Yearly Archives: 2016
Mar 9, 2016 Douglas NeJaimeFamily Law
As marriage equality became a nationwide reality, those who opposed same-sex marriage increasingly turned their attention to issues of reproduction and parenting. In 2012, David Blankenhorn, a longtime opponent of same-sex marriage, famously announced his newfound support for marriage equality in the pages of the New York Times. Yet Blankenhorn continued to oppose important aspects of family formation by same-sex couples, arguing that “children born through artificial reproductive technology” should have “the right to know and be known by their biological parents.” Same-sex couples commonly raise children conceived with anonymous sperm or egg donors, and same-sex-couple-headed families are much more likely than their different-sex counterparts to include nonbiological parent-child relationships. As Blankenhorn’s views suggest, opposition to LGBT equality can seamlessly continue in new forms. Indeed, researchers at Blankenhorn’s Institute for American Values are urging “an active public debate over whether it is ethical for the state to support the deliberate conception of children who will never have the chance to be raised by their biological parents.” Elizabeth Marquardt, the director of the Institute’s Center for Marriage and Families, advocates a number of restrictions on family formation through assisted reproductive technologies (ART). Restrictions on the use of ART to form nonbiological parent-child relationships will have a distinct impact on reproduction and parenting by same-sex couples. In marriage equality’s wake, alternative reproduction has clearly emerged as an important new front in the culture wars.
In her engaging and insightful new article, The Oedipus Hex: Regulating Family After Marriage Equality, Courtney Cahill focuses on a specific argument put forward by those seeking to restrict alternative reproduction—what she terms the incest prevention justification. As Cahill explains, scholars and advocates argue for greater regulation of alternative reproduction to minimize the likelihood for accidental incest among donor-conceived children. Continue reading "Alternative Reproduction in the Age of Marriage Equality"
Mar 8, 2016 Tanya MarshProperty
Andrea J. Boyack,
American Dream in Flux: The Endangered Right to Lease a Home, 49
Real Prop. Tr. & Est. L. J. 203 (2014), available at
SSRN.The “American Dream” referred to by Andrea Boyack, an Associate Professor of Law at Washburn University School of Law, is homeownership. As first year Property students are taught, the dream of homeownership has its hallowed roots in Thomas Jefferson’s conviction that widespread ownership of real property was a predicate for a functioning democracy. “The small landowners,” Jefferson wrote, those with “a little portion of land” are “the most precious part of a state.” The idea that the government should encourage more people to own “a little portion of land”—first farms and now single family homes—has inspired public policy since the Revolution.
Boyack does not argue that the American Dream is dead, or that promoting homeownership is an illegitimate policy goal. Instead, she convincingly argues that by myopically focusing on increasing homeownership and owner occupancy, a combination of public land use controls, private land use controls, and federal policies are undermining “important public concerns.” (P. 299.) Continue reading "Redefining the American Dream"
Mar 7, 2016 Andres GuadamuzTechnology Law
Have you ever thought of who will have access to your email when you die? If you have social media, have you prepared a digital will that will allow your loved ones to dispose of your online presence? Have you ever wondered what happens to people’s digital accounts when they pass away? These and many other questions are part of a growing number of legal issues arising from our increasingly networked life, and it is the main subject of Virtual Worlds – a Legal Post-Mortem Account, which looks at the issue of post-mortem digital arrangements for virtual world accounts, where the author discusses several possible ways of looking at virtual goods to allow them to be transferred when the owner of the account dies. The article is a great addition to the growing scholarship in the area, but it is also an invaluable shot-in-the-arm to the subject of virtual worlds.
The legal discussion of virtual worlds has gone through a rollercoaster ride, if you pardon the use of the tired cliché. In 1993 author Julian Dibbell published a remarkable article entitled A Rape in Cyberspace. In it he recounts the happenings of a virtual world called LambdaMOO, a text-based environment with roughly one hundred subscribers where the users adopted assumed personalities (or avatars) and engaged in various role-playing scenarios. Dibbell describes how the community dealt with perceived sexual offences committed by a member upon other avatars. The story of LambdaMOO has become a classic in Internet regulation literature, and has been pondered and retold in seminal works such as Lessig’s Code and Goldsmith and Wu’s Who Controls the Internet. Dibbell’s powerful story of the virtual misconduct of an avatar during the early days of Cyberspace still resonates with legal audiences because it brings us back to crucial questions that have been the subject of literature, philosophy and jurisprudence for centuries. How does a community organise itself? Is external action needed, or does self-regulation work? What constitutes regulatory dialogue? How does regulatory consensus arise? And most importantly, who enforces norms? Continue reading "“Ye Shall Inherit My Magic Sword!” Post-Mortem Ownership in Virtual Worlds"
Mar 4, 2016 SpearItCriminal Law
For criminal justice enthusiasts, Padilla v. Kentucky (2010) represented a victory for criminal defendants in an area where there are few. Whereas previously, defense attorneys were under no compulsion to inform clients about the downstream consequences of a conviction, Padilla said that deportation was different. The severity of this outcome mandated that clients be made aware of this possibility before making a guilty plea—it simultaneously served as a mandate for the defense bar. As a result of the ruling, defense attorneys were involuntarily thrust into the world of crimmigration law, with the beneficiaries being those accused of a crime. Now, at a minimum, defense counsel would need the competence to be able to advise clients who face the risk of deportation.
In Crimmigration Law, César Cuauhtémoc García Hernández has created an immense resource to help ensure this occurs. The work provides a comprehensive overview of a complex phenomenon in American law, namely, how criminal and immigration law converge into a distinct body of law that necessarily involves both. Continue reading "Crimmigration Law Comes of Age"
Mar 3, 2016 Wyatt SassmanCourts Law
Close only counts in horseshoes, hand-grenades, and the Supreme Court’s recent treatment of equitable remedies. So says Samuel Bray in The Supreme Court and the New Equity, where he defends fourteen Supreme Court decisions decided from 1999 to 2014 that are fraught with errors and frequently criticized, which Bray labels “the new equity cases.” The equity in these cases is “new” in two ways. First, it maintains a clear distinction between equitable and legal remedies by entrenching the “irreparable injury rule,” or the requirement that there be no adequate remedy at a law before a judge consider equitable relief. Second, it seeks to control judicial discretion by adhering strictly to the history of equitable practice, and drawing from that history rules and multi-part tests to guide the application of equitable relief.
“It is not easy to imagine,” Bray writes, “anything further from the conventional scholarly wisdom than” the doctrinal developments of the new equity cases. (P. 1008.) For one, experts had long celebrated both the death of the irreparable injury rule and the unity, for all practical purposes, of equitable and legal remedies. Bray points to Douglas Laycock’s 1991 book “The Death of the Irreparable Injury Rule” as the aristeia of a movement to tear down the barrier between equitable and legal remedies that began over a century ago. Laycock “meticulously” illustrated that the requirement to show no adequate remedy at law has no discernable impact on a judge’s decision whether or not to grant equitable relief; as Bray puts it, “[w]hen judges want to give a permanent injunction, they never find legal remedies adequate.” (P. 1006.) Even the American Law Institute criticized the irreparable injury showing as “antiquated” and “spurious” in its Restatement (Third) of Restitution and Unjust Enrichment. Continue reading "On Being Mostly Right"
Mar 2, 2016 Mark KendeConstitutional Law
American politics is increasingly polarized. The New York Times recently published an article listing all of the people and organizations that Donald Trump has insulted during his Presidential campaign so far. Republicans and Democrats get in trouble just for working together in Congress. This makes the U.S. Supreme Court an especially interesting institution right now. Though unelected, it is made up of Republican and Democratic appointees who decide important constitutional and other cases together. Professor Eric Berger, of the University of Nebraska School of Law, has written an important law review article addressing a related problem that has emerged on the Court: a tendency towards “absolutism” in its judicial opinions. So, has political polarization somehow carried over to the Court? If yes, what are the explanations and solutions?
Professor Berger’s article is well written, nicely organized, deeply researched, and comprehensively analyzed. Moreover, his article shows the value of traditional doctrinal legal scholarship, though the article includes abundant theory as well. The article was published before Chief Justice Roberts’ dissent in Obergefell v. Hodges, 576 U.S. __ (2015), where Roberts wrote that gay people may celebrate the decision, but added derisively that the majority’s decision has “nothing to do with the Constitution.” Ironically, the point of Roberts’s dissent was the lack of humility in Justice Kennedy’s majority opinion. So Professor Berger is on to something. The late Justice Scalia frequently, and with increasing harshness, skewered the opinions of the other justices. Continue reading "The U.S. Supreme Court and Humble Opinion Writing"
Mar 1, 2016 Christopher M. BrunerCorporate Law
Theories of corporate law and governance that purport to explain the nature of the corporate entity, the legitimate objective of corporate decision-making, and/or the balance of corporate power have proliferated over recent decades, and the debates prompting them show no signs of abating. Some accounts place the shareholders’ interests at the core of the enterprise, while others present more embracing conceptions requiring (or at least permitting) regard for other “stakeholders” such as employees and creditors. Similarly, some accounts identify shareholders as the font of legitimate corporate power, while others present more board-centric conceptions. Adding to the complexity, various theories combine differing perspectives on the corporate objective and corporate power in differing ways, often rooting them in irreconcilable conceptions of what the corporate entity itself fundamentally is. As time passes, the arc of corporate theory would appear to bend toward fragmentation rather than closure.
In the article cited above, Martin Gelter and Geneviève Helleringer illuminate these issues from a fascinating doctrinal perspective, exploring what the persistence of so-called “constituency directors” – placed on the board by a particular individual or institution – reveals about the nature and defining objective of corporate decision-making. Gelter and Helleringer bring to the task not only deep engagement with the scholarly literature in these areas, but also considerable comparative and interdisciplinary sophistication. Drawing upon a broad range of examples from U.S., U.K., and Continental European corporate legal systems, they observe a “fundamental contradiction” manifesting itself in all of them – “the tension between the uniformity of directors’ duties and the heterogeneity of directors themselves.” Specifically, they identify an apparent “paradox” in permitting “directors’ nomination rules linked to specific constituencies” while at the same time imposing “heterogeneity-blind duties.” Building on their descriptive account of illustrative doctrinal structures, Gelter and Helleringer assess them against prevailing formulations of the corporate objective, social scientific insights, and the available empirical evidence, concluding with a normative case for reform. Their product is informative, insightful, and a pleasure to read. Continue reading "Constituency Directors, Loyalty, and the Corporate Objective"
Feb 29, 2016 Adrian VermeuleAdministrative Law
Some readers value an article for logical rigor, some for sound judgment, some for immediate utility, some for originality, and so on into N dimensions. (We may value more than one dimension, of course, but not “all of the above,” because the desirable traits may trade off against one another, at a frontier; no one piece can display all of them simultaneously and to a maximum degree). The peculiar excellence of richness is on display in Administrative War by Tino Cuellar, formerly of Stanford, now molted into a higher form of life as Justice Cuellar of the California Supreme Court. Cuellar recounts the history of the administrative state during the Second World War, and connects it to the surrounding political conflicts and developments in legal theory. There is no single thesis, no one-sentence nugget. Rather we are treated to a kind of legal-historical cornucopia. Cuellar’s story undermines conventional wisdom on a number of critical issues in administrative law. Let me attempt to lay out some of the wealth of interesting points that emerge.
1. The New Deal and the War. Cuellar’s basic narrative recounts the arc of the administrative state just before and during the Second World War. Administrative lawyers, particularly critics of the administrative state, still talk about “the New Deal” as though it were the moment when the Rule of Law gave way to the administrative state (and as though “the New Deal” were all one thing or era, as opposed to a pastiche of movements and developments). Distilling, synthesizing and translating-for-lawyers a library of background literature, Cuellar explains that the war, rather than the New Deal, represented the key “inflection point” in the growth of the administrative state. Furthermore, unlike World War I, which gave rise to a number of more or less temporary bureaucracies, the burgeoning administrative state was cemented into place during and by World War II, and by the odd political consensus that created the Administrative Procedure Act of 1946—a key legitimating mechanism for Leviathan. The pedagogical implication of all this is that the constitutional conflicts of the 1930s, which occupy so much space in public law courses, should at a minimum be supplemented and probably partly displaced by a study of the bureaucratic developments of the war years. Less time on the National Industrial Recovery Act (NIRA), which did not provide an enduring model for the American administrative state; more time on (entities like) the War Production Board (WPB) and the Office of Price Administration (OPA), which did. Continue reading "Leviathan Had a Good War"
Feb 26, 2016 Henry ChambersWork Law
Leora F. Eisenstadt,
Causation in Context, 36
Berkeley J. Emp. & Lab. L. 1 (2015), available at
SSRN.
In Causation in Context, Professor Leora F. Eisenstadt harshly critiques Burrage v. United States, a case in which the Supreme Court imports some of its troublesome thinking on employment discrimination causation into a criminal law case. I like the article lots because it crosses two substantive areas and explains why causation, a tricky and core concept in both areas, does quite different work in each area. In the process, the article exposes the larger danger of misusing a powerful tool that judges, lawyers and law professors alike use – reasoning by analogy. Professor Eisenstadt implicitly suggests that reasoning by analogy is of little or no use if the court that is reasoning has an insufficient understanding of the underlying areas at issue and fails to recognize what makes the analogy inapt. If a court wants to use an employment discrimination concept in a criminal law area, the court needs to understand why the concept has been used—and whether the concept has been misused—in the employment discrimination area before deploying it in the criminal law area.
In short, the article considers how the Supreme Court in Burrage imported the but-for causation principle – the notion that a factor does not cause a result if the result would have occurred in the absence of the factor – that has been become prevalent in the employment discrimination area into a criminal law case. In the process, a principle used to determine whether intentional discrimination caused an adverse job action is now used in a criminal case to determine whether the use of an illicit drug caused a victim’s death. The article discusses the Court’s mistake in finding a false equivalency between causation in criminal law and causation in employment discrimination law. The false equivalency not only triggered an inappropriate use of an employment discrimination causation standard in the criminal law case; it may trigger a broader assumption that a principle used in one area of the law can be borrowed and used in other areas of the law. That could create problems if courts import concepts from other areas of law into an already complex employment discrimination arena. Continue reading "Why Importing Employment Discrimination Causation Into Criminal Law is a Bad Idea"
Feb 25, 2016 Anne-Marie RhodesTrusts & Estates
Mary F. Radford, Predispute Arbitration Agreements Between Trustees and Financial Services Institutions: Are Beneficiaries Bound?, 40 ACTEC L. J. 273 (2014).
Disputes are a persistent reality of trust law and even the most meticulously-drafted and expertly-administered trust can be embroiled in litigation, often involving trust investments. In an effort to avoid litigation, many investment advisors and banks include in their routine account agreements, provisions requiring arbitration in the event of any dispute. When a trustee opens an account that contains a mandatory arbitration provision, are the beneficiaries also bound?
Professor Mary Radford delves deep into the practice, cases, and theory of predispute arbitration provisions. Her discerning and experienced eye expertly distills the essence of a trustee’s fiduciary responsibilities with the practical realities of investing in the 21st century. This article appealed to me because it offers a thoughtful, sophisticated, and wide-ranging look at an increasingly common provision. At a time that arbitration clauses are under review, the article connects trust law to the wider world; it is a good example of the law as “seamless web.” Continue reading "Enforceability of Predispute Arbitration Provisions"
