Monthly Archives: May 2016
May 18, 2016 Adam N. SteinmanCourts Law
Justin Pidot,
Tie Votes in the Supreme Court, Minn. L. Rev. (forthcoming 2016), available at
SSRN.
Ever since Justice Scalia passed away in February, the Supreme Court of the United States has been operating with eight justices. As readers are surely aware, this is one justice short of its statutorily mandated population of nine.
There is widespread consensus among mathematicians that the number eight is evenly divisible by two, while the number nine is not. So it should come as no surprise that the Supreme Court has handed down several 4-4 decisions in recent months, with more expected before the Term wraps this June. In light of Senate Republicans’ refusal to hold a hearing on President Obama’s nominee to replace Scalia—and predictions that such a stalemate might extend well into the next President’s term—this even-numbered state of affairs could well become the new normal. Enter Justin Pidot’s article, which provides a timely, thoughtful, and informative examination of tie votes at the Supreme Court. Continue reading "Fit to Be Tied"
May 17, 2016 Gregory M. SteinProperty
Timothy M. Mulvaney,
Legislative Exactions and Progressive Property,
Harv. Envtl. L. Rev. (forthcoming), available at
SSRN.
In Legislative Exactions and Progressive Property, Professor Timothy Mulvaney provides a clear and thoughtful discussion of whether legislative exactions should be subjected to the same heightened level of scrutiny that applies to administrative exactions under current Supreme Court doctrine. For those who view exactions as a device that internalizes externalities and forces owners wishing to intensify their use of land to bear the full cost of their development, the conventional wisdom is that Nollan v. California Coastal Commission and Dolan v. Tigard should be read as narrowly as possible.
Both of those cases addressed only administrative exactions and did not need to decide the question of whether similar rules should apply in cases in which the exaction is imposed through more generally applicable legislation. Those who believe that Nollan and Dolan hold government actors to an unreasonably high standard may naturally resist expanding their reasoning to legislative exactions. While acknowledging and largely agreeing with this first-order reasoning, Mulvaney notes second-order effects of confining those two cases to administrative exactions. These second-order effects, he argues, might be more harmful in the long run than those who object to expanding the reach of Nollan and Dolan may have initially recognized. Continue reading "Do Progressive Property Scholars Really Want to Limit Nollan and Dolan to Administrative Exactions?"
May 16, 2016 Jaya Ramji-NogalesLexImmigration
Over the past few months, the world has been transfixed by the flows of Syrian refugees pouring into Europe. These mass movements were, of course, preceded by much larger populations fleeing Syria for neighboring countries such as Jordan, Lebanon, and Turkey; at last count, four million Syrians resided in these three states. Though international law mandates protection against refoulement, or return to Syria, for those who fit the definition of a refugee, the UN Refugee Convention says nothing about who should bear the costs of protecting these refugees. This is the gap that Tendayi Achiume seeks to fill in her forthcoming article, Syria, Cost-sharing, and the Responsibility to Protect Refugees.
The question of global cost-sharing for refugees is ground well-trod, perhaps most famously by Prof. Peter Schuck in his 1997 article, Refugee Burden-Sharing: A Modest Proposal. That controversial piece has since framed the debate around the topic. Prof. Achiume steps into this arena with a novel and provocative proposal: to leverage the international legal doctrine known as the Responsibility to Protect (RtoP) in order to frame international coordination around and equitable cost-sharing for refugees. Perhaps best known as the doctrine that enabled humanitarian intervention in Libya, RtoP is not without its critics, as Prof. Achiume readily acknowledges. Her article suggests using RtoP as a tool to address the free rider problem in responding to mass refugee flows while at the same time viewing the situation of Syrian refugees as a tool to rethink potential uses of RtoP on the world stage. Making this case is not a task for the faint of heart; Prof. Achiume’s combination of boldness and fine-grained attention to each layer of her complex argument will manage to convince even the most skeptical of readers to rethink their views of refugee cost-sharing and RtoP. Continue reading "Rethinking International Law’s Responses to Refugee Flows"
May 13, 2016 Reuel SchillerLegal History
When I was growing up in New York City, there was a rite of passage that you went through when you turned 14. You got your “working papers.” For a middle class kid, the process was one of your first encounters with the administrative state. You went to the dingy building in downtown Brooklyn that housed the New York State Department of Labor’s Kings County office. There you submitted a form, signed by your parents, along with a copy of your birth certificate. The form itself was a stock item of the postwar, pre-digital bureaucracy: four sheets of stacked, bound, carbonless copy paper (white, yellow, pink, and blue with an instruction to press hard enough to create legible words on the blue copy). The birth certificate was a photocopy – white text on a black background – with a raised seal. The form and the birth certificate were reviewed and stamped by a clerk behind a counter who then returned to you a copy of the form (the pink one, I seem to recall). You now had the permission of the State of New York to be a camp counselor, or to peddle Dove Bars and frozen lemonade from a cart in front of Rockefeller Center
Behind this banal bureaucratic process was over one hundred years of state building, some of it quite familiar. As anyone who remembers their AP American History class will tell you, the substance of the regulatory regime (children can’t work until they’re 14 and even then they are prohibited from industrial labor), and its institutional manifestation (the Department of Labor) are products of the Progressive era campaign against child labor. However, as Susan J. Pearson’s richly detailed article demonstrates, before the political impulse to protect children from the dangers of industrial labor could succeed, the administrative state had to assert its power in another way. The most fundamental obstacle to abolishing child labor was not political resistance from business interests or immigrant families in need of income. Nor was it hostile courts with their concerns about federalism and freedom of contract. The most intransigent barrier to abolishing child labor was the fact that well into the twentieth century, the state had no way of knowing how old somebody was. In a world without state-issued birth certificates, enforcing age-based prohibitions on work was impossible. Continue reading "The Birth of the Birth Certificate: Age, Child Labor and the Growth of the Administrative State"
May 12, 2016 Linda JellumAdministrative Law
Dan R. Meagher,
The Principle of Legality and a Common Law Bill of Rights—Clear Statement Rules Head Down Under (2015), available on
SSRN.
I decided to think outside the box this year with my recommendation, or more accurately, outside of our Country’s academy. About a year ago, an Australian Law Professor Dan Meagher contacted me about presenting his paper to our faculty at Mercer University School of Law. I’m very grateful that he did. Professor Meagher ended up visiting with us for a week this past fall as a visiting scholar. During that time, he provided one of the best development presentations that I have seen. His topic was interesting yet completely outside of most of our expertise. His presentation style was relaxed and fostered the interaction of the entire faculty. Perhaps the relaxing part should not be surprising: Australians are not necessarily known for being uptight. I chose to recommend his article to Jotwell readers because I found the topic interesting, the paper well-written, and the application of the legal doctrine a bit contradictory to the way we do things here in the U.S.
The title of his paper is The Principle of Legality and a Common Law Bill of Rights—Clear Statement Rules Head Down Under. In his article, Professor Meagher traces the evolution of the Australian Courts’ approach to protecting fundamental rights. This evolution is fascinating, controversial, and directly connected to both our Constitution and statutory interpretation principles. This history lesson begins with a simple point: “the Australian Constitution is a redraft of the American Constitution of 1787 with modifications found suitable for the more characteristic British institutions and for Australian conditions.” Our system of a government with separated powers was adopted. Importantly, however, the Australian framers consciously rejected, even deleted from a draft version, the American Bill of Rights. The framers rejected the American approach, believing that common law and a parliamentary form of government offered a superior and more democratic way to protect these rights. Professor Meagher describes the Australian Constitution’s development and the strong role that our Constitution played in the drafting process. That part of the paper should be interesting enough to Administrative Law Scholars who teach this aspect of the Constitution. But the story is much more interesting. Continue reading "Super Strong Clear Statement Rules Down Under"
May 11, 2016 Brian BixJurisprudence
Robert Alexy is one of the foremost contemporary legal theorists of this generation. His work has been very influential, both in analytic legal philosophy (e.g., A Theory of Legal Argumentation (Oxford, 1989) and The Argument from Injustice: A Reply to Legal Positivism (Oxford, 2002)) and in constitutional theory (A Theory of Constitutional Rights (Oxford, 2002)). He is a German theorist; while most of his important works were written first in German, many (like those just listed) have been translated into English, and many shorter articles have appeared originally in English, including the subject of the current jot.
In analytical legal philosophy, Alexy is best known for his “anti-positivist” views—views critical of the legal positivist theories associated with H. L. A. Hart, Joseph Raz, and others. His theory is nicely summarized in the short article being reviewed. Alexy argues that law has a dual nature: (1) a “real” or “factual” dimension, and (2) an “ideal” side. The real or factual dimension is associated with “authoritative issuance and social efficacy”; the ideal dimension is connected with “the element of correctness of content.” (P. 441.) Alexy argues that it is part of the nature of law that it claims to be (morally) correct. And following the German legal theorist of an earlier generation, Gustav Radbruch (in the works he wrote just after World War II), Alexy argues that a rule that is sufficiently unjust loses its status as valid law (the “Radbruch formula”). For Alexy, the claim of correctness and its correlate, the Radbruch formula, display necessary connections between law and morality, thus showing that legal positivism (which claims a separation between moral content and legal validity) is mistaken. Continue reading "Alexy’s Anti-Positivism"
May 10, 2016 Irene CalboliInternational & Comparative Law
Daniel Gervais’s recent article in the Houston Law Review examines the revision of the 1958 Lisbon Agreement for the Protection of Appellations of Origin and their International Registration (Lisbon Agreement) that took place at a Diplomatic Conference held in Geneva under the auspices of the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO) in May 2015. The Geneva Act of the Lisbon Agreement on Appellation of Origin and Geographical Indications (Geneva Act) was finalized and opened for signatures in May 2015. As it is reflected in its title, the adoption of the Geneva Act of the Lisbon Agreement had extended the scope of protection—previously limited to appellations of origin (AO) in the Lisbon Agreement—to include also geographical indications (GIs), which are defined along the lines of the definition of GIs in the 1994 Agreement on Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights (TRIPS).
I enjoyed reading this article, which certainly represents one of the most comprehensive reviews of the May 2015 Diplomatic Conference and the language of the Geneva Act of the Lisbon Agreement written to date by one of the most distinguished experts in the field. Most significantly for scholars and those interested in the topic, Professor Gervais offers a candid review of the background leading to and the meetings that took place at the Diplomatic Conference in Geneva. In this respect, the core message of the article is that WIPO Member States—in particular common law countries on one side and civil law countries on the other side—may have missed an important opportunity to find a much needed compromise on the issue, and finally reconcile the differences on the normative basis for the protection of GIs, including the protection of AOs for the countries members of the 1958 Lisbon Agreement, that have historically characterized the debate in this area. Continue reading "The Growing Case for Geographical Indications?"
May 9, 2016 Solangel MaldonadoTrusts & Estates
Two years ago, my friend Myra died of cancer. She was survived by her husband Scott and their six-year old daughter Isla, as well as her parents, siblings, and many nieces and nephews. As Scott tried to make sense of his wife’s death, he was somewhat comforted by the knowledge that her pension and life insurance would cover the mortgage and keep their daughter in the only school she had ever known—the school where her mother had taught kindergarten.
Scott’s comfort was short-lived. Although Myra did have a pension and life insurance, neither Scott nor their daughter were the beneficiaries. When Myra began working as a school teacher many years ago, she designated her mother and only nephew at the time as the beneficiaries of her life insurance and state pension. Years later, she married Scott and had a daughter together, but never updated her beneficiary designations. She simply forgot. But she also believed that because she did not have a will, Scott would inherit everything she owned and use it to take care of their daughter. She was wrong. Although Scott inherited her very modest intestate estate, her pension and life insurance benefits went to her mother and oldest nephew instead of Scott—her intended beneficiary and intestate heir. The family was torn apart and Isla has had almost no contact with her maternal relatives since her mother’s death.
In their article, Revisiting the Revolution: Reintegrating the Wealth Transmission System, Professors Melanie B. Leslie and Stewart E. Sterk illustrate the law’s failure to address the problems created by the proliferation of non-probate instruments. This failure has deprived intended beneficiaries, like Scott, of assets that the decedent intended them to take and has also enabled wrongful takers, including former spouses, to receive assets that the decedent clearly did not want them to have. Continue reading "Honoring Decedents’ Wishes—Non-Probate Devices Included"
May 6, 2016 Lisa Larrimore OuelletteIntellectual Property Law
Jake Linford,
Are Trademarks Ever Fanciful?, 105
Geo. L.J. (forthcoming), available at
SSRN.
Trademark law protects distinctive marks: ones that identify the source of goods or services and distinguish them from others in the marketplace. But how should courts determine whether consumers view a mark as distinctive? In an attempt to provide some analytical rigor to this essential question, courts have developed a complicated two-prong test: they look to both “inherent distinctiveness” (i.e., linguistic uniqueness) and “acquired distinctiveness” (i.e., whether consumers have come to see the mark as distinctive of source). Inherent distinctiveness for word marks is based on the so-called Abercrombie spectrum (named after the 1976 2d Cir. case that most famously articulated it), which classifies marks from most to least distinctive as fanciful (KODAK cameras), arbitrary (APPLE computers), suggestive (COPPERTONE suntan lotion), descriptive (AMERICAN airlines), or generic (“apple” for apples). Marks like AMERICAN can become strong, protectable marks only by developing “acquired distinctiveness”; marks like COPPERTONE and APPLE are presumed to be protectable at birth; and coined marks like KODAK are the strongest of all.
As Barton Beebe notes in his casebook, Abercrombie‘s “influence on U.S. and even foreign trademark law cannot be overstated.” But Abercrombie‘s foundation has been slowly crumbling. For example, in a 2009 study, Thomas Lee and colleagues found that consumers are far more influenced by how and where a mark is placed on a box than by where the mark falls on the Abercrombie spectrum. Rebecca Tushnet has explained that Abercrombie “lacks empirical foundation” and is out of step with basic marketing knowledge, such as that an ostensibly fanciful mark like VIAGRA is already imbued with “suggestions of virility, viability, and Niagara Falls (a classic sexual image).” And now, in an impressive trifecta of recent articles, Jake Linford has further dismantled the key theoretical assumptions underlying the Abercrombie classification scheme for word marks. Continue reading "Is it Time to Overrule the Trademark Classification Scheme?"
May 5, 2016 Elaine CraigEquality
Abbe Smith, Representing Rapists: The Cruelty of Cross Examination and Other Challenges for a Feminist Criminal Defense Lawyer, 53 Am. Crim. L. Rev. (forthcoming 2016).
Reading the work of those writing from a different perspective has been productive to the development of my own thinking. Abbe Smith’s forthcoming article, Representing Rapists: The Cruelty of Cross Examination and Other Challenges for a Feminist Criminal Defense Lawyer, is no exception. Like her other scholarship, Representing Rapists is impeccably written, thoughtful, and well reasoned. What makes this work exceptional is its brutal honesty. With its steadfast transparency and willing self-reflection, the article is downright brave.
Abbe Smith, a well known legal ethicist and criminal lawyer, has committed much of her professional attention to theorizing and defending the need for unmitigated zeal in the representation of the criminally accused – including, of course, those accused of sexual offences. With a view to better protecting sexual assault complainants, I have dedicated a lot of scholarly attention in the last few years to developing feminist arguments in support of the ethical limits on defence lawyers who represent clients accused of sexual offences. Where our perspectives likely differ most is with respect to the cross-examination of sexual assault complainants. Continue reading "A Brave and Honest Examination of the Complexity of a Feminist Defence Ethos"
