Yearly Archives: 2015
Jul 20, 2015 Ted SichelmanIntellectual Property Law
In the 19th century, legal scholarship focused on legal doctrine. In the 20th century, legal scholars began to examine the policy effects of legal doctrine, paying particular attention to how changes in doctrine could yield better policies. Now, such policy-oriented approaches are cemented into nearly every U.S. law review article. Although this shift has in my view generally been beneficial, it still suffers from a doctrinal myopia: legal scholars usually write about only the swaths of law they know well, often overlooking other strands of law that are quite pertinent to the policy issues being addressed.
For example, although patent law scholars frequently opine about the nuances of patent doctrine and how changes in those nuances may affect innovation incentives, they have often ignored how other available policy tools—such as grants and government prizes—affect innovation. Although there is certainly law that deals with grants and prizes, it is rarely the subject of litigation and is fairly specialized (hence, occupying the minds of a small number of lawyers). None of it is taught in law schools. As such, law professors tend to know (and write) little about it. Continue reading "A Pluralistic Vision of Incentivizing Innovation"
Jul 17, 2015 Clifford RoskyFamily Law
The presumption of legitimacy is one of Euro-American family law’s most venerable doctrines. Under this well-known rule, a woman’s husband is presumed to be the father of any child conceived during marriage. Throughout the ages, the substance of the doctrine has been remarkably consistent: With relatively modest changes, it can be traced from Roman law through Canon Law, Civil Law, and the Common Law—and until recently, into the parentage statutes of a majority of U.S. states. But, as Susan Appleton correctly observed nine years ago, this ancient rule is now at a crossroads. On the one hand, it has been eroded by the rise of genetic paternity tests and the demise of laws that discriminate against children born out of wedlock. On the other hand, it has been given a second wind by extension to same-sex married couples and couples who use ART, who vigorously guard its value as a protection for their children. As a result, we are now at a particularly useful vantage point to review the promises of the presumption itself.
A new article shines light on the presumption and its many meanings. As Andrew Counter illustrates in Always Uncertain, the ideological underpinnings and consequences of the presumption have varied “enormously” in different places and times. Continue reading "Legitimacy’s Uncertainties: Exploring the Presumption’s Premises"
Jul 15, 2015 Toni WilliamsEquality
Escaping Battered Credit: A Proposal for Repairing Credit Reports Damaged by Domestic Violence expands and develops Angela Littwin’s pioneering work on “coerced debt” within violent and abusive relationships. Littwin’s first study on this topic, Coerced Debt: The Role of Consumer Credit in Domestic Violence, offers a preliminary account of various ways in which “coerced debt” occurs, how it is experienced and its potentially devastating consequences for abused women. Escaping Battered Credit considers potential legal responses to the problem in the context of abusive relationships, and takes on the challenge of crafting a partial remedy that fits within the institutional structure of US consumer credit markets.
Littwin describes coerced debt as occurring “when the abuser in a violent relationship obtains credit in the victim’s name via fraud or duress” (P. 365), and defaults on the debt. Typical practices range from basic identity theft, as when the abuser applies for a credit in his partner’s name without telling her, through resort to physical and psychological violence to coerce abused women to apply for credit or release equity in their homes, to abusers structuring loan transactions to ensure that they enjoy the benefits of credit and the women they have abused are left with the debt liabilities. Coerced debt is related to the well-documented problems of “sexually transmitted debt” in which so-called “surety wives” guarantee loans to their businessmen spouses under circumstances of duress, fraud, or misinformation; and coercive microcredit which occurs when gender specific peer-lending programs expose poor women to the risks of being coerced into borrowing on behalf of their spouses. All three instances subject abused women to risks of liabilities to creditors to which they did not freely consent and against which law offers little protection, illustrating how market relations of credit and debt may constitute specific instruments of oppression within familial and intimate relationships, particularly, although by no means only, as those relationships fail. Continue reading "When Information Wields Power: The Inequalities of Credit Reporting in Abusive Relationships"
Jul 14, 2015 Herbert BurkertTechnology Law
The overall issue addressed in this book has received renewed attention recently. On April 1, 2015 President Obama issued the Executive Order “Blocking the Property of Certain Persons Engaging in Significant Malicious Cyber-Enabled Activities,” which allows the Treasury Department to freeze assets of individuals and entities that are directly or indirectly involved in such activities. Furthermore in the beginning of April, in a series of meetings in China, US Homeland Security officials met with their Chinese counterparts to discuss cybersecurity issues. And in late April the US Department of Defense issued its latest document on cyber strategy that mentions – among other countries – China among the “key cyber threats.”
However, the chosen article focuses on an issue that is easily is forgotten in these grand debates: citizens’ privacy, since threats to privacy come from the inside as well as from the outside. The author is Professor of Communication at the School of Digital Media and Design Arts, Beijing’s renowned University of Posts and Telecommunications (BUPT). He starts with an overview on the present legal framework for protecting the Right to Internet Privacy in China. (P. 247) I still vividly remember a presentation I gave in October 1996 at the China Youth College for Political Science (now the China Youth University for Political Sciences) in Beijing on “The Function of Law in an Information Society” addressing privacy issues. At the end of my talk one of the Chinese students stood up and boldly asked me what my talk had to do with current situation in China. Continue reading "Internet Privacy: A Chinese View"
Jul 13, 2015 Susan BandesCriminal Law
In standard criminal procedure and criminology texts, the concept of “arrest” receives surprisingly little attention. Arrest is portrayed as a way station on the road to trial. It is also portrayed as a meaningful sorting device: a determination that the criminal justice system has just cause to restrict an individual’s liberty, if only temporarily. For those who view arrest in these terms, coverage of recent events has provided a dramatic crash course in the true nature and scope of the arrest power. In Ferguson, Missouri, for example, Michael Brown’s arrest, which gave rise to the chain of events resulting in his death, was for the crime of “manner of walking along roadway.” Arrests on this charge were frequent in Ferguson, and 95% of those arrests were of African-Americans. Across the U.S., arrests for seemingly innocuous behavior are common; discretion to make the arrest “custodial” is generally broad; and the burden of arrests for misdemeanors and minor infractions falls disproportionately on minorities. One in three adults will be arrested by the age of 23. For minorities, the odds are even more shocking: 49% for African-American men, and 44% for Latino men. Legal scholars such as Babe Howell and Alexandra Natapoff have examined the often- draconian consequences of such arrests on individuals, including the process costs of contesting the charges and the lasting stigma of an arrest record. And as powerful recent scholarship by Alice Goffman, Michelle Alexander and Jill Leovy drives home, the arrest power is properly understood not merely as a restriction on individual liberty, but as a means of social control that holds entire communities in the grip of the criminal justice system.
Eisha Jain, in her valuable, meticulously documented article Arrests as Regulation, describes and critiques an additional set of burdens triggered by the broad, poorly circumscribed power to arrest—burdens that reach well beyond the criminal justice system. Arrests are used as a proxy, or a low-cost auditing mechanism, by agencies regulating public housing, public benefits, licensing for various professions, education, child welfare, and immigration, as well as by employers and other non-governmental actors. These agencies and individuals use arrests as a means of monitoring and tracking individuals (for example legal immigrants, foster parents, school children) and a means of setting regulatory priorities (for example determining who is entitled to public housing or employment or professional licensing). Agencies and individuals rely on arrests to assess the individual’s potential for violence, risk to security, or instability. In short, as Jain succinctly states, we have delegated broad front-end screening discretion to individual police officers, thus magnifying the effects of arrest decisions. The reasons for the arrest (even assuming the arrest is justified) often have little relevance to the rationales underlying the regulations at issue. Moreover, the use of the arrests often proceeds unchecked by any of the safeguards that would apply in the criminal justice context. Continue reading "The Arrest Power Unchained"
Jul 10, 2015 William BaudeConstitutional Law
Richard M. Re,
Promising the Constitution, 110
Nw. U. L. Rev. (forthcoming, 2016), available at
SSRN.
Many questions about the meaning of the Constitution are disputed. But however we answer those questions, at some point most of us come to a different question: so what? Why do those words on a page have any moral grip on the three-dimensional world of human beings? In one of my favorite new articles of the summer, Promising the Constitution, Professor Richard Re takes on this question and its implications. The answer, he says, is the constitutional oath, which simultaneously commands much less and much more than many have assumed. (Full disclosure: Re is a friend and former classmate.)
Re’s article makes three major contributions. The first is to argue that the oath is what gives the Constitution normative force in our world. We should see the oath not as an empty political ritual, but as a solemn assertion of a promise, with all the moral force that a promise carries. Of course, many philosophers are skeptical about the moral force of promises; but Re surmounts their objections by turning to the democratic context of the oath. While immoral promises and coerced promises might lack moral weight, the constitutional oath today should be seen as neither. Continue reading "The Power of Promises"
Jul 8, 2015 Marin LevyCourts Law
Aziz Huq,
Judicial Independence and the Rationing of Constitutional Remedies, 65
Duke L. J. __ (forthcoming 2015), available at
SSRN.
It is easy to forget sometimes that our hallowed federal courts are a collection of organizations and therefore subject to the mundane limitations that organizations face.The judges who compose those organizations must determine how to wade through hundreds of thousands of cases each year—a task that has become more challenging in the past few decades, as the ratio of cases to judges has increased. Judicial administration scholarship has long sought to understand how increases in caseload affect court procedure and practice. More recently, scholars have tried to assess how caseload can impact substantive law.
Against this background, Aziz Huq makes a significant contribution with his forthcoming article, Judicial Independence and the Rationing of Constitutional Remedies. Continue reading "Rationing Constitutional Justice"
Jul 7, 2015 Tom C.W. LinCorporate Law
Securities fraud presents one of the more vexing challenges for financial regulators and policymakers. Each new financial crises and catastrophic fraud frequently begets new tools to fight securities fraud. In a thoughtful recent article, Better Bounty Hunting: How the SEC’s New Whistleblower Program Changes the Securities Fraud Class Action Debate, Professor Amanda Rose examines the SEC’s new whistleblower program as a tool for securities fraud detection, and explores its potential impact on the old fraud detecting tool of class action lawsuits. The motivating argument of the article is that the SEC’s new Whistleblower Bounty Program (WBP) created by Dodd-Frank can serve as a superior alternative to the traditional fraud-on-the-market (FOTM) class action lawsuits as a tool for securities fraud detection and deterrence.
Professor Rose articulates this argument in a logical, measured fashion. She begins by providing background information on the origins of FOTM class actions and the WBP, which is designed to pay large sums to eligible individuals who provide valuable, original information about frauds that result in $1 million or more of penalties. Building on that background, Professor Rose then contends that the WBP could reduce the relative benefits associated with FOTM lawsuits while increasing their relative costs thereby making them a less desirable tool to combat securities fraud. With cautious optimism, she believes that the generous bounty of the WBP and the steep costs often associated class action lawsuits could ultimately lead tipsters who are aware of securities fraud to pursue redress through the whistleblower route rather than the class action route. However, to the extent that the WBP does not function as a feasible replacement for FOTM suits, Professor Rose introduces the innovative idea of adding a qui tam provision in the current whistleblower program as a modest improvement over FOTM suits. Continue reading "Whistleblowers as Securities Fraud Detectors"
Jul 6, 2015 Richard PierceAdministrative Law
I thought I had a good general understanding of the confirmation process until I read Professor O’Connell‘s enlightening study. Some of the findings were about what I expected. Thus, for instance, both the rate at which nominees fail to be confirmed and the time required for confirmation have increased significantly between 1981 and 2014. The failure rate was 26.4% in the George W. Bush Administration and 28.0% in the Obama Administration, compared with an average failure rate of 4.4% to 10% during the period 1885 to 2008. The average confirmation time was 127.1 days in the Obama Administration, compared with an average confirmation time of 88.5 days over the 33-year period of the study. The results of the high rate of failure and the lengthening delays are disconcerting. At any point in time, between 15% and 25% of senior agency positions are vacant.
As I would have predicted, the failure rate was four times higher in the last year of an Administration than in the first year of an Administration. Also as predicted, the 2013 reduction in the number of Senate votes required to enable an up or down vote on a judicial nominee from 60 to 50, at a time when the President’s party had a majority in the Senate, reduced both the number of failed nominations for judgeships and the average time until a nominee for a judgeship was confirmed.
Many of Professor O’Connell’s findings differed significantly from my expectations, however. Continue reading "The Reasons for Failures and Delays in Confirming Nominees Are More Complicated than We Think"
Jul 3, 2015 Marcia L. McCormickWork Law
Erik J. Girvan,
On Using the Psychological Science of Implicit Bias to Advance Anti-Discrimination Law, (2015), available at
SSRN.
Legal scholars in a wide range of areas have used now well-settled developments in cognitive psychology to argue for doctrinal changes in the definition of actionable discrimination. Implicit biases have been shown to cause discrimination against minorities and women, yet the law has developed to penalize only fully self-conscious race and sex-based decisions. Legal scholars and many lawyers’ organizations have enthusiastically embraced the social science that demonstrates people act on biases when they do not always self-consciously realize it, and have engaged in massive educational efforts with the idea that education will change people’s views of what discrimination is and their behaviors that perpetuate it. But changes in legal doctrine have not followed.
In On Using the Psychological Science of Implicit Bias to Advance Anti-Discrimination Law, Erik Girvan draws on jurisprudential and psychological insights to explain why that is so, and he pledges to offer a path towards future research that will more likely lead to doctrinal change. In short the efforts have failed because scholars use classical legalist jurisprudence instead of legal realism and because scholars are victims of naïve realism. The classical legalist jurisprudential model fails to recognize the force of extra-legal influence on judges’ decision-making as explained by legal realism. And naïve realism is a social psychological theory of how people behave when they learn others do not share their beliefs. Naïve realists assume that education alone will change the doctrine. Continue reading "The Truth is Not Enough to Set Us Free"
