC and DOJ’s recent increase in FCPA enforcement. Growing numbers of academic medical centers are engaging in joint ventures throughout the world, particularly in emerging economies where the risks of corruption are greatest. For these reasons, then, the FCPA is increasingly relevant to the health lawyer and compliance professional.
Professor Joseph W. Yockey’s recently published article, Choosing Governance in the FCPA Reform Debate, is a worthwhile read for three reasons. First, it summarizes the history and salient parts of the FCPA for those requiring a primer on the law. Second, it examines the two sides of the debate—between the business community (led by the Chamber of Commerce, which is also fighting vigorously for changes to the False Claims Act) and entities such as Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International —over whether Congress should revise the FCPA and whether DOJ and the SEC are over-enforcing the law. Third, the issues evoked by the concerns about FCPA enforcement are quite similar to the debate surrounding enforcement under the False Claims Act thereby giving the health professor, like myself, who is not a white collar specialist, a ten-thousand-foot view across the statutory spectrum of enforcement agency behavior. Continue reading "New Governance as the New Weapon in the Fight Against Fraud"
